------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------

Published by EH.NET (November 2008)

Lawrence Richards, _Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture_.
  Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. x + 245 pp. $40
(cloth), ISBN: 978-0-252-03271-4.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.


What accounts for the weakness of the American Labor Movement, the small
proportion of workers who belong to unions in the United States?  For
over a century, the question of “American Exceptionalism” has been
central to the field of labor history, indeed to the whole of the social
sciences and the project of understanding popular unrest in capitalist
societies.  And it is of much more than academic interest; the weakness
of the American Labor Movement is associated with the weakness of the
American welfare state and with the unequal distribution of income in
the United States.

In the past, the debate over American Exceptionalism pitted radicals who
attribute Labor’s weakness to bad union strategy or to repression,
against others who associate exceptionalism with popular individualism
and the strength of liberal values in what Seymour Martin Lipset dubbed
“The First New Nation.”  This has been a sterile debate between opposing
views supported by evidence that while often incontrovertible has been
irrelevant to the other interpretation.  Lawrence Richards, of Miami
University of Ohio, now brings something new.  Approaching
exceptionalism from the left, he focuses on the attitudes of the workers
concerned.  He associates exceptionalism with popular resistance to
unions; but he does so by citing a paternalist ethos rather than liberal
individualism.

Richards divides his study into two parts. The first, the weaker half,
attempts a global evaluation of what he calls “America’s Antiunion
Culture.”  In 82 pages he uses newspaper accounts, cartoons, and the
views of selected commentators to review the place of unions in American
culture.  He then states a fairly conventional conclusion that unions
were unpopular because they threatened individual rights.  Preaching an
ideology of “collective advancement,” they violated “[t]he ideal of
individualism, of getting ahead on one’s own” (p. 83).  Frankly, this
argument is as unpersuasive as it is unoriginal.  How, I wondered,
should one evaluate the place of unions in a culture that produces both
_On the Waterfront_ and _Salt of the Earth_ in the same year that Joseph
McCarthy was censured by the Senate?  (Both movies are now in DVD
special editions.)

Fortunately, the second part of _Union-Free America_ is much stronger.
Richards reviews three case studies, including two union drives and the
conflict between a trade union (the American Federation of Teachers) and
a professional association (the National Education Association).
Richards provides a detailed and specific analysis of the troubles
unions have had in organizing workers who often did not want to be
organized.  And, getting down to details, Richards drops talk of liberal
individualism; instead, he shows that popular anti-unionism came from an
attempt to forge alternative collective identities.

Richards reviews union drives at Frank Ix and Sons textile mill (in
Charlottesville, Virginia) and at New York University (in New York
City).  Both drives failed but not, Richards reports, because of
repression, nor because workers saw themselves as individuals whose free
expression was threatened by a paternalist union.  On the contrary, the
title of Richards’ chapter on the textile drive expresses the book’s
central finding:  “Union Outsiders Versus the Ix Family.”  In Virginia
and in New York, workers were less concerned with protecting their
individuality than defending their identity as members of a productive
community, a group identity threatened by the unions’ insistence that
workers and their employers were adversaries.  Workers, Richards found,
were neither proto-Marxists nor proto-Smithians.  They “wanted a work
environment that was friendly and cooperative. ... They harbored a
Mayoist vision of the workplace.”  Workers, Richards finds, wanted to
believe in “a mutuality of interests between themselves and their
employers ... a friendly, cooperative work environment” (p. 91).
Unions, Richards notes, are built on distrust of employers; but the
workers trusted the Ix family and NYU management.  Or, perhaps, they
wanted to trust them, they wanted to believe they were part of a working
family.

Workers seek meaning from work that is more than a means to a wage but
has significance because it joins them to a group with a common social
purpose.  Harnessed by employers, this becomes a powerful weapon against
unions, the real cultural source of “union-free America.”  Seen from
this perspective, the most important element in the photograph of
anti-union activists on the cover of Union-Free America is not the
American flag, but the Nissan shirts these workers are all wearing.
These are not isolated individuals; they belong to a community, albeit
one that spans the class divide and inhibits unionization.

Once he drops Lipset and explores the Frank Ix family, Richards develops
a story that challenges the received wisdom of both union advocates and
opponents.  For those who support unions he rejects the widely-held idea
that membership will explode once labor law is reformed, On the
contrary, his analysis suggests that union weakness goes much deeper.
American unions are weak because they present instrumental arguments to
workers who want something bigger, something spiritual: a sense of
belonging to a productive community.

Nor should union opponents rest too comfortably on Richards’ work.
Pragmatically, semi-paternalist employers who defeat unions by building
productive communities put hostages to fortune.  Their promises to
protect their work-families, to maintain wages and working conditions,
cannot be maintained in a market economy.  These paternalists may be
only one serious economic downturn away from a successful union drive
built on a sense of betrayal fostered by the employers’ failure to care
for their families.

But the importance of moral economy and productive communities goes
beyond these pragmatic considerations.  As a society, we want to foster
a sense of belonging; but as a democracy, we want to foster
participation, honest and open public discourse, and a wide diffusion of
power.  The workplace communities described by Richards are not
democratic, do not foster meaningful participation, and are not built on
honest discourse or the spread of power.  At Frank Ix, management rules
a workplace run as an autocracy.  The workers may get t-shirts; their
managers and share-holders get wealth and power. These workplaces are
the very antithesis of the type of small-group self-government that
Alexis de Tocqueville and others saw as the basis of lasting democracy
in America. Should a decent democracy allow them to stand?  Or should it
impose institutions for popular empowerment even in the face of worker
disinterest?

Lawrence Richards has written a challenging and important book that
should be read by all interested in the American labor movement.  More,
it should be read by all interested in the evolution of America as a
culture and a democratic society, by all of us.


Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Gerald
Friedman was born in New York City to parents who believed that anyone
who said they lived elsewhere was really “only kidding.”  In addition to
his books, _State-Making and Labor Movements. The United States and
France, 1876-1914_ (1998) and _Reigniting the Labor Movement_ (2008), he
has written numerous articles on topics in the labor history of the
United States and Europe, the evolution of economic thought, and the
history of slavery in the Americas. He is currently writing an
intellectual biography of Richard Ely.

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