Symposium on Tomlins, "The State and the Unions"

Labor History recently published a symposium in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of The State and the Unions, by Christopher L. Tomlins (UC Irvine). The articles are available only to subscribers, but the introduction, by Craig Phelan, is open access, as are the abstracts.

Here, for example, is the abstract for the contribution by Jean Christian Vinel (Université Paris Diderot) (whose book, The Employee, we mentioned earlier this week):

The thrust of this article is to review the evolution of the historiography of American labor law since the publication of Christopher Tomlins' widely celebrated The State and the Unions (1985). More than an isolated effort, Tomlins' critique of New Deal labor law was part of a broader analytical paradigm which should be called the ‘critical synthesis’. Dominating the field until the mid-1990s, the critical synthesis owed a part of its success to the crisis of labor history. Then, it gradually receded as labor unions continued their steep decline and historians of labor rekindled their faith in American liberalism and the Democratic Party. In analyzing the rise and fall of the critical synthesis, the article thus lays bare all the factors – scientific, social, and political – that contribute to the making and unmaking of analytical paradigms in the political history of labor. Finally, in doing so, the article places the debate on the Employee Free Choice Act in historical perspective.

Here is the abstract for Tomlins's response, titled "The State, the Unions, and the Critical Synthesis in Labor Law History: A 25-Year Retrospect":

This article responds to Jean-Christian Vinel’s assessment of the ‘critical synthesis’ whose proponents created labor law history as a new and flourishing field of scholarship in the decade after 1978. Vinel accords my book, The State and the Unions (1985) a key role in the development of this new field. Here, I situate my book in relation to the critical synthesis, and assess the capacity of critical legal scholarship to address the current parlous state of the U.S. labor movement. I look to current labor historians to engage with and build on the work that the labor law historians undertook.

Vinel's Political History of "The Employee"

Jean-Christian Vinel, who teaches American history at Université Paris-Diderot, has recently published The Employee: A Political History, with the University of Pennsylvania Press.  The book appears in the series Politics and Culture in Modern America, edited by Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas J. Sugrue.

Explains the press:

In the present age of temp work, telecommuting, and outsourcing, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the category of "employee"—a crucial distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. Tracing the history of the term since its entry into the public lexicon in the nineteenth century, Jean-Christian Vinel demonstrates that the legal definition of "employee" has always been politically contested and deeply affected by competing claims on the part of business and labor. Unique in the Western world, American labor law is premised on the notion that "no man can serve two masters"—workers owe loyalty to their employer, which in many cases is incompatible with union membership.

The Employee: A Political History historicizes this American exception to international standards of rights and liberties at work, revealing a little known part of the business struggle against the New Deal. Early on, progressives and liberals developed a labor regime that, intending to restore amicable relations between employer and employee, sought to include as many workers as possible in the latter category. But in the 1940s this language of social harmony met with increasing resistance from businessmen, who pressed their interests in Congress and the federal courts, pushing for an ever-narrower definition of "employee" that excluded groups such as foremen, supervisors, and knowledge workers. A cultural and political history of American business and law, The Employee sheds historical light on contemporary struggles for economic democracy and political power in the workplace.

TOC and blurbs from Joseph McCartin, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Craig Becker after the jump.

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New Release: Smith, "Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction""

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, by Stacey L. Smith (Oregon State University). A description from the Press: 

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.

Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

A few blurbs:

"A real winner: ambitious, thoughtful, and splendidly rendered. Smith peels back history to rework the labor landscapes of nineteenth-century California and reintroduce the state into dynamic, Reconstruction-era political and social debates."--William Deverell

"A brilliant and long overdue examination of late-nineteenth-century California's complicated race and labor history. By comparing the stories of bound Native American, African American, Chinese, Latino, and Hawaiian workers, Smith reveals the complexities of California's racial and labor histories and goes even further to demonstrate the larger implications for the California experience for understanding national stories of abolition, emancipation, Reconstruction, and immigration."--Michael Magliari

More information is available here.

Phillips Sawyer on Godcharles v. Wigeman

We've previously noticed Laura Phillips Sawyer's article on the Godcharles decision.  Until August 31, Camridge Journals is letting us read it for free: Contested Meanings of Freedom: Workingmen's Wages, the Company Store System, and the Godcharles v. Wigeman Decision, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12 (July 2013): 285-319.  Here is the abstract:

In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not prescribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent workingmen. The decision quashed over two decades of efforts to end the “truck system.” Although legislators had agreed that wage payments redeemable only in company store goods appeared antithetical to the free labor wage system, two obstacles complicated legislative action. Any law meant to enhance laborers' rights could neither favor one class over another nor infringe any workingman's ability to make voluntary contracts. These distinctions, however, were not as rigid and laissez faire-oriented as depicted by conventional history. Labor reformers argued that principles of equity must supplement these categories of class legislation and contract freedom. This essay explores how legal doctrine helped both sides of the anti-truck debate articulate the contested meanings of liberty. Ultimately, the Godcharles ruling enshrined the specialness of workingmen's labor contracts and rejected the use of equity principles to justify contract regulations, but the controversy also informed future labor strategies, especially the turn to state police powers as the rubric under which workers' safety, morals, and health could be protected.

Labor and Working-Class History Seminar at Hunter

[We have the following call for papers.]

