"The Progressive Origins of the Union-Busting Consultant: The Rise and Fall of Nathan Shefferman"

Though largely forgotten today, in the late-1950s Nathan Shefferman was the most infamous union buster in the United States. In nationally televised hearings, the Senate McClellan Committee unveiled how Shefferman and his firm, Labor Relations Associates (LRA)—the first labor-relations consultancy in the country and one of the largest of its time, whose clients included blue-chip names like Sears, American Express, and Macy’s—used bribes and surveillance tactics (rather than the traditional bayonets and batons) to thwart workers’ lawful rights to collectively organize and bargain. But despite being vilified by liberals, Shefferman had come from within their midst, a former mediator with the New Deal National Labor Board who worked closely with American Federation of Labor functionaries and advocated a vision of labor-management harmony. My paper seeks to answer this apparent paradox: how did Shefferman the progressive become Shefferman the union buster? In examining his work and writings, I find that Shefferman’s union-busting was always compatible with his belief in what I term “business producerism,” an ideology that saw production as society’s goal and voluntary, uncoerced labor-management peace as its key. While Shefferman critiqued managerial intransigence as a Progressive-era human relations consultant and New Deal labor mediator, the surge in labor militancy over the 1930s and 1940s—in particular, a greater willingness to challenge management’s prerogatives and halt production by striking—led Shefferman to see militant unions (primarily those affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations) as the paramount threat to his ostensibly liberal vision of labor-management cooperation and industrial peace. In exploring Shefferman’s career, this paper thus sheds a light on the crucial role of liberalism’s ideological and institutional legacy in undermining the postwar labor movement, thus laying the seeds for a surge in anti-union consultancies in the 1970s and 1980s.