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Howard Stanger brings a broad temporal perspective to Columbus employers in the printing industry and their varied strategies regarding activism. Here he makes the case for how employer activism did not always lead to an ability to counter unionism. Columbus printers made a collective decision to recognize unions for the first part of the twentieth century, and then later made a collective decision to initiate a campaign to counter unions. This counter-campaign benefitted from the long praxis of anti-unionism in other parts of the country, facilitated a vigorous belligerent drive against them based on strategies learned elsewhere, and in other industries.

Thomas Klug focuses on the city of Detroit, a major battleground in employers’ fight for open-shop conditions. Challenging the conventional story that seeks to show that the city’s employers, organized in the Employers’ Association of Detroit, enjoyed victories with little difficulties during a major strike in 1907, Klug has discovered that the organization was characterized by considerable amounts of internal tension. While organization spokespersons promoted the open-shop publicly, some members quietly negotiated with skilled workers, recognizing that collective bargaining offered the promise of industrial peace. Yet all members of the Employers’ Association of Detroit proclaimed their support for the open-shop principle.

Chad Pearson explores the multidimensional ways anti-union activists worked to break strikes and bust unions while attempting to turn “scabs” into “heroes.” He examines this process from different angles: from above, from below, and from somewhere in-between. Traditional employers’ associations were joined by unions of non-union workers and supposedly class-neutral Citizens’ Associations. Open-shop movement spokespersons frequently insisted that they were not engaged in a “class movement,” but Pearson disputes this claim by showing these organizations were formed by employers’ or by their middle-class allies.

This chapter examines the role of the Better America Federation (BAF), a business lobby headquartered in Los Angeles, in promoting the doctrine and practice of anticommunism during the interwar period. BAF and other business lobbies harnessed the passion and the infrastructure of the Red Scare to promote their economic and industrial agenda. They used anticommunism (and generous financial inducements) to revitalize and reorient urban police “Radical and Anarchist Squads.” This chapter first considers the open shop movement's fight against communism before discussing big business' domination of of economic and industrial policy during the 1920s. It then looks at the rise of the BAF and its use of the Red Squad and the California Criminal Syndicalism Act as instruments of labor suppression. It also describes the BAF's cultural war against Bolshevism, along with the scandal involving the BAF as well as the federation's demise and resurrection. The chapter shows that the BAF dominated anticommunism on the Pacific Coast from around 1920 until well into the Cold War as part of the Anticommunist Spider Web.

Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson introduce the book by describing the importance of study employers, the historiography about this group, and the structure of the book. Feurer and Pearson highlight scholarly trends, including the recent popularity of the study of capitalism and conservatism. They make a case of placing class at the center of their study. They note that few scholars of capitalism have focused extensively on the anti-union activities of employers, and that political historians of conservatism have overstated the differences between the Republicans and Democrats with respect to labor relations. This introduction makes a strong case emphasizing the role of employers in shaping politics, public relations, and labor relations.

Robert Woodrum examines the clashes between waterfront employers and black longshore workers in Mobile, Alabama during the era of World War I. The regional Marine Employers’ Association, committed to upholding open-shop conditions, enjoyed support from the U.S. Shipping Board and local vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan. During strikes, the employers benefited from the mobilization of white strikebreakers.

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning

This chapter illustrates how advocates of the open shop argued that elimination of unions would enable southern industrialists to realize the benefits of a large and growing supply of cheap labor. An employer, however, could not simply walk out into the street and find men to operate cranes, lathes, or rammers. Much of the local labor force lacked the necessary knowledge and would have to be trained before the theoretical benefits of more up-to-date methods could be realized. Efficient operation of a modern foundry, machine shop, or steel plant required a large number of semiskilled operatives who could be trained quickly and would work twelve hours each day. Some companies continued to rely upon the market to supply them with the workers they needed and to use threats of dismissal and other forms of coercion to force workers to behave as they wanted.

Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger highlight the ways employers and their allies used racism to divide the working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such racist practices began under slavery, and continued well into the early twentieth century as they constructed hierarchical workplaces which they deemed as natural; unions and solidarity in their estimation subverted the natural order. They call this practice “race management.” Employers seeking control over the workforce benefited from racism.