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This chapter looks at key figures in the emerging anticommunist network and analyzes two early episodes: the Smith Committee attack on the National Labor Relations Board and its allies, and the Dies Committee attack on the consumer movement, especially the League of Women Shoppers and the Office of Price Administration. The power of the labor movement in stimulating the reaction against the New Deal is well known, but the consumer movement should be recognized as another major trigger. Women were important in the ascendance of both industrial unionism and organized consumerism, and conservatives highlighted women's role in an effort to undermine public confidence in those movements and their allied government agencies.

By 1977 the United Farm Workers (UFW) had successfully negotiated more than 100 union contracts, recruited a dues-paying membership of more than 50,000, and secured enactment of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the only legislative guarantee of farm workers' collective bargaining rights in the continental United States. Why did the UFW succeed at such a daunting task—a task at which other far more powerful organizations had repeatedly failed? This book argues that the UFW succeeded, while the rival AFL-CIO and Teamsters failed, because the UFW's leadership devised a more effective strategy, in fact a stream of effective strategies. The UFW was able to do this because the motivation of its leaders was greater than that of their rivals; they had better access to salient knowledge; and their deliberations became venues for learning. The three elements of strategic capacity—the ability to devise good strategy—are discussed.

This chapter focuses on Mary Dublin Keyserling and Leon Keyserling, who were particularly prominent targets for the anticommunist right from 1940 through the mid-1960s. His first claim to fame was drafting the National Labor Relations Act, and her career began as a consumer activist, so they aptly represent the movements whose successes mobilized anticommunist crusaders. The Keyserlings were “purchasing-power progressives” who argued that raising working-class living standards was essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy. They both experienced long, bruising loyalty investigations and resigned in 1953 during the transition to the Eisenhower administration. Leon reemerged as an economic adviser to the Democratic National Committee and the AFL-CIO in the late 1950s and then as an ally of the centrist Democrat Hubert Humphrey. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Mary head of the U.S. Women's Bureau, over the objections of congressional conservatives who revived the old disloyalty allegations.

The sixth chapter recounts the history of Hollywood collective bargaining. On a day-to-day basis, the American motion picture industry relied on its ability to balance a modern, rationalized production operation with a more unstructured creative process. However, in times of crisis, when the harmony was interrupted, the creative element was often surrendered. During the 1930s, the presidency of FDR, his New Deal policies, and the empowerment of organized labor throughout the U.S. had a significant influence on Hollywood. The chapter focuses on the rise of the Screen Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Screen Directors Guild, their struggles, the way they chose to pursue them, and the attitude embraced towards them by studio management. However, as is shown, while they borrowed tactics from industrial unions and appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, Hollywood creative employees aligned with traditional industrial labor causes only as long as it served their immediate goals.

The procedural version of the rule of law the Hughes Court settled on did not appeal only to a judicial elite. New York's general election in 1938 showed that it claimed broad support. The state constitutional convention adopted an “antibureaucracy clause” requiring weight-of-the-evidence review for most agencies' findings of facts. It split the state's lawyers and political parties, but even conservative corporation lawyers like John Foster Dulles opposed the clause, and voters overwhelmingly rejected in November. But New Yorkers expected agencies to treat individuals fairly and they voted in surprisingly large numbers for a relative unknown, John Lord O’Brian, who made his campaign to win the seat of Senator Robert F. Wagner a referendum on the procedures of the National Labor Relations Board, Wagner’s prized legislative offspring.

Labor unions play a vital role in ensuring an equitable distribution of wealth by increasing the share of corporate profits that go to workers. The decline in union membership and influence in the United States thus correlates with rising income inequality. American unions have struggled to reconcile an agenda of economic justice for the working class with a more pragmatic orientation that emphasizes gains for groups of workers on a contract-by-contract basis. The dominance of the latter approach, compounded by legislative and judicial hostility to group action by workers, has resulted in the public perception of unions as self-interested special interest groups. Yet embedded within historical and modern American unionism is a powerful ideological impulse toward social and economic reform. That impulse is constrained, however, by an anachronistic labor law. A new legal regime that provides breathing space for evolving change agents is essential to restore labor’s countervailing power.

This chapter discusses the legislative struggles between the election of 1924 and the passage of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) in May 1926, which laid important legal framework for the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The elections of 1924 thus brought the first stage of railroad labor's battle to bring the Railroad Labor Board to a close. The unions presented the Howell-Barkley Bill to Congress and forced the GOP to recognize the need to amend the Transportation Act. Union leaders continued to work behind the scenes to strengthen their position. By remaining politically active, and even threatening to some, the brotherhoods assured themselves a voice in the creation of new legislation.

This chapter examines the relationship of the labor movement to the decline of smokers' work cultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. As newspaper articles, letters to lobbyists, and published National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions illustrate, the demise of smoking at work often intersected with the efforts of many employers to roll back the power of organized labor. Employers sometimes used no-smoking rules to discipline workers, committeemen, and union organizers for unwanted efforts to shape managerial policy making. Unions often fought for working-class smokers and their vanishing privileges, as the increasing marginalization of smoking and smokers seemed to portend the overall demise of labor's power in the late twentieth century. The NLRB discovered in numerous cases brought by workers and unions that employers tried to sidestep collective bargaining by abruptly creating new no-smoking rules and using smoking restrictions to harass union supporters.

