The Right to Work? Rethinking Labor and Politics in the 19th and 21st Centuries (original) (raw)
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Old Deal, New Deal, Raw Deal: The Evolution of the Liberal State in the Modern United States
Labour / Le Travail, 1993
HAVING FAILED FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS to synthesize United States social and labour history effectively or to make the often recondite findings and interpretations of the "new" history accessible to a larger reading audience, many scholars have resorted to "bringing the state back into" their narratives. Historians, especially, seem eager to write stories that have a plot and that develop sequentially and chronologically. Not for them a postmodernist sensibility that denies the validity of central truths, omnipotent authorial voices, and real historical times; not for them the cacophony of multiple voices contesting historical reality or telling competing narratives. At least that appears to be the case among younger historians whose consciousness was formed in the student protest movement and counterculture of the 1960s and who have written some of the best of the "new" social and Melvyn Dubofsky, "Old Deal, New Deal, Raw Deal: The Evolution of the Liberal State in the Modern United States," Labour/Le Travail, 32 (Fall 1993), 269-77. 270 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL labour history, if the recent books edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and written by Alan Dawley portend trends in current scholarship. Dawley, Fraser and Gerstle consider the New Deal to be the central event in 20th-century United States history. They also insist that any meaningful narrative must explore and explain the evolution and devolution of the New Deal state or order, terms that they use interchangeably to characterize the style and form of governance that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers created. Dawley's narrative spans three-quarters of a century and moves relentlessly toward the New Deal years as the climax of modem American history. The collection of essay s edited by Fraser and Gerstle begins with the New Deal and moves ahead to dissect its dissolution. Both books have an almost elegiac quality, simultaneously praising the New Deal for modernizing the American state, enabling working people to build new forms of power, and constructing an embryonic welfare state, yet mourning its inability to purge the temple of "money changers" permanently, liberate the nation from racism and sexism, and, in the case of Fraser and Gerstle, to survive as an effective political reform movement. Subtextually, the books lament the failure of workers, radicals, and intellectuals to free themselves from the shackles of a New Deal order that sold them a cornucopia of consumer goods instead of a more frugal, virtuous, egalitarian, cooperative, and perhaps even socialist order. The tale told, then, is of a capitalist system and a state that survived the crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s through treatment in the healing waters of the New Deal. Although Dawley, Fraser and Gerstle cut their academic teeth as practitioners of the new social and labour history, these books, despite an almost reflexive homage to the discursive styles of the new history, are state-centered and, in Dawley's case, old-fashioned narrative in form. Yet if they have returned to the subject matter so dear to more traditional historians-politics and the state-Dawley, Fraser, and Gerstle nevertheless write political history with an exceedingly modern, if not postmodern, touch. No heroic statesmen bestride the books' pages; here history is made by vast impersonal demographic, social, and economic structures rather than human actors, whether high-born or low-bom, reactionary or radical. Few real people trod Dawley, Fraser, and Gerstle's historical stage, although in Dawley's case, that new holy trinity, class, race, and gender, serve as frequent and wondrous deus ex machina. Because Dawley narrates how history produced die Roosevelt regime and reforms of the 1930s while Fraser and Gerstle explain the decline as well the rise of die New Deal, let me begin this discussion with the former. All his references to the new social and labour history as well as the "holy trinity" notwithstanding, Dawley constructs his narrative of the creation of an active, interventionist modern state in America conventionally. His principal story asserts that "the crux of American history from die 1890s to the 1930s was the imablance between a bustling society and the existing liberal state." (4) "Along every front and fault line of American life," writes Dawley, "there arose a contradiction between the society's needs and die existing political system." (2)
The Endurance of New Deal Liberalism
Studies in American Political Development, 1996
The increase in writing by political historians and political scientists about the United States in the 1940s registers concerns about origins-after some major endings, notably of Democratic political predominance and the Cold War. That decade also saw the beginning of serious national efforts at reform in racial politics. Interest in the 1940s expresses contemporary political concerns, especially for those who mainly agree with the New Deal, not only as a response to the grave political and economic problems of the 1930s but also as an attractive model of active government. Friends of the New Deal have entered an unexpected situation, having to justify conceptions that for decades were taken as a starting point for policy efforts and political argument. One defense is to say that what has been attacked as New Deal liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s is different from and much less cogent and appealing than the real thing of the 1930s.
How Right to Work Is Destroying the American Labor Movement: From the Ku Klux Klan to the Tea Party
Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 2011
This essay examines recent efforts to enact right to work laws and analyzes the impact of such laws on union development. The argument is that right to work is an invidious anomaly in federal collective bargaining policy, and Section 14(b) should be eliminated from the National Labor Relations Act. Proponents of right to work legislation claim that such laws promote economic development, but the evidence for that claim is unconvincing. Alternatively, supporters of the legislation assert that it promotes individual liberties in our market economy. Opponents of right to work challenge the normative dimension of right to work as an empty ideology that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Right to work is inimical to the economic and social interests of American workers.
The New Class and Right Wing Populism: The Case of Wisconsin
The Sociological Quarterly, 2024
While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward right-wing populism in the twenty-first century. We draw on Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu to theorize intellectual-worker alliances. We then present historical evidence that an intellectual-worker alliance played an important role in the earlier period. Logistic regression analysis with survey data shows continued political antagonism between the state’s wealthiest and most highly educated citizens in the later period, as well as an enduring political alignment of highly educated and working-class Wisconsinites. Our results demonstrate that right-wing populism prevailed in Wisconsin despite an intellectual-worker alliance, not because the alliance broke down. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings imply about contemporary right-wing populism beyond Wisconsin.
The Platypus Review, 2022
How one understands labor history’s object, labor, is largely determined by one’s understanding of capitalism. Increasingly, however, labor historians conceptualize capitalism in a frivolous manner, tacking on “capitalism” as a loose signifier of wrongdoing secondary to more fashionable commentary on race, gender, and sexual identity. Labor historians remain in denial of how the field’s ongoing cultural turn has mirrored contemporary developments in Left-liberal politics, particularly the fractured relationship between the Left and the working class. The field has abandoned Marxism in favor of today’s default frameworks for grasping class and labor: communitarianism and neo-empiricism. As the Left has adopted ideologically, so have labor historians entrenched intellectually: despair with the working class, anti-capitalist moralism, the conflation of bourgeois society and capitalism, the disavowal of social revolution, and particularist identity politics. By appraising labor history’s treatment of class, women, race, capitalism, and revolution, we can better appreciate just how much the field has diverged from classical Leftist and Marxist conceptions of these issues, as they relate to labor in capitalism.
Book Review: Why America Needs A Left: A Historical Argument
The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this recent book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women′s movement and gay liberation. Emily Coolidge Toker recommends the book to anyone looking for a quick and convincing call to action.