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Book Review
| Susan Eleanor Hirsch, After the Strike: a Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman, University of Illinois Press, 2003. pp. x + 292. US $ 44.95 cloth.
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| The Pullman Company is famous for two critical US labour confrontations: the set-piece battle with the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1894, and the anti-discrimination battles waged by Pullman's black workforce in the first half of the twentieth century led by Philip A. Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Susan Hirsch chronicles the Pullman Company's 115 year history, from its development in the late nineteenth century as the US monopoly railway car manufacturer and sleeping car service provider to its decay into rust-bucket collapse in the 1970s, identifying the ebb and flow of worker organisation across the company's operations. The constant throughout the period is Pullman's unrelenting hostility to attempts to organise effective union structures and its resistance to workers' attempts to achieve collective bargaining. The company had a sophisticated raft of strategies to maintain its dominance, incorporating company unions, the construction of a whole company town, welfarist strategies and its ruthless manipulation of race, gender and occupational divisions. The Pullman Company cynically encouraged racist exclusion in some work areas while simultaneously facilitating integration in others to ensure conflict which cemented management control over the workforce. |
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The principal focus in this solid case study is the incapacity (and in many cases the unwillingness) of the American unions to unite Pullman's workforce. For a manufacturing union official it makes pretty bleak reading. Hirsch charts the corrosive effect of racism, competitive unionism, a failure to build unions that reflected the industrial as well as the occupational and craft identities and aspirations of potential members and a failure to adopt a unifying political strategy that undermined effective unionism. |
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After the Strike is not an easy read, which perhaps reflects the difficulty in marrying a comprehensive longitudinal study with an analysis of the key themes close to Hirsch's heart. It is a pity that she does not bring some of the key leadership figures on either side of the fence into sharper relief — I imagine that character studies of Eugene Debs, Philip A. Randolph and George Pullman would enliven the work. Despite these defects this book demands attention from those of us who don't want to repeat its history. |
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| Australian Manufacturing Workers Union |
TIM AYRES | |
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