Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Iron Masters
- 3 Laying the Foundations: Peace and War in the Metal Trades, c. 1890–1904
- 4 Combat, Crisis, and Consolidation, 1904–1915
- 5 “The Largest, Strongest, and Most Valuable Association of Metal Manufacturers in Any City”
- 6 Riding the Storm, 1915–1918
- 7 The War After the War, 1918–1923
- 8 Pacific Passage: Quaker Employers and Welfare Capitalism, c. 1905–1924
- 9 A Liberal Interlude: The Modernization of the MMA, c. 1924–1931
- 10 The Deluge: The Great Depression and the End of the Open Shop
- 11 The New World: Accommodation and Adjustment, 1936–1939
- 12 Afterword: “We'll Still Be There. We're Not Going Away”
- Appendix: Databases Referred to in Text: Nature, Sources, Use
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Iron Masters
- 3 Laying the Foundations: Peace and War in the Metal Trades, c. 1890–1904
- 4 Combat, Crisis, and Consolidation, 1904–1915
- 5 “The Largest, Strongest, and Most Valuable Association of Metal Manufacturers in Any City”
- 6 Riding the Storm, 1915–1918
- 7 The War After the War, 1918–1923
- 8 Pacific Passage: Quaker Employers and Welfare Capitalism, c. 1905–1924
- 9 A Liberal Interlude: The Modernization of the MMA, c. 1924–1931
- 10 The Deluge: The Great Depression and the End of the Open Shop
- 11 The New World: Accommodation and Adjustment, 1936–1939
- 12 Afterword: “We'll Still Be There. We're Not Going Away”
- Appendix: Databases Referred to in Text: Nature, Sources, Use
- Index
Summary
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
This is a book about power. It is an examination of how and why American employers were so successful for so long in their campaign to construct and maintain a system of industrial relations in which unions would play no part. The creation, persistence, and sudden collapse of the resulting Open Shop order define the chronological limits of this work, c. 1890–1940. This periodization allows us to study the vicissitudes of organized class relations through successive booms and depressions, the systemic crises of the First World War and New Deal, and across two generations of change in the structures of industrial enterprises themselves and, to a lesser extent, in the ideologies of those who controlled them.
This book is therefore about some of the main industrial relations issues confronting American employers and their workers, the public, and the state, through five decades. It aims to illuminate these large national realities, but does so from a particular local standpoint. It is rooted in the experiences and behavior of one self-selected group of employers, in one industry, in one city. The city is Philadelphia; the industry is secondary metal manufacturing, the heart of the Open Shop movement there and elsewhere; and the group is the Metal Manufacturers' Association of Philadelphia (MMA), set up in December 1903 to fight the good fight against organized labor, and doing so with considerable success throughout the next thirty years.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bloodless VictoriesThe Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890–1940, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000