African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal (original) (raw)
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Social Science History
It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the...
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The history of industrial relations in South Africa, especially pertaining to strikes, is to a great extent also a reflection of the country's racially divided past. The origins of the South African labour movement can be traced to a working class historically divided in terms of colour and skills. This working class was crystallized into a small, mostly skilled, elitist and exclusivist white group of trade unionists and a vast unorganized and unskilled proletariat of black workers. The white labour movement became militant relatively soon after its formation in ...
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe, the United States and large areas of the globe experienced labour unrest and multiple strike waves at an unprecedented pace and intensity, some of which developed a quasi-revolutionary momentum. From the bitter conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, to the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s, a sense of impending cataclysm, symbiotically associated with fears of revolutionary upheaval and forebodings of social anarchy, ceaselessly haunted those who had assumed the role of guardians of the established order. While much work has been devoted to socialist parties and revolutionary organisations, the multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation and privately organised coercion have not received the same degree of scholarly attention.
This is the accepted version of my 2016 Labor Studies Journal article. Drawing on primary and secondary sources on the 19th century U.S. labor movement both nationally and in Chicago, I argue that the major postbellum labor federations foundered on the shoals of racial exclusion and evolved into a segregated movement; from there, black labor leaders took their appeal for civil rights to the Republican Party. The separation unfolded in three interrelated processes. The first was discursive: white labor leaders framed the civil rights struggle as past or already accomplished by the Civil War, and the fight against wage slavery as the natural successor struggle. The second was institutional: the labor movement split into white and black unions; black leaders then shifted strategy to focus on achieving civil rights through partisan channels. The third was local in nature: black workers were systematically excluded from the member organizations of the National Labor Union and Knights of Labor, and socially by white workers in general. Together these processes conspired to fracture the initially biracial labor movement into a white labor movement and a black civil rights movement.