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Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the Urban Archives Center at California State University at Northridge, California. The Center was established in 1979 through the efforts of university faculty and concerned community organizations and leaders. The primary purpose of the Center has been to collect the historically significant records of voluntary associations and prominent citizens who have directed growth in Los Angeles County and influenced government and public thinking since the beginning of the 20th century. Major subject areas developed during the Center's first 10 years of operation include, trade, tourism, and urban development; education; minority and ethnic organizations; politics; social services; women of Los Angeles; and recreation, sports and leisure studies. The center sent out 800 questionnaires inquiring about materials being stored in union halls and administrative offices. The responses revealed the existence of a wealth of untapped historical documents as well as the willingness of many labor organizations to participate in an archival program.

When violence broke out in the strike-ridden coalfields of Colorado in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson was called upon to send federal troops into the State. Wilson had already made several attempts to bring about a settlement and was now faced with a decision fraught with political implications. The role Wilson played in the strike — the story of his critical decision to use federal troops — is less well known. In the spring of 1914, Wilson had problems enough on the international scene. Tension was mounting in Europe and, more immediately, the incident in Mexico had reached proportions of an inter-American crisis. Then, in April, violence flared up in Colorado, and Wilson ordered federal troops to occupy part of that State. Understanding the decision behind this movement is important in understanding Wilson's attitude toward the presidency. The situation in Colorado had not developed suddenly. The State had earlier been the site of serious labor disturbances in the mineral industry and these disturbances left a legacy that would intensify emotions of Colorado's citizens when the 1913 strike began.

In the decade following World War I the anthracite coal industry of Pennsylvania found its domination of the domestic fuel market in the eastern U.S. under serious challenge. The emergence of intense competition from oil, gas, electricity and soft coal threatened to destroy the entire hard-coal business. Under these circumstances the anthracite industry could ill afford to indulge itself in bitter labor disputes. Strikes only created a vacuum for the new substitute fuels to fill. Indeed, short work stoppages in 1920 and 1923 and a hundred-and-sixty-three day strike in 1922 put the hard-coal industry on the brink of extinction. Yet it was impossible to conclude that another anthracite strike might be avoided in 1925. The identical problems, which caused the previous strikes, persisted. At the contract negotiations in July 1925 representatives of the anthracite operators and the United Mine Workers of America reached an impasse from the outset. The union demanded a 10 percent wage increase while the operators claimed that, to save the industry, a reduction of wages was mandatory.

Since the 1970s, governments around the world have been engaged in a conflict over the appropriate role of public services in society. In the U.S. and elsewhere, public services have faced pressures to restructure, reduce the size of government, and make government more ‘business-like.’ This paper examines how the evolution of public services and public sector unions shaped the distinctive character of public sector industrial relations in the U.S. Next it demonstrates how this distinctive character made public services and public sector unions vulnerable to neoliberal attacks and New Public Management reforms. It concludes by theorizing about how the frameworks of citizenship at work and union renewal may be used to strengthen the essential identity and restore the positive role that public sector unions have traditionally played in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents an update on issues concerning labor history in the U.S. as of January 1993. Overview of the 1993 Lowell Conference on Industrial History; Information on several conferences on labor studies and industrial relations; Establishment of a working group to focus on labor movements and free trade.

In 1923, leaders of the American steel industry agreed to end the twelve-hour working day, a subject of public dispute for some fifteen years. Though under intense pressure from President Watren Harding and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, industry might not have conceded were it not for a small band of reformers, most of them connected in one way or another with Survey magazine. These reformers — not workers — first made the twelve-hour day an issue, though it became a rallying point for the steel unions in 1919. They defined the terms of attack. These rolling and finishing plants had to reheat the metal and working hours in these plants often became organized around a specific number of heats. This in turn led to working hours of from anywhere between eight and fourteen a day. Late nineteenth-century technological advances led to integration of the steps of steelmaking. Companies began building plants that had both blast furnaces and the finishing mills on the same premises.

