The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor, by Chris Rhomberg . Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2012, 398 pp., ISBN: 978 0 87154 717 0, $47.50, hardback.

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12068
AuthorKim Moody
Published date01 June 2014
Date01 June 2014
illustrative of the potential weaknesses of the ways these young people have developed
coping mechanisms to deal with the instabilities of their lives.
It is clear that the author is a skilled sociologist who is able to identify important
patterns within the huge complexity of social experience. She is sensitive to issues of
race and gender and allows them an important role in explaining parts of the expe-
riences of these young adults while at the same time emphasizing class as central to
these experiences. In this regard, she makes a clear case that the deregulation of the
labour markets for routine occupations is absolutely the key in explaining the inse-
curity experienced by her interviewees. What is less evident is her position within the
psychoanalysis literature. She identifies the therapeutic narrative as being both helpful
and problematic, but this is a study informed by sociology rather than psychology.
The book’s lack of grounding in that literature is one of its weaknesses.
Nonetheless, this is a highly engaging book that details the nuance and variety of
these young people’s lives in an accessible way. The author tells us that some of her
participants wanted the book to be a voice for young working-class adults, and she
achieves this with considerable sensitivity. And of course, famously, where America
leads, much of the world follows, so the US focus may well turn out to have a much
wider relevance.
MELANIE SIMMS
University of Leicester
The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor,by
Chris Rhomberg. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2012, 398 pp., ISBN:
978 0 87154 717 0, $47.50, hardback.
Much of the industrial relations scholarship coming from the USA in the last two
decades has focused understandably on the problems of organizing and union growth.
Yet, closely related to falling union membership in the USA is the decline of the strike
as a weapon in achieving union recognition or of improving and defending terms and
conditions. While union membership dropped by more than half between the 1970s
and the 2000s, the average number of strikes per year fell from over 5,000 to fewer
than 300. The Broken Table provides a detailed and readable analysis of why the strike
has become so rare in the conflict-ridden context of American industrial relations.
The author examines the five-year strike of six unions that began in 1995 at the
Detroit News Agency (DNA), the joint operation of that city’s two newspapers, the
News and the Free Press. The story of the strike itself is extraordinary in that six
unions ranging in composition from white-collar professionals and skilled crafts
workers to unskilled distribution workers maintained solidarity throughout the strike.
In the end, however, the unions were defeated. The questions that the author
addresses are how and why.
These questions are pertinent because, although the unions had no advance plan,
they received substantial support from Detroit’s sizable labour movement in addition
to deploying a wide variety of new and old tactics. Early in the strike, traditional
picketing at the News’s huge printing plant in the working class suburb of Sterling
Heights saw hundreds and at times thousands of members of the United Automobile
Workers, and other unions join the strikers to face down the combined police forces
of several nearby communities. When an injunction prohibited these tactics, the
unions turned to guerrilla picketing at distribution centres. At the same time, the
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398 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.

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