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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2009
2 New York Times, 20 February 1995; see also the programmatic pamphlet, A New Voice for American Workers: A Summary of Proposals from Unions Supporting John J. Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson (Washington, DC, 1995).
3 For the SEIU vision, see Sweeney, John J. and Nussbaum, Karen, Solutions for the New Work Force: Policies for a New Social Contract (Camp John, MD, Press, 1989)Google Scholar; on Justice for Janitors, see Hurd, Richard W. and Rouse, William, “Progressive Union Organizing: The SEIU Justice for Janitors Campaign”, Review of Radical Political Economics, 21:3 (1989), pp. 70–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Spalter-Roth, Roberta, Hartman, Heidi and Collins, Nancy, “What Do Unions Do For Women?”, in Friedman, Sheldon (ed.), Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, (Ithaca, 1995), p. 195Google Scholar.
5 While their absolute numbers are relatively low, African-American men are the most highly unionized segment of the labor force; in 1992, 24 per cent of all African-American men employed in the non-agricultural labor force were unionized, compared to the general unionization rate of 16 per cent: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Membership, 1992”, Monthly Labor Review, 116 (03 1993), p. 2Google Scholar.
6 Challenges to the unitary conception of class predate recent studies of race; a useful perspective for labor history is that of Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Treating the Male as Other”: Redefining the Parameters of Labor History”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 190–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1994)Google Scholar; idem, Towards an Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London, 1994), and the prolific citations for Nelson's essay, esp. note 1.
8 The “new institutionalism” was first used to describe developments in political science. -See Smith, Rogers M., “Political Jurisprudence, the ‘New Institutionalism,’ and the Future of Public Law”, American Political Science Review, 82:1 (1988), pp. 89–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life”, American Political Science Review, 78:3 (1984), pp. 734–749CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Goldfield, Michael, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s”, International Labor and Working Class History, 44 (1993), pp. 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Honey, Michael K., Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar.
10 Nelson, Bruce, “Pentecost on the Pacific: Maritime Workers and Working Class Consciousness in the 1930s”, Political Power and Social Theory, 4 (1984), pp. 141–184Google Scholar.
11 Nelson writes of the “white majority that has seen blacks not only as competitors for jobs and the often scarce resources of the larger society, but also as an alien phenomenon whose integration into the existing structures and subcultures of the white working class would be destabilizing and dangerous” (p. 367). Later in the essay, Nelson offers that the bipolar view of race is increasingly inappropriate; but for the most part, as he asserts, historians have treated African-American workers as the relevant reference group for the debate.
12 This is an argument Nelson neglects entirely, except to comment on older analyses that laid racism at the employer's door. For the employer assault, see Harris, Howell, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar; Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, Selling Free Enterprise: Tfte Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, 1995)Google Scholar; Gall, Gilbert, The Politics of the Right to Work (Westport, 1988)Google Scholar. For examples of the cultural assault on organized labor, see Richberg, Donald R., Labor Union Monopoly (Chicago, 1957)Google Scholar; McClellan, John L., Crime Without Punishment (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, and regular labor coverage in Newsweek and U.S. News jmd World Report.
13 Sugrue, Thomas, “Crabgrass Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964”, Journal of American History, 82:2 (1995), pp. 55–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 On structural sectoral and occupational shifts in the labor force, the consequences for labor were known as early as the 1950s, but the news hasn't reached some historians yet. See Bell, Daniel, “The Next American Labor Movement”, Fortune (04 1953)Google Scholar; idem, “Prospects for Union Growth”, in Fogel, Walter and Kleingartner, Archive (eds), Contemporary Labor Issues (Belmont, CA, 1966), pp. 225–238Google Scholar; see also idem, The End of Ideology, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (Glencoe, IL, 1960); Lens, Sidney, The Crisis in American Labor (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Irving, “The Growth of American Labor Unions”, Labor History, 2:2 (1961), pp. 131–157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Sugrue, “Crabgrass Politics”.
16 Brody, David, “The CIO After Fifty Years; A Historical Reckoning”, Dissent (Fall 1985), pp. 457–472Google Scholar; see also his Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York, 1980).
17 Friedlander, Peter, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh, 1975)Google Scholar.
18 Nelson, Bruce, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar.
19 The “New Men of Power” in the labor movement may not have had the power of court-martial to force workers to behave themselves, but they did have a number of sanctions at their disposal. On the desegregation of the armed forces and racial attitudes, see Dalfiume, Richard, The Desegregation of the Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953 (Columbia. 1969)Google Scholar.
20 Faue, Elizabeth, “Paths of Unionization: Community, Bureaucracy, and Gender in the Minneapolis Labor Movement, 1935–1945”, in Baron, Ava (ed.), Work Engendered: Toward a New Labor History, (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 296–319Google Scholar.
21 Elizabeth Faue, Comment, “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Industrial Unions” panel, Rethinking American Labor History: Gender, Race, and Class conference. State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 10 April 1992. See also Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York, 1977)Google Scholar, for a similar argument about the need to balance the numbers.
22 Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar, compares policies toward women in the automobile and electrical industries. While her argument is oriented toward other questions, the difference in proportion of women in each industry's labor force can be used to explain major differences in union attitudes toward gender equality. For the post-war period, and the impact o f McCarthyism o n reinforcing women's equal place, see Kannenberg, Lisa, “The Impact o f the Cold War o n Women's Trade Unionism: The UE Experience”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 309–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 This can be seen in the cases both of garment workers and in the hotel and restaurant workers, where twentieth-century shifts in the waitperson labor force led to gerrymandering, including the development of separate women's locals. See Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Problems of Coalition-Building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s”, in Milkman, Ruth (ed.), Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston, 1985), pp. 110–138Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Nelson refers here to a specific case study; see Halpern, Rick, “Interracial Unionism in the Southwest: Fort Worth's Packinghouse Workers, 1936–1954”, in Zieger, Robert (ed.), Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South (Knoxville, 1991), pp. 158–182Google Scholar; see also his Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packing-houses, 1920–1960 (Urbana, forthcoming); Horowitz, Roger, “‘Without a Union, We're All Lost’: Ethnicity, Race, and Unionism among Kansas City Packinghouse Workers, 1930–1941”, presented at Rethinking American Labor History: Gender, Race, and Class conference, State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 10 04 1992Google Scholar.
25 Boyle, Kevin, “‘There are No Union Sorrows that the Union Can't Heal’: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States Automobile Industry, 1945–1960”, Labor History, 36 (1995), pp. 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fehn, Bruce, “‘Chickens Come Home to Roost’: Industrial Reorganization, Seniority, and Gender Conflict in the United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1955–1966”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 324–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deslippe, Dennis, “‘We Had an Awful Time with our Women”: Iowa's United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1945–1975”, Journal of Women's History, 5:1 (1993), pp. 10–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition-Building”; Faue, “Paths of Unionization”.
27 This is to parallel Nelson's construction of a “racialized” democracy.
28 Lichtenstein, Nelson, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), pp. 370–381Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., p. 376.
30 Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; Katznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar.
31 Lewis, Earl, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar.
32 For another case of this, consider the salutory impact of the woman's department of the UAW on the union's eventual acceptance of policies supporting gender equality; the department was one of the prime movers in the formation of CLUW as well. See Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, 1990)Google Scholar.
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