Well known is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) in the United States places a largely per se ban on nonunion employee representation (ER) groups which deal with employers over a term or condition of employment. Much less well known is that America’s other labor law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA, 1926), takes a different approach and permits employers to operate such councils and committees as long as they do not perform a collective bargaining function or interfere with workers’ free choice of a bargaining agent. Thus, under the RLA Delta Air Lines is able to operate what is today the closest living approximation to a 1920s-style ER plan while hundreds of other companies (e.g. Polaroid) under the jurisdiction of the NLRA have been forced over the years to disband similar groups on grounds they are a proscribed company union. No study to date has explored the history behind the RLA and NLRA’s divergent treatment of nonunion ER groups so this article takes a first look. The main part of the story covers the 1920–1935 period and examines the events, people, and experiences associated with company unions and ER in, respectively, the rail and manufacturing industries and why the legislative outcome in the former was a permissive stance on nonunion committees but prohibitive in the latter. The last part of the paper fast-forwards the RLA-NLRA story from the 1930s to contemporary law and practice in order to demonstrate how “history matters” when it comes to what employers can and cannot do with nonunion representation groups, such as works councils, participation and involvement committees, and dispute resolution forums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents announcements related to various events. The Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration and the Newcomen Society announce a postdoctoral fellowship in business history in the amount of $13,000 to be awarded for twelve months' residence, study, and research at the Harvard Business School during 1976-77; The Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization is currently planning its third Spring Conference, to be held sometime in March or April 1976 in New York City; University of Michingan researchers at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations want to interview some 50 women from different parts of the country who have been leaders and activists in the trade union movement. Their experiences will be recorded as part of a one-year oral history project, "The Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change," funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; The National Archives has announced that its Machine Readable Records Division has acquired from the Department of Labor's Manpower Administration an updated version of the National Longitudinal Surveys, originated to determine the socio-economic characteristics of the labor force, and changes in activity and attitudes.

This paper examines the last notable period of working-class unrest in Britain and America, the 1968-74 'upsurge.' It questions the widespread dismissal of such workplace-based, 'economistic' forms of resistance as disconnected from more explicitly political forms of rebellion. The explosive, dynamic character of the rebellion is argued to have contained both the potential and actuality of a transformed consciousness and thus fundamental questioning of existing political and economic relations. The loss of 'what might have been' is attributed less to absence of a grand political narrative, despite the ruling-class panic of 1974, than to a simple failure to build cross-class networks which could have achieved the coordination and unity of often separate struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the New York police's control of strikes as an important development in the changing role of the state in labor relations. Claims by police historians that state police was created as an element of working class repression; State police's replacement of the military in handling strikes; Decentralization of authority to call out the New York Guard during strikes.

Presents an update on issues and events related to labor history in the U.S. as of September 1993. Conferences; Grants and fellowships; Library materials made available to the U.S. public.

This article expounds on the political power and influence held by railroad unions in the U.S. during the 1900s. Several historians have noted that 16 railroad unions and, in particular, the four operating Brotherhoods came to enjoy considerable power during the 1920s. It is well know that in 1916, the four operating unions succeeded in winning the eight-hour day, thanks partly to the intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and in gratitude they campaigned vigorously for his re-election. It was during the war, however, that the rail workers really reaped the benefits of what they considered their political influence. The nationalization of the railroads allowed the unions to achieve a high degree of unity and to establish themselves as representatives of all railroad workers. During the war, they secured collective bargaining and satisfactory machinery for settling grievances while winning improved working conditions and large wage increases. As a result, the shop-craft union made great gains in membership, becoming powerful organizations for the first time, and the operating Brotherhoods made striking gains. When the war ended, the rail unions had a tradition of working together at the national level and were also confident that life would continue to improve at the same pace.

In the historiography of the American labor movement, the 1920s have long been characterized as ‘lean years’. Historians have identified many explanations for this decline, but they have not fully accounted for the role of ‘public’ or ‘middle class’ anti-labor sentiment. Opportunistic employers appealed to growing middle-class consumer discontent, set in motion by the mounting ‘high cost of living’, to build support for crippling unions during the immediate post-World War I period. Using Chicago as an example, this essay emphasizes the relationship between employers and the white-collar ‘middle class’ as an important factor in explaining the origins of the lean years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spurred by the shooting of 16 striking miners at a western Pennsylvania mine head on September 14, 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt bullied recalcitrant coal operators into signing a National Recovery Administration (NRA) code for the bituminous coal industry. After the President approved the code, Leo Wolman of the Labor Advisory Board declared, without a trace of irony, that the Board was glad the long struggle of the United Mine Workers for recognition has at last been successful through the orderly processes of the NRA. Captive mine operators declared that they were not bound by the code. As to commercial mines, the code contained nothing about union recognition or union rights other than ambiguous words of section 7(a) itself, and Pennsylvania operators appeared to be dragging their feet in executing local collective bargaining agreements. Also remaining to be decided was the question whether miners of the coke region would be permitted to elect their own union officers.

