<i>Labor History</i>symposium: Political repression of the American labor movement during its formative years – a comparative perspective

Goldstein, Robert Justin

doi:10.1080/00236561003729750

Cited by 19 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In this hostile legal climate, the simple act of joining a union, striking, or boycotting could be interpreted as an unlawful conspiracy in restraint of trade, against which employers regularly secured injunctions restricting, if not prohibiting, most such forms of collective action prior to the New Deal (McCammon 1993). When the law was not enough, employers, often with backing from the state, violently attacked labor, resulting in some 500 strike-related deaths in the three decades following the 1894 national Pullman strike (Lipold and Isaac 2009), placing the United States on a par with post-Bismarck Germany and ahead of most of Europe in the high level of repression directed at labor (Goldstein 2010).…”

Section: Theories Of Unionizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Worker Replacement Costs and Unionization

Kimeldorf

2013

Am Sociol Rev

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The embattled state of U.S. labor has generated a voluminous body of research on the processes of deunionization contributing to its decline. Revisiting the less researched topic of unionization, this study explores the social conditions facilitating union growth during the labor movement’s formative years. Focusing on the first decade of the twentieth century—in many respects for labor, a period not unlike the present—I seek to explain the pattern of organizing success and failure across industries and occupations. I find that the most organized settings occurred where workers had greater disruptive capacities due to the high cost of being replaced during work stoppages. The highest replacement costs were associated with three conditions: scarcity of skilled labor, geographically isolated worksites that raised the cost of importing strikebreakers, and time-sensitive tasks that rendered replacement workers economically impractical. Workplaces that had at least one of these conditions formed the backbone of the early U.S. labor movement. The conclusion considers the impact of declining replacement costs on current challenges facing U.S. labor.

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Section: Theories Of Unionizationmentioning

confidence: 99%