Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Union Decline: Business Political Mobilization and Restrictive Labor Legislation, 1938-1958

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Despite considerable social science research pertaining to the decline of the American labor movement in the postwar era, relatively little is known about the political struggles that helped shape U.S. labor policy and the geographic and industrial patterns of unionization that have persisted over the last half century. This research considers the surge of restrictive labor legislation that spread across states between 1938 and 1958, including intensely contested Right-to-Work laws that diminished labor's financial and organizational capacity. We question how the labor movement, during a period of unparalleled growth and numerical strength, suffered such a string of political defeats. We suggest that anti-labor political activity, union response, and its unfolding across time and space are best understood within a political process framework. Consequently, analyses, which draw from state-level quantitative data over the period and in-depth archival material from particular cases, consider how important dimensions of employer and union strength, and the varying state structures these contending groups face, may influence policy enactment. Event history methods are first used in order to identify more general processes leading to restrictive labor legislation across all states. Qualitative event structure analysis (ESA) is then used to examine three specific anti-labor campaigns that are representative of the range of mobilization, and successes and defeats, during our period of interest. This comparative strategy will enable us to systematically address the complex mechanisms and causal linkages through which local actors attempt to alter policy. Coupled with the quantitative event history modeling of anti-labor activity, these analyses will (1) improve our understanding of an important and understudied period in American labor history, (2) speak to and inform sociological conceptions of the state, and (3) extend the substantial literature on new deal policy formation by considering the political unraveling and retrenchment of the labor movement=s historic legislative gains of that era. By systematically analyzing multiple policy outcomes across varying temporal and sociopolitical contexts, we also address the ability of social movement actors to influence the political process more generally. This approach, and the understanding it will generate, will be informative to existing social science perspectives on policy outcomes and social movement processes. It will also serve the purposes of informing students and a more general public about the history of, and political dynamics associated with, labor unions in the U.S.