The article is an announcement about several meetings to be held concurrently in the year 1979 in various cities of the U.S. The Economic and Business Historical Society issued a call for papers for the April 1979 meeting at Lake Tahoe-Reno. A dissertation session is also planned. The Society meets concurrently with the Western Social Science Association. The Fourth Midwest Marxist Scholars Conference will be held on March 9-11, 1979 at the University of Cincinnati on the theme "The U.S. Educational System: Marxist Approaches;' The focus will be on education as an institution and on Marxist approaches to research and teaching in various academic disciplines. The Department of History and the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University announce a national labor history conference that will be held in October 1979. The American Council of Learned Societies had published a brochure on "Aids to Individual Scholars," which deals with competitions to be held in 1978-79. The ninth annual Institute for Historical Editing will take place in July 15-27, 1979, in Madison, Wisconsin.

The article presents information on limits of labor unions in reference to the Chicago newspaper strike of 1912. William Randolph Hearst established the Chicago American, an evening daily, in 1900. Subsequently, a morning paper, the Chicago Examiner, was started. Initially Hearst's representatives signed a joint contract for five years covering printers, stereotypers, pressmen, engravers and mailers. All but the pressmen were covered by an agreement with the International Typographical Union (ITU); the pressmen were members of the International Printing Pressmen's and Assistants' Union of North America. Both international unions underwrote the contract. By the time it had expired, stereotypers and engravers had withdrawn from the ITU and set up their own international unions. In 1905, agreement was renewed separately with each organization, for another five-year term. During this period, unions signed contracts with the Chicago Chapter of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association (ANPA) on terms more favorable to management than those granted to Hearst. In 1910 at the expiration of the pressmen's contract on the Hearst Chicago newspapers, the pressmen as well as the other printing trades unions were informed of the desire of Hearst's management to come under the Chicago ANPA contract.

This article studies the great public debate over yellow-dog contracts as an episode in the history of the legal culture of early 20th century U.S. The attempt by certain groups of employers to enlist judicial power on their side of labor disputes provoked a bitter quarrel, full of charges, justifications, and recriminations. The debate revealed the partisans' conflicting understandings of the nature of the industrial order. Its outcome was an unmistakable sign that the moral vision of proprietary capitalists no longer provided a persuasive account of the industrial relations of the corporate economy. The yellow-dog contract in the 1920s was most often used by those employers who faced the greatest challenges from organized labor, that is, the proprietors of marginal firms in the nonunion sectors of competitive industries. Their justification of the contract proceeded from assumptions which made sense of their own industrial circumstances but which were out of step with the understandings of managers of the decade's dominant, corporate firms.

Two great waves of organization built the industrial unions founded in the 1930s. The first, most dramatic, and most closely examined surge of growth ended in late 1937 after the U.S. Committee for Industrial Organization had won a substantial foothold in much of basic industry. Nearly four years of stagnation and retreat followed, until in early 1941 a second wave of industrial union growth began. Although attracting far less scholarly attention than the era of unionism symbolized by the sit-down strikes, the wartime surge of organization completed many of the unfinished tasks of the 1930s, doubled the size of what had become the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and put collective bargaining on a routine basis which determined much of the pattern of government-management-labor relations in the postwar era. This growth and consolidation took place under the most extraordinary circumstances, the nation was at war, unemployment had dropped to minimal levels, the federal government dominated every aspect of the economy, the trade unions had agreed to a ban on strikes and a ceiling on wages.

