Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1986.tb00688.x |
| Published date | 01 July 1986 |
| Date | 01 July 1986 |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
24:2
July
1986 0007-1080 $3.00
BOOK
REVIEWS
The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor
Movement
in America,
1880-1960
by Christoper L. Tomlins. Cambridge University
Press,
1985,348
pp.. Cloth
f30.00,
Paper
f10.95.
Testifying before a Senate committee considering amendments to the National
Labor Relations Act in
1939,
Sidney Hillman stressed that government must ensure
that unions and employers ‘do not abuse their powers
of
organisation against the
interests
of
the public at large’. Some years later Hillman reflected that, prior to
passage
of
the Wagner Act, there had not been in the United Staes anything that
could properly be called a labour movement. To the undermining
of
this union
establishment version
of
American trade union purpose and history Christopher
Tomlins devotes his enviable talents
-
as lawyer, historian, researcher and writer.
The result is a formidable documentation in support of a good deal
of
the revisionist
labour and social history
of
the past couple of decades-much
of
which has appeared
in
Labor History
and in monographs loosely designated as either New Left
or
neo-
Marxist.
But this book is not a mere ‘legalising’
of
the revisionist critiques
of
institutional
labour history;
it
is, rather, a sophisticated survey of the union experience in the
United States. Firmly founding his analyses on a remarkable range
of
primary
sources (congressional documents, private papers, court and labour board hearings)
and supporting his argument also with effective use
of
monographs, articles and
biographies, Tomlins reverses the Hillrnanesque schema: the Wagner Act and its
inexorable evolution, far from entrenching labour’s ‘right’ to organise and bargain
freely, harnessed the unions to a system
of
priorities and restrictions which invariably
designated industrial stability, productivity and labour peace as the rock upon which
the ‘conditional legitimacy’ of the unions has been founded. He depicts, even more
starkly than does Nelson Lichtenstein, the triumph
of
an ‘industrial pluralism’ within
which labour’s new men
of
power conceded an ever larger sacrosanct sphere
of
managerial discretion and a steadily shrinking scope
of
legitimate union action
-
all
in
return for a wildly bureaucratised, even professionalised ‘security’ for the unions
as institutions. In his concluding paragraphs, sub-titled ‘A counterfeit liberty’,
Tomlins judges that
in
the post-Wagner years ‘what the state offered workers and
their organisations was
no
more than the opportunity to participate
in
the
construction
of
their own subordination’.
At the outset, Tomlins declares that his analysis, ‘unlike that of some earlier
revisionists, is not founded on a conspiratorial model
of
political and legal decision
making,
in
which all outcomes consciously serve the interests
of
identifiable business
elites’. As with all good lawyers his concern is with continuities and with complex
causation. Thus, the Wagner Act is scarcely a watershed at all and,
in
one sense his
treatment of the whole period from the
1880s
is a brilliant essay
in
the common law,
308
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
leading quite naturally
to
the increasing codification of that law. Yet, behind the
intellectual discipline, there is a passion in this book which will provoke most readers
into speculation about its author’s ‘real’ feelings about historical causation.
While Tomlins rejects conspiracy and prefers Nicos Poulantzas and Fred Block to
Ronald Radosh
or
William Domhoff as analysts of class-state relationships, he
nevertheless accepts that ‘courses
of
action consciously chosen and pursued by
managers
.
.
.
demonstrably damaging to the interests
of
particular capitalists, will
in the long run exhibit an overall bias toward reproduction of the political-economic
status
quo’.
His ‘state managers’ include a vast range
of
judges, legislators and
administrators, yet from within those seemingly amorphous groups, from decade to
decade, Tomlins does point to particular people
-
a William Leiserson, a Robert
Taft, a covey
of
federal judges and corporation managers
-
who appear to have
exercised very real and specific influence upon the course of events. Perhaps there is
merely a semantic problem here?
Tomlins sees a glimmer of hope in the apparent erosion
of
the consensus on which
the post-Wagner system rests and
in
a statement made by Douglas Fraser while
Fraser was president
of
the
UAW,
announcing the need
to
‘reforge the links with
those who believe in struggle’.
I
suspect that Tomlins is close to the heart of the
American radical tradition: mistrust
of
government and
of
ideology; faith in the
accumulation and dissemination
of
facts. He probably accepts with stoicism Fraser’s
joining the board
of
Chrysler to help along the Iacocca miracle. The final sentences of
this fascinating book say it all: ‘a counterfeit liberty is the most that American
workers and their organisations have been able to gain through the state. Its reality
they must create for themselves’.
Pace,
Sam Gompers.
KENNETH MCNAUGHT
University
of
Toronto
A
History
of
British Trade Unions since
1889
Vol
I1
1911-1933
by H. A. Clegg.
History and Heritage
by Alan Fox. George Allen and Unwin, London,
1985,481
pp.,
Oxford,
1985,619
pp.,
f40.00
f30.00
Both of these contributions
to
British labour history are major achievements of
scholarship which add substantially to the many other more specific studies that have
appeared during the past few decades, and take their place alongside such classics as
the Webb’s
History
of
Trade Unionism
and
E.
H.
Phelps Brown’s
The Growth
of
British Industrial Relations.
The History
of
British Trade Unions since
1889
began as a joint venture between
Clegg, Alan Fox and
A.
F. Thompson; the first volume which covered from
1889
to
1910
was published
21
yeas ago. The second volume, which is the subject of this
review, has been written by Clegg alone for reasons which he explains in the preface;
the book is dedicated to A.
F.
Thompson.
Clegg’s study, following the tradition
of
the Webb’s, provides a close examination
of
the trade unions as they developed through a period which included a massive rise
and decline in union membership under the impact
of
two great slumps and the first
World War; the syndicalist revolt before the war and an upsurge
of
industrial conflict
after the end
of
the war,
in
which the miners played a central role culminating in the
General Strike in
1926;
the restructuring of the pattern
of
collective bargaining from
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