| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement. By Howard Kimeldorf. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. x, 244 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-520-21832-9. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-520-21833-7.)

Through two case studies, Howard Kimeldorf challenges the classical analysis of American workers' preferences for either the American Federation of Labor (AFL) or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the Wobblies) or, later, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He suggests that those choices were more pragmatic than political and were linked to the necessary strategy to obtain control of the workplace. According to Kimeldorf, whether acting under AFL or IWW guidance, the workers were urged by a syndicalist spirit that had little to do with political choices. On the whole, rank-and-file workers were neither conservative nor revolutionary, but were seeking the most favorable way of improving their working conditions. 1

By documenting the unchartered territory of the Philadelphia dock workers and that of the New York City hotel and restaurant workers from the 1900s to the 1930s, Kimeldorf sets a precise context for his larger theory on the workers' options for craft or industrial unionism. At the same time, this study also offers a way of bridging the wide chasm between the AFL's hegemony in labor relations at the time of World War I and the eventual coming of age of industrial unionism in the 1930s. . . .

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