In this article the author shares his experience of attending the meetings of the labor organization, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). What first attracted the author to the IWW was its songs and the gusto with which its members sang them. Such singing, the author thought, was good propaganda, since it had originally attracted him and many others as well. Despite its size, the songbook blazed the trail for the larger songbook to come, a songbook of lasting fame, and one that would make the IWW. known in all corners of the earth. That time came nearer when J. H. Walsh blew in from Alaska. He came as a National Organizer to the Spokane Branch of the IWW, after Alaskan activities which included the founding of a paper, "The Nome Industrial Worker." By the time Walsh returned to Spokane, Washington, where he would continue his work, the worst effects of the 1907 panic were nearly over. This Panic came without advance warning. It was caused, some said, when Eastern bankers withdrew financial backing from railroad construction.

The article presents information on various meetings related to labor disputes to be held in various places. The Arizona Labor History Council and the Arizona State University will jointly sponsor the 1977 Southwest Labor Studies Conference scheduled to meet in Tempe, Arizona on March 4-5, 1977. The sponsors welcome conference proposals, papers, and participants from both the academic and labor-union communities there is a possibility that participants will have expenses paid by a pending grant proposal. The Forest History Society has published "Oral History Collection of the Forest History Society: An Annotated Guide." The fifth annual Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization conference has been tentatively scheduled for April 16-16, 1977, in New York City. The theme of the conference will be "The Politics of Culture: Legitimation and Resistance in Advanced Capitalism."