This chapter examines how labor unions responded to workforce feminization that began in the 1970s. It first places the relationship of women to unions in historical perspective before analyzing empirical data on inter-union variations in the extent of women's representation in union membership and leadership in the late twentieth century, as well as variations in the extent and nature of attention to “women's issues” on the part of unions. It then explores the dynamics of union organizing in the 1980s, showing that workplaces with large female majorities were the most readily organized in that period—as measured by the probability of winning National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union representation elections. It also considers the growing commitment of some unions in the 1970s and 1980s to gender equality issues and to incorporating women into positions of leadership. Finally, it discusses the innovative gender politics that has emerged in unions least constrained by the forces of deunionization or patriarchal traditions.

This chapter reviews Anglo-American labor history to illustrate that the right to refuse unsafe work has been a struggle to decide who is empowered to define it. The right to refuse was protected as early as the Jellico Agreement of 1893, which covered eight Appalachian mines and was at the time “one of the most advanced agreements of any miners in the country.” It allowed a miner “to refuse to work if he thought the mine was dangerous through failure of the bosses to supply enough support timber.” After the enactment of the U.S. National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and adoption of Wagner Act principles in Canada in the 1940s, the right to refuse unsafe work gained ground as a viable subject of collective bargaining in North America. Collective labor agreements would become the only way to circumvent the strict common laws on the termination of employment that had commodified workers in the United States and Canada.

This chapter explains how worker centers can deal with forces in society that would like to harm or destroy them. It first highlights the important lessons that can be learned from the experience of ACORN, a community organizing voice for low-income families that had to contend with right-wing forces. It then discusses current attacks against worker centers, including those by the website called Worker Center Watch and goes on to consider the issue of 501c3 tax exemption leveled against worker centers, along with the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Labor definitions and requirements relevant to the problem. It also discusses the importance of the National Labor Relations Act for worker center organizers; the strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) filed against worker centers; and other areas where worker centers may be vulnerable and should shore up their operations. Finally, the chapter looks at the main opposition to bills strengthening enforcement against wage theft and outlines steps for training worker center staff and volunteers in laws and areas of concern.

The Introduction examines the historical narrative presented at San Antonio’s 1968 World’s Fair, named HemisFair. It also explains the geographic and historiographic focus of the book before presenting a brief overview of each of the chapters.

Local National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials brought the Wagner Act to the Pacific canneries between 1935 and 1941. The NLRB’s field offices focused on legal procedure in preparing cases. The emphasis on proper legal procedure spread from the NLRB field offices to local union organizers, union bylaws, and union rules. In the late 1930s the NLRB used pledge cards to measure union support in the canneries, a measure that local unions adopted as part of their own requirements for membership. The emphasis on legal procedure also extended the time required for NLRB investigations, forcing unions to pay for long periods of legal representation. Legal reasoning and legal procedure framed the NLRB’s local operations and encompassed each union’s local organizing.

This chapter examines out-of-the-ordinary circumstances in which accommodation arises as an issue. It first considers the case of Kimberly Cloutier, who sued Costco over dress code before turning to Charan Singh Kalsi's religious discrimination lawsuit against the New York City Transit Authority. It then discusses two other court cases involving George Daniels and Robert Roesser, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidelines on accommodation. It also assesses the relevant provisions of the National Labor Relations Act regarding the payment of union dues by workers holding religious convictions that oppose union activities. It suggests that a solution for workers with religious convictions that oppose labor unions is to pay to charitable institutions what other workers pay to their union as dues.

The fight over the vote for the FTA started a period of intense legal and political argument between the Teamsters and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the northern California canneries. In late 1945 and early 1946, the Teamsters attacked the integrity of the NLRB’s procedures by persuading Congress to investigate a disputed letter from the Agriculture Department. The union also ignored the pending NLRB case and induced companies to dismiss some FTA supporters in northern California. From October 1945 to February 1946, Board chairman Paul Herzog and the Board deflected Teamster attacks and sought to craft a decision on the apparent FTA victory that protected the NLRB’s political legitimacy in Washington and asserted the NLRB’s legal authority in northern California.

This chapter reviews Anglo-American labor history to illustrate that the right to refuse unsafe work has been a struggle to decide who is empowered to define it. The right to refuse was protected as early as the Jellico Agreement of 1893, which covered eight Appalachian mines and was at the time “one of the most advanced agreements of any miners in the country.” It allowed a miner “to refuse to work if he thought the mine was dangerous through failure of the bosses to supply enough support timber.” After the enactment of the U.S. National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and adoption of Wagner Act principles in Canada in the 1940s, the right to refuse unsafe work gained ground as a viable subject of collective bargaining in North America. Collective labor agreements would become the only way to circumvent the strict common laws on the termination of employment that had commodified workers in the United States and Canada.