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Capital migration undermined prospects for union organizing in the post-World War II South. Scholars and other observers have often viewed southern anti-unionism as a product of distinctively “southern” traits. However, in the postwar period, northern manufacturers relocated production to southern communities. Southern boosters, eager to lure northern industry, fought hard to preserve their region's status as anti-union terrain. Their commitment to creating an attractive investment climate for northern businessmen, coupled with southern workers' desperate need for economic opportunity, provided a powerful deterrent to unionism in the postwar South.

This chapter analyses the extent and nature of anti-English feeling in Scotland. Also explored in unprecedented detail is the work of the union commissioners (from both countries) whose job it was to work out a new constitutional relationship between England and Scotland. It is argued that the Scottish commissioners were well-chosen and that they were firm in their defence of Scottish interests, ensuring that the incorporating union that resulted in 1707 was not an ‘entire’ union but one that recognised Scottish distinctiveness. Persuading the public outside Parliament of this however, was difficult.

This chapter considers the immediate impact of the Union, and its failure to deliver what was promised. The nature of post-Union patriotism and anti-Unionism are explored. The basis of support in Scotland for the Jacobites is investigated, while attention too is drawn to the strength of commitment there was to the Union and its corollary the Hanoverian succession during the Jacobite rising of 1715-16.

The last decade of the 20th century was critical for organized labor. In this decade, labor unions began to capture some of the cross-class, biracial, democratic character that had distinguished its most important achievements. Virginia and the South were at the junction of this struggle to redefine the labor movement in democratic and movement-oriented terms. As private interests promoted a political atmosphere hospitable to market fundamentalism, the South became a model for anti-unionism. The South defined the “right to work” philosophy that was gaining national credibility in the late 20th century. In the South, the movement for collective action ground against the ideology of self-interest and anti-government individualism. While Virginia's labor unions failed to generate widespread support, they fostered a debate that redefined the cultural and political terrain in the United States.

Chapter 5 discusses the retail workers in detail. The chapter analyzes workplace abuses, including human rights abuses and Walmart’s anti-union practices, organizing strategy, and outcomes for these unions. The independent retail unions in the study are complex and multifaceted particularly because they represent over 4,000 workers. Although the two retail federations differ in their cultures and strategies, both can still be characterized by flexible militancy. Their structural location, expansive geography, on the ground flexibility, and militancy shape their outcomes and give these unions the capacity to push back Walmart culture.

This chapter underlines the role of anti-unionism in challenges to the New Deal consensus, further highlighting the influence of economic conservatism in the immediate postwar years. New Deal-era laws increased workers' ability to form unions and set a minimum wage for many workers, fueling an economic prosperity that by the 1950s had created the century's narrowest income gap between the wealthy and middle-income workers. Corporate and conservative interests had challenged these laws from the start, and many emerged from World War II motivated by a renewed determination to slow labor's growing momentum and return workplace economics to the private sector.

This book offers a detailed account of the 1981 strike staged by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), President Ronald Reagan's response to the strikers, and the strike's implications for public sector unionism and American labor politics more generally. It first recounts the 1960 midair collision over New York that cost 134 lives and exposed the flaws of the nation's overburdened air traffic control system. Drawing on the stories of controllers such as Mike Rock and Jack Maher, the book goes on to describe the efforts of individuals who sought to make the airways safer. It also considers the showdown between Reagan and the striking air traffic controllers, a collision that had major consequences not only for the controllers but also for the air traffic control system, anti-unionism in the private sector, and the American system of labor relations.