The reigning historical consensus is that the McCormick Riot of 3 May 1886 was a spontaneous conflict between strikers and scabs that provoked a brutal police attack. This re-examination of the evidence shows the complicated nature of work relations in the plant, the different interests and loyalties of various groups of McCormick employees, and the early involvement of Chicago's anarchists in exploiting McCormick's union tensions for their own purposes. New revelations detailing August Spies’ private motives for revenge against the police are uncovered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a significant literature around the idea that American multi-national corporations (MNCs) diffuse a ‘country of origin’ effect which claims the export from America of an individualistic ideology comprising distinctive employment practices based on the national business system. This literature usually conflates the sector of the firms, but recently several critiques have emerged which limit the discussion to discrete sectors (generically in the engineering industries) and which digress from the previous literature's dichotomous nature, where home versus host country influences are evaluated. This article adds to that recent literature by offering evidence of structural factors within the MNCs, as well as of institutional norms and societal influences. This evidence is taken from extensive longitudinal data on American MNCs in two sectors of the UK oil industry. These comprise the exploration and production activities on the UK continental shelf (part of the North Sea), known as the ‘upstream’ sector, and the related activities of refining of oil and manufacturing chemicals, known as the ‘downstream’ sector. The findings provide a theoretical addendum to the literature: in this study we are able, unlike other studies, to explain the adaptation of the industry to local institutional, cultural and labor market contexts through the different structures of the industry's two sectors. Even within the same MNC, the divisions prove to be differentially adapted to the UK context. Such evidence casts doubt on the broad conclusions drawn from a large part of the existing literature. We therefore show that structure and sector are far stronger forces explaining MNC actions than the diffusion of a country of origin effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Surveys of labour practices in subsidiaries of US-owned firms in Europe often argue that reluctance to join employer associations is a distinct feature of the American approach to industrial relations, entailing tensions with trade unions, particularly in so-called stakeholder economies like Germany. Taking the cases of Fordwerke and Opel, this article demonstrates, however, that this general claim does not always fit the historical pattern of US companies in post-war Germany. When the choice between plant and industry bargaining became a major issue at Opel (1948-58) and Fordwerke (1960-65), there was no significant pressure by Detroit management for decentralized negotiations. The real promoters of plant bargaining were the local works councils and union organizations, whose ideas, however, were controversial within the broader IG Metall union organization. The majority of the union's leadership feared that a decentralization of bargaining could weaken overall organizational strength and solidarity, or even lead to autoworkers splitting from the union. A transatlantic link was important, too - yet on the labour rather than on the management side: The American United Automobile Workers (UAW) trade union, concerned about growing Ford and GM investments in Western Europe, actively supported a shift towards plant bargaining in Germany through bilateral contacts and through a lobby for international collective bargaining coordination under the auspices of the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF). Such a prospect sounded as threatening to IG Metall leaders as to Ford and GM management, and their collusion accordingly ensured that industry bargaining prevailed. From the companies' point of view the costs and constraints of membership in the German employer association were a drawback more than offset by the advantage of being shielded against a scenario of militant wage pressure by German car workers drawing on international support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining two case studies in Spain's automobile industry, this article analyzes the part played by the multinational corporation (MNC) in the historical transformation of Spanish trade unionism at shop-floor level. The literature on organizational change, often aimed at explaining the ability of MNCs to diffuse human resource policies and practices across borders, is used to explore MNCs' ability to introduce organizational changes into the specific local conditions they are forced to deal with. Of the three possible types of organizational change examined ('continuity and institutional inertia', 'discontinuous and revolutionary change', and 'hybridization'), the authors find there is a strong evidential tendency towards hybridization. The MNCs under scrutiny were able to transform some aspects of the work of trade unions at the workplace level (wages, promotion, selection), but found they had to adapt their management style to the Francoist state's labour legislation - namely, concerning professional classification and functional mobility. The authors also contend that it was the role of these companies as MNCs, not their country of origin, which opened the way to the transformation of trade union organization and labour relations at the local level in Spain, since such a transformation accelerated once French and Italian multinationals took over each one of the MNCs under examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of social relations in the Italian steel mill at Cornigliano, near Genoa, during the 1950s. Built with funding from the Marshall Plan, the mill was the subject of a number of initiatives aimed at establishing a system of industrial relations based on the contractual and consensual 'American model'. The transfer of industrial equipment and management tools was used by American authorities to put pressure on Italian players to accept the imported model. But these management techniques tended to lose their identity when they were implemented in the local context. The militant interpretation of 'human relations' by Italian managers involved in the anti-communist battle within the factory significantly contributed to the downsizing of the operational dimension of these techniques. The introduction of job evaluation depended less on institutional constraints and more on the internal dynamics of the plant, which allowed for the redevelopment of autonomous relations between management and unions. The Americanization of social relations at Cornigliano was not a case of a linear transfer of foreign models of industrial relations, but rather was the outcome of a complex process rooted in the interplay of transnational and local mechanisms. The pragmatism of the different actors involved in the modernization of social relations at Cornigliano led to an eclectic re-appropriation of the 'American model'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits postbellum efforts to address the labor question and social reform through the emerging field of economics, in particular through social economics. Social economics, now usually known as institutional economics, offered on alternative path for the field of economics, one which rejected sharp distinction between practical or material studies and social-theoretical inquiries. This broad approach to economics in particular and the social sciences more generally shaped the emerging field of labor history. Labor historians have long been critical of early labor histories, particularly stressing their narrow focus on unions and economic goals. A re-examination of social economics, and the contingent language of institutionalism, however, suggests that social economics can continue to offer labor historians a useful model, one that stressed the position of labor history within broader examinations of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the late 1860s and the aftermath of the First World War, American discourse about the 'labor problem' - relations among workers, unions, employers, and the state - was permeated by comparisons. Reformers looked especially toward Britain, the first industrial nation, for clues about how to build an industrial relations system. This article explores how three generations of American employers reflected on what Britain's experience with relatively strong, recognized, legally secure unions could teach about how to handle the challenge of American labor. Their interest was serious, sustained, if discontinuous. It was most important at key moments of decision in the early 1900s and in 1918-19 when the Open Shop was first built, and then refurbished and defended. Examination of their understanding and representations of the British model of labor relations aids our appreciation of the ideological framework within which they conceived and constructed the American Way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vermont city of Barre, as the center of granite production in the state, provides a useful case study of the effects of technological change on a large local workforce. The introduction of pneumatic stoneworking tools in the late 19th century began a lengthy and tragic effort by granite workers to protect their health against the effects of technology. The high levels of dust produced by the pneumatic tools lodged microscopic shards of sharp granite dust in stoneworkers' lungs, and, as the tools became widely used in the early years of the 20th century, granite workers developed debilitating lung disorders in large numbers; many died young from a disease known as silicosis. Literature on Barre's granite industry examined its economic impact or the social relations and the class conflict that erupted between unionized workers and the granite industry owners. Some studies recognized the harsh realities of the long struggle for dust control; others looking at the horrors of silicosis saw only the eventual triumph of enlightened cooperation between employers, employees, medical professionals, and government regulators. Unfortunately, government was slow to respond and often seemed overawed by the power of business to set the terms of the debate. The medical profession was itself subject to political manipulation by manufacturers with a large stake in the debate on dust control in their industries. The result was a solution to the problem of silicosis that was tailored to the interests of employers, not laborers.