The Labor and Working-Class History Seminar at Roosevelt House, Hunter College, City University of New York seeks proposals for seminar papers that explore the rich and diverse spectrum of labor history and lived experiences; class dynamics as informed by other social categories and identities; changes in political economy and their policies promoting economic security and other forms of social welfare; and other related topics.

The Labor and Working-Class History Seminar will be an on-going colloquium for a broad academic audience, including graduate students, faculty members, and independent scholars. . . . [A]t the meeting, an invited presenter will offer an overview of a scholarly work, pre-circulated electronically to all participants, and a commentator will provide constructive feedback. The exchange between the presenter and commentator will be followed by a discussion among all seminar attendees.

The Labor and Working-Class History seminar, while focused on history, welcomes scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including human rights studies, public policy studies, sociology, anthropology, literature, law, and environmental studies. We encourage cross-disciplinary discussion, and invite proposals from diverse subject areas and approaches.

Interested scholars who would like to present a portion of their current research on labor and/or class should submit a one page abstract and a brief cv to: Donna Haverty-Stacke and Eduardo Contreras at laborsem@hunter.cuny.edu by August 1, 2013.  Decisions will be communicated by September 1, 2013 to all those who have submitted abstracts.

We have a limited fund to support regional travel but are unable to provide funding for long-distance travel or lodging. If you would like to be placed on the email list to receive announcements of upcoming presentations, please write to: laborsem@hunter.cuny.edu.

Trestman to Lecture on Bessie Margolin

Marlene Trestman, the author of the forthcoming book, Fair Labor: The Remarkable Life and Legal Career of Bessie Margolin, will deliver the Donald S. Shire Lecture at the U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, on Friday, June 28th, 2013.  The lecture, which is open to the public, will take place at 1:00 p.m. in the Department’s César Chávez Memorial Auditorium, which may be accessed via 3rd and C Streets, NW, entrance.  Please RSVP to Patricia Morgan at 202-693-5772 or Morgan.Patricia@dol.gov.

L&HR 31:2 (May 2013)

Law and History Review’s 31:2 issue (May 2013) is up on the Cambridge Journals website.  Here are the articles

Protective Labor Legislation in the Courts: Substantive Due Process and Fairness in the Progressive Era, by Claudio J. Katz

Constitutional Principle, Partisan Calculation, and the Beveridge Child Labor Bill, by Logan Everett Sawyer

“Equals of the White Man”: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence Against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia, by Amanda Nettelbeck

Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust, by David Fraser and Frank Caestecker

“Our Militancy is in Our Openness”: Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law, by Katherine Turk

Book reviews after the jump.
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Unemployment By Industry

In one of the New York Time’s Economix blog posts, Motoko Rich discusses changes in the unemployment rate by industry from February 2011 to February 2012, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  While unemployment remained relatively unchanged at 8.3 percent in February “mainly because more people started – or resumed – looking for work,” the data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows quite a bit of variability in unemployment between industries.  For example, as the table from the Bureau of Labor Statistics above shows, construction experienced a 4.7% decrease (from 21.8 % to 17.1%). Agriculture; information; and mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction all saw increases in unemployment of 1.1%, 1.7% and 1.6% respectively.  In addition to changes in unemployment rate, the rates themselves also vary widely; agricultural workers experienced an unemployment rate of 19.5% while government workers experienced only 3.9% unemployment.

Lies and Employment Statistics

Catherine Rampell at the New York Times Economix blog examines the rate of job growth necessary to recover the jobs lost during the recession in the United States. The short answer she provides is that there is no short answer. There are almost seven million fewer employed people than there were when the recession began in 2007. At the rate of job growth enjoyed last month (244,000 new jobs in the month) it would take 29 months to return to the level of employment of before the recession. But the population (and more importantly the working age population) is growing, so there ought to be more jobs than there were before the recession. We might examine the unemployment rate for a better picture of the nation's economic health, but that is misleading too. The unemployment rate is found by dividing the number of employed persons by that number plus the number of people actively looking for work. A recovery in employment can actually increase unemployment as previously discouraged workers are driven to return to the job search. Indeed that very situation occurred in April.

Perhaps then, it would be better to look at the unemployment rate in conjunction with the labor force participation rate: the percentage of the population over 16 working or actively looking for work. Essentially it is the proportion of the population accounted for by the denominator of the unemployment rate. That number is at 64.4%, lower than it has been for the last twenty-five years but much higher than it was in the 1970s. But back when the labor force participation rate was traditionally this low, many women didn't work outside the home. They weren't discouraged workers who had given up; they never intended to work. So to adjust for that we can look at the male-only labor force participation rate. When we do that we find that an unprecedentedly small number of men over 16 are participating in the labor force. The increasingly equal position of women appears to have masked fundamental problems in the labor market. However, for the same reasons that other projections might have been too optimistic, this measure of the labor market is unnecessarily pessimistic. Now the denominator is too large rather than too small. There is a reason that many prefer the unemployment rate to the labor force participation rate; many of those not actively looking for work are discouraged people who would like to work, but a large and growing number are not. The ratio of workers to retirees is falling as the population ages, meaning the labor force participation rate would fall even in conditions of full employment. It's also possible that as more people on the opposite end of that age spectrum opt for college and graduate school, they drive down the labor force participation rate as well. In search of an answer to how far the US economy is from full employment, we can only say that no statistic tells the whole story.

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