| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"If the Workers Took a Notion": The Right to Strike and American Political Development. By Josiah Bartlett Lambert. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii, 259 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8014-4327-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8014-8945-8.)

Over the last thirty years, the strike rate in the United States has fallen by between 60 and 90 percent. During the 1970s, about 289 major work stoppages occurred each year, but that number tumbled to just 35 walkouts per year in the 1990s. In "If the Workers Took a Notion," the political scientist Josiah Bartlett Lambert explores why American workers are increasingly reluctant to strike. Refuting scholars who argue that the decline is a reflection of weak labor laws, Lambert boldly argues that the right to strike has become eroded by the rise of a "modern American liberal state" (p. 5), which transformed it from a "citizenship right into a commercial right" (p. 18). Prior to the Progressive era, he asserts, striking was a "stalwart citizenship right, founded on civic republican principles" (p. 5). Today, concludes Lambert, the right to strike has become little more than the "right to quit" (p. 151).

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