The article discusses the attempts to revision the virtues of company union in the U.S. The author emphasizes that there were several attempts of revisionist thinkig before the formulation of the National Labor Relations Act or the Wagner Act. These attempts accepted the shortcomings of company unions. Labor historian Howard Gitelman illustrates his views about the misadventure, mistakes, and risks that were being associated with company unions. Another historian in the name of Daniel Nelson has said that company unions were formidable organizations that served the interest of both employers and employees.

In 1993 the Governor-General of Australia, son of an American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) maintained that brutal employment conditions explained the rise of the IWW in the USA: "Direct action appeared justified." Not so in Australia, he insisted, where unionism was well established, Labor governments a periodic reality, and industrial relations avoided the "excesses" of the American system; Australian IWW tactics, therefore, were "self-destructive." As a former cabinet minister in a federal Labor government, Bill Hayden's perspective on the Australian IWW is typical of the Australian Labor Party, implying as it does that Labor's achievements rendered an Australian IWW unnecessary and counterproductive. A similar response is apparent in a 1919 Labor pamphlet, which described the IWW as "a serpent in the new Eden ready to poison the clear spring of progress." However, the Wobblies of the time maintained that it was precisely the discrepancy between promise and performance of Labor governments that discredited political action and demanded direct industrial action; and it was the persuasive power of this argument that found them an audience amongst militant workers. Thus it was the apparent success of the labor movement's incursion into parliamentary politics, the formation of governments that explains the appeal of the Australian IWW, as it developed and articulated a distinctively anti-political position.

This article focuses on cultural and social condition of steelworkers at Youngstown, Ohio. The author describes that in the early 1930's Youngstown was home to thousands of steelworkers laboring for three national steel giants, Youngstown was known nationally as the country's "Ruhr Valley." During the late 1930's, a workers' culture seemed to represent a possible alternative to liberal capitalist ways of life. But by the mid-1960's, few commentators found the correspondence between working for a living and class identity meaningful; a consensual culture existed where no one thought of themselves as workers, not even people who went off to steel mills everyday and lived next door to other steelworkers. Worker relationships outside of production were not taken into account, and it is this lack of attention to the ways of life of a post-Second World War working-class community that seems to the author as to evade recent labor scholarship. Steelworkers who struggled with insecurity in the shadows of their working-class neighbors were not embittered Americans. Nor were they secured, independent holders of equity in a growing share of America's wealth.

For U.S. workers and unions in the 1940s, labor law, and its administration and interpretation, had changed the world in which they operated. Without a doubt, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the National War Labor Board during World War II both strongly stimulated and protected union organizing and collective bargaining for the first time in American history. Historically, the predominant paradigm of the American judiciary towards organized labor's constitutional liberty had been to conceptualize human labor as a commodity that was part of a commercial transaction. As such, since they engaged in business related commercial activity, unions were only granted as much First Amendment protection as appropriate to this sphere. A long line of cases had held that business or commercial expressions could properly be regulated by the state to protect the varying interests affected by the commercial transaction violating the First Amendment, and commercial professions could be licensed by the state. As the complexities of representing labor during wartime increased, Pressman, as leader of the ClO general counsels, periodically convened conferences where industrial union lawyers could discuss common legal problems. In the early war years, Pressman devoted a brainstorming session to the question of how to deal with the tremendous increase in anti-union legislation at the state and local levels, particularly in the south and rural plains areas. In response to the union revival of the mid-1930s, state legislatures in conservative regions passed varied restrictions on union activity.

