Abstract

"The Long History of American Business’s Exceptional Hostility to Worker Agency"

Michael Hillard, University of Southern Maine (mhillard@maine.edu)

This paper traces the long history of American employers’ exceptional opposition to unionization. It reviews US history of capitalism, business history, and labor and working-class history literature (and primary sources), and is for an interdisciplinary and popular audience. By 1910, American employers had developed and embraced an extreme and reactionary “core” capitalist ideology, melding Social Darwinism, classical liberalism, and open shop ideology that portrayed unions as a red line in the sand to be defended against at all costs. Concrete campaigns to defeat workers reinforced this core ideology. US labor historians have argued that specific structural and path dependent/historical factors empowered American employers to build and then continue a historically exceptional, often violent, intense, and enduring warfare against workers’ attempt to establish workplace agency that expressed this ideology in action. (See Jacoby, Lichtenstein, Swenson, and Friedman). I then revisit the story of the 1930s “labor breakthrough,” highlighting steel executive Tom Girdler’s prosecution of the Little Steel strike as the most telling event of the decade. I argue that the “Mohawk Valley Formula,” rather than the Flint/UAW breakthrough or later “Treaty of Detroit,” was the key harbinger of future American labor relations. The “New Deal” period (1930s-1970s) saw a split between “pragmatic conservative” capitalists (bargaining with unions out of necessity) and full–on reactionary capitalists. Reactionaries pioneered modern union busting techniques in successfully defeating their workers’ organizing attempts, or severely weakened unions when they were established, while financing right wing ideology, and building a political movement to undo the New Deal labor relations regulatory framework by the 1980s. (See Fones-Wolf, Phillips-Fein, Lichtenstein, Glickman, Delton, Dallek and Gibbs among others). I connect this long story with contemporary employer hostility to unions (using Howard Schultz and Starbucks as a current example) and call for broader challenges to this peculiarly American employer/managerial exceptionalism.