Having negotiated challenges that contributed to the deterioration of most other unions, the United Packinghouse Workers of America entered the second half of the century with widespread support among packinghouse workers and a strong sense of purpose. In the late 1950s, however, meatpacking companies began a radical reorganization of the industry's system of production. Within the next decade, significant deskilling, the collapse of wage standards, and numerous plant closings facilitated the political emaciation of organized labor in meatpacking. Using event-structure analysis to systematically examine and compare labor struggles in the postwar years (1946)(1947)(1948) and during the Reagan era (1986)(1987), the authors find that the development of new corporate strategies fundamentally transformed the capital-labor relationship and led to the collapse of industrial unionism in meatpacking. Most important were the industry's development of new technologies, its geographical reorganization of production, and its ability to locate new sources of cheap, nonunion labor.

We examine working-class race relations during two steel industry unionization efforts: the 1919 AFL drive and the 1937 CIO drive. Racial conflict divided steel workers in 1919 but interracial labor solidarity prevailed in 1937. We contrast the two drives using event-structure analysis (ESA) to highlight the imputed causal connections in our argument. Comparison of the 1919 and 1937 cases suggests that three developments were necessary for interracial solidarity in steel. First, industrial unions had to replace craft unions, which promoted class-oriented organizing strategies. Second, interracial solidarity required an easing of split labor market conditions. Third, unions had to incorporate concrete strategies to recruit black workers. In both cases, state actions and economic conditions mediated the impact of these factors on interracial organizing.

In a time of economic depression and racism more overt than anything we now experience, the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s and 1940s forged a lasting interracial solidarity within the industrial working class. The authors tell the stories of how three CIO organizing drives achieved interracial solidarity. In 1933, the United Mine Workers (UMW) adopted the “UMW formula” for placing Black workers in positions as union officers and organizers. Adopted from more radical unions, the formula institutionalized racial inclusion, which proved to be a major tactical innovation in realizing class solidarity across racial lines. Faced with similar conditions, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1937 and the United Auto Workers in 1940 adopted variants of the UMW formula to overcome racial barriers to organizing. The authors analyze narratives of these three drives using the following two qualitative methods: event-structure analysis (ESA), a diachronic method, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), a synchronic method. Both approaches reveal the importance of three main factors: tactical innovations, political context, and labor market conditions. The first two factors are explained by political process theory, and the third is predicted by split labor market theory. Among these findings, ESA highlights path dependence of tactical innovations and QCA emphasizes structural conditions in the labor market.

Between 1870 and 1916 rapid and widespread mechanization and capitalization dramatically transformed the means and relations of production in the mass industries. At the same time, increasing ethnic diversity challenged the class basis of labor solidarity. The cases of steel and bituminous coal mining illustrate important contrasting responses to these forces on the part of organized labor. In particular, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers lost members and became increasingly ineffectual, while the United Mine Workers underwent intense and sustained growth. Our comparison of the two unions' notably different trajectories reveals the importance of socio-historical factors as well as union strategies for dealing with technological innovation and ethnic divisions.