The article focuses on the railroad shopmen's strike which started on July 01, 1922 in the U.S. About 400,000 railroad workers were engaged in this national strike action which directly threatened the country's economic and social lifeline. The importance of the strike for the American labor movement was just as significant. The conflict marked the end of an era of industrial union strength. Author David Montgomery in his book "The Fall of the House of Labor" argued that the strike helped propel the shopcrafts into accepting management inspired cooperative schemes. As with other strikes in the period 1920-1922, the shape of this strike was molded by employer attacks epitomized by the American Plan. The 1922 railroad strike was symbolic of the new form of conflict. Above all, it was a struggle that pitted a leading industrial sector against a solidly organized labor force. The shopmen were determined not to allow the strength gained during the war years to slip away. During the government's wartime operation of the nation's railroads, the shopcrafts obtained full trade union rights and a corresponding increase in power. The strength of the shopmen was confirmed by their organization. The railroad shopmen were comprised of six distinct crafts: machinists, boilermakers, black-smiths, carmen, electricians and sheet-metal workers.

The article presents the annual bibliography of the American Labor History in 1991. Some of the articles are: John R. Commons: Pioneer of Labor Economics by Jack Barbash, published in the journal Monthly Labor Review; The Evolutionist Conception of the Commons-Wisconsin School of Labor History by Mary C. Canzoneri; Working Class Heroes and Others by Daniel R. Ernst and American Labor History in the 1980's: the Quest for Synthesis Continues by Lisa M. Fine, published in the journal Reviews in American History; How to Read Wright: the Equity of the Wage System and the Morality of Spending by John F. McClymer, published in the Hayes Historical Journal; Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-80 by Jonathan M. Wiener, published in the Journal of American History; Les Etats-Unis: Images du Travail et des Loisirs, published in the Journal of Economic History; One Hundred Years of Strike Statistics: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in Quantitative Strike Research by R. Franzosi, published in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

There has been in recent years a surge of scholarly interest in the U.S. labor law history. Due to the strong, fundamental social tensions surrounding and infusing conflicts over claims against master, employer, management or servant, journeyman, slave, employee, the stance of academic disinterest and neutrality with which elites wrapped scholarship in the 19th century has been difficult to maintain in the field of American labor history. Almost all of the scholarly work in this field has been written from standpoints overtly or at least clearly favorable to workers and, more particularly, to workers' organizations. These scholars understand that the position of the worker has been damaged by the growth and power of big business in the United States, and they favor social change which redresses workers' ills. They differ amongst themselves on the manner in which business is the source of workers' ills and ultimately on the nature of those ills; on the mode and kind of redress necessary or possible and on the nature of the society to be achieved through change.

The aim of this essay is to chart the emergence and assess implications of the law's conflation during the first half of the 19th century of the language of employment and the language of service in one doctrinal discourse. During this period, courts in Massachusetts, like courts elsewhere in the Anglo-American common law world, adopted master/servant reasoning as a paradigmatic response to contemporary social and economic changes transforming employment from a highly varied social relation encompassing many different species of interpersonal transactions into the much more uniform and impersonal institution of wage labor. The result was the contract of employment, a doctrinal innovation which combined the contradictory features of a transaction between juridical equals and the exercise of power by a legally-denominated superior over a subordinate. American labor historians have generally confined their interest in 19th century legal history to the impact of the conspiracy doctrine on workers' collective behavior, and have not paid much heed to contemporaneous changes in employment law.

The article focuses on the failure of American socialists to create a mass party with some prospect of achieving power. According to the author Americans themselves have also waged a long and intense debate to explain why the mightiest industrial nation has had the weakest socialist movement. Most of the explanatory models suggested by scholars found the explanation for the failure of American socialism within the movement itself, and especially within the Socialist Party of America (SP), while the others located the sources of failure within the American environment. Those who prefer an environmental explanation stress the absence of a feudal past, the scarcity of labor and economic growth, high wages and the ease of upwards mobility, the early existence of a democratic franchise and the flexibility of the American party system, and the potency of American individualism. According to the author some of the problems related with this issue can be disposed of quickly by adopting a comparative perspective.

