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BOOK REVIEW
| Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2008. pp. x + 245. US $40.00 cloth.
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| Much of what scholars do, whether it be theoretical musings or presenting research data, involves little more than the development of tautologies. Ralf Dahrendorf, in his monumental Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1959, p. 173) has observed that 'there are tautologies that are worth stating'. Then again, some are not. |
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This volume by Lawrence Richards is concerned with an historical examination of the reasons why unions have found it so difficult to attract American workers to join unions. In the preface he states that his motivation for undertaking such an investigation followed an unsuccessful attempt to organise computer programmers, an experience he described as 'like trying to herd cats', and the strong opposition that these workers expressed against unions (p. ix). |
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In attempting to make sense of this, and on the basis of his subsequent research, he maintains that a neglected factor in explanations of the inability of unions to gain a viable role in America, its workplaces, politics and broader culture, is that of worker opposition to unions. He says, 'This does not mean that I view this factor as the most important. But, so far, it has received far less attention than the other explanations' (p. 4). These 'other explanations' are employer opposition and a hostile state. |
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Richards organises his material into two parts. The first is at the level of culture and hegemony, where he surveys various magazines, newspapers and other sources such as film and television on the ideas that have been 'popularly' expressed about unions. The propagation of such ideas has been invariably developed by those opposed to unions. Their supporters have found it difficult to obtain an entrée to such purveyors of 'popular' opinion. |
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Unions have been tarred as being boss-ridden, undemocratic, dominated by reds or the mafia, corrupt, promoting violence and strikes, a special interest group not concerned with the common good, upsetting the special relationships that exist between workers and supervisors and of being a waste of time because they cannot obtain anything extra that employers would provide them with any way, and if they could such 'advances', if not eaten away by increases in prices and the cost of living, would result in lay-offs and the transfer of company operations elsewhere, whether in low wage states to the south or overseas. The only time that it has been conceded that unions could have a positive role is when workers have been seen to be treated unfairly, as during the 1930s depression and the era of the New Deal. |
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The second part is to provide three case studies of union organising campaigns and the ideas used to drum up opposition to unionism. The first two involve an attempt by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to organise workers at Frank Ix & Sons in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1980 and the Wholesale, Distributive and Processing Workers Union to organise clerical workers at New York University in 1970. What Richards discovers is that the rhetoric used in these two unsuccessful attempts is the same as or stem from the broader ideas that pervade American society. |
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