The Homestead, Pennsylvania strike of 1892 is a good example of how republicanism both shaped workers' outlook in the strike and was itself reinterpreted in the course of militant union action. The Homestead strike in a unified social context, that is, as class action and ideology in its socio-economic setting. Too often, sociological theorists have tried to assimilate workers' consciousness to a historical notions of what constitutes class consciousness or some opposite state. Disparate sociological schools of thought have seen elements of republicanism citizenship, nation and law articulated so frequently by Homestead workers, as integrative symbols of national identity, binding together people of the U.S. as a social group and counterbalancing divisive forces of class conflict. Functionalist sociologists see these symbols as part of a national political culture, a set of overarching values reflecting common group membership in American society. The data presented here on consciousness at Homestead suggest that the relationship between class and symbols of national identity is more complex than either of these analyses indicate.

The article presents memories of the author as an industrial worker in early World War II in New York City. It is one person's reminiscences, based entirely on his own experiences as industrial worker from the beginning of 1940 to February 1944 when the author was called up to the U.S. Infantry. The place where the author worked had no safeguards, floor space was occupied to the hilt for diverse operations and no clear dividers were there to distinguish between different work areas. The function of the union on a day-to-day basis at the shop level was in cooperation with management, to assure regular and efficient production, at the large general meetings the officers indulged in the most radical, even revolutionary, rhetoric, particularly when speaking of management and labor in the abstract. The most interesting feature of the author's brief experience in the industrial working class was his fellow workers. It was overwhelmingly a male world. During the lunch hour many of workers would stay on the floor, dining on sandwiches and cokes, exchanging raucous pleasantries with each other and with the women. The themes of the discussions and the talk the author did with his colleagues included sports, women, and sex.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was born on December 10, 1886, in a second floor meeting hall at 146 South Fourth Street in Columbus, Ohio. The series of events earlier in 1886 had set the stage for the Columbus meetings of December 7-11. The years 1881 to 1886 had brought a meteoric rise in membership to the Knights of Labor. Although trade unionists belonged to the Knights in large numbers, the official structure, organizational attitude, and leadership of the Knights were not friendly to the concurrent growth of trade unions during these years. The leadership of the bourgeoning national trade unions contributed its share to the growing hostility. By the mid-1880s the "trades unions and Knights of Labor were clashing in many localities." To deal with the trade union threat, the Knights called a special General Assembly to meet in Cleveland, Ohio on May 25, 1886. In an effort to make peace, a group of trade union leaders within the Knights called its own separate conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 17. It was this group which would create the AFL in December of 1886.

This article presents information on the walkout of members from a meeting of the wage stabilization board established during the Korean war mobilization period. The walkout was announced by Emil Rieve, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) member of the board. He spoke not only on behalf of his two colleagues on the board but also for the united labor policy committee, which represented the entire labor movement in the U.S. with the exception of a few dissident labor organizations. The Wage Stabilization Board was set up as a tripartite organization which comprised of nine members, three each representing industry, labor and the public. The Wage Stabilization Board was supposed to make recommendations to an administrator regarding the planning and development of wage stabilization policies and would perform such further functions with respect to wage stabilization which may be determined by the administrator after consultation with the Board. The administrator was also assigned the responsibility for initiating conferences under Title IV of the Defense Production Act, which dealt with settlement of labor disputes.

The article focuses on the alternatives to labor injunction that the federal courts can provide to meet the railway labor problem from 1877-1895. During the years between the Railways Strikes of 1877 and the Pullman Boycott-Strike of 1894, the courts turned labor injunction as a major device to protect railroads from demonstrators. Though labor advocates condemn the device, the businesspeople hailed labor injunction as proof that the U.S. legal system can adapt to the changing needs of industries. Aside from labor injunction, federal courts could have addressed railway labor disputes by acting as mediators on interstate railways, by requiring receivers to recognize and bargain with organized railway workers, or by empowering itself to enjoin workers from quitting and taking custody of the railroad companies in question until the dispute is resolved.

The article analyzes the variety of views about industrial democracy in the U.S. between 1898 and 1915. Due to the growth of unionism in the country in the same period, U.S. industrial management shifted from the traditional methods of autocracy and paternalism to those associated with representative government. The trend, which came to be known as industrial democracy, is identified in the U.S. with independent trade unionism and bilateral collective bargaining supplemented by government. The determination of the rules of participation and due process is given to the managers and trade union officials with unresolved differences of interpretation and application. However, the determination of the boundaries of appropriate bargaining is recognized as a governmental task.