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In light of the current crisis afflicting the labor movement, historian Joseph McCartin revisits the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) eight decades after its passage and the Supreme Court ruling that upheld its constitutionality. That act constituted a “momentous shift in the nation’s jurisprudence,” but making it a living reality required American workers’ efforts on the ground. In this Up for Debate roundtable, McCartin poses critical questions: How should we evaluate the legacy of the Wagner Act? What did it mean in its time? How did it shape the course of US labor history? What significance does it hold for us in our present context? McCartin and three respondents—Craig Becker, Dorothy Sue Cobble, and Katherine Stone—address these questions and debate their responses, offering both historiographical assessments and historically informed suggestions about the labor movement’s path forward.

This article features an extended interview with Ray Marshall, professor emeritus and Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and former secretary of labor to President Jimmy Carter (1977–81). An influential figure in the field of labor economics and the economics of discrimination, Marshall joined the Carter administration at a pivotal moment in postwar American history. In this interview, he reflects on his time as secretary of labor, his broader career in academia and politics, and the state and future of working America, addressing topics that include contemporary politics, economic and fiscal policy, labor law, education and immigration reform, and the role of organized labor in American society.

On 1 December 2011, Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, hosted a forum on ...

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, by Judith Stein, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-300-11818-6 Judith Stein, Professor of Hist...

First, I would like to offer my thanks to Lance Compa, Richard McIntyre, and Gay Seidman for their thoughtful responses to my essay. One could not find three more accomplished scholars with whom to engage in this discussion. Each in their own way has sharpened our thinking about the relationship of labor rights to human rights—Compa through a lifetime of inspiring organizing and writing, Seidman through her eloquent defense of human rights-based labor activism, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism, and McIntyre through his sharp interrogation of this activism in Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Not only do they bring well-honed critiques to bear in discussing my argument, they are generous and fair-minded. I'm grateful to them for prodding me to clarify my thinking.

In the August 8, 2008, edition of the Wall Street Journal, an editorial denounced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), organized labor's most recent effort to reform US labor law, as a measure that would lead to worker intimidation and the end of free and fair workplace representation elections. That the nation's leading business journal carried an editorial outlining the familiar EFCA opponent's trope of worker intimidation by unions was not surprising. That the author's identity was former South Dakota senator George McGovern—that aging icon of American liberalism and a self-described “longtime friend of labor unions”—foreshadowed the uphill battle and ultimate defeat labor and its allies would face in enacting the measure.

The explosive rise of public sector unions in the United States in the 1960s and the early 1970s resembled in many ways the breakthrough of industrial unionism in the 1930s. The unionization of teachers, police officers, fire fighters, secretaries, sanitation work ers, and other government employees was every bit as sudden and unexpected as the depression-era industrial union upsurge had been. Membership in public sector unions grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping four million by the early 1970s. Moreover, newly organized government workers behaved just as militantly as did auto and steel workers a generation earlier. In 1958 there were a mere 15 public sector strikes recorded in the United States; in 1975 the number hit 478.l It is little wonder then that so many observers compared public sector unionism to the rise decades before of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio). Describing a scene reminiscent of a famous history of the 1930s by Irving Bernstein, the journalist Irwin Ross suggested in 1968 that the upsurge in government workers' activism had created a "turbulent state" by the late 1960s. Ralph J. Flynn, a lobbyist for the fastest growing public sector union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (afscme), also used a depression-era bench mark. Surveying afscme's prospects in 1974 he concluded that "today is 1934 in the public sector." And, when a Pennsylvania state official tried to understand the unioniza tion of state workers, he also drew on history: "We went through this in the '30s in the private sector," he explained. "Now we are going through it in the public."2

One cannot begin to grasp David J. O'Brien's rich legacy or his enormous importance as an American Catholic historian without considering this trinity of simple, yet in many ways quite loaded descriptors: "American," "Catholic," and "historian." These three words define O'Brien in a deep and profoundly intercon nected way. During more than forty years of prolific scholarship, activism, and inspir ing teaching, O'Brien's career has been characterized by his steadfast fidelity to this trinity of commitments: fealty to his national community, his Catholic faith, and his craft. To have maintained these commitments over the last forty years was no doubt at times a challenge, for developments within the Church, America, and the historical pro fession alike complicated the relationship among O'Brien's trinity. In the end, no single one of his many prodigiously researched, thought-provoking books is likely to prove as important in defining his legacy as his example of fidelity. Not only did O'Brien keep faith with his commitments when developments compli cated that effort, he did so with grace, humility, and good humor, ever attentive to the changes taking place around (and within) him, ever open to the voices of those who did not share his views. In short, he modeled a union of faith and intellect that was matched by few scholars of his time?in any field. To appreciate O'Brien's fidelity, consider both the changes that he witnessed over the course of his career and his reaction to those changes. When he graduated from Notre Dame in 1960, he and his generation believed they stood at "the center of American Catholicism." In those days, he later recalled, "you could be and I could be, as enthusiastically as one can be, Catholic and American." In the Cold War era, "it seemed that at last Catholicism and Americanism had become one and the same."1

This article considers the reasons why labor historians have continued to neglect the history of workers and unions in the US public sector. It argues that the most compelling explanation for historians’ failure to examine the history of public sector unions is that conducting such an examination would challenge a number of deeply rooted preconceptions regarding the history of American labor since World War II. The article goes on to suggest what we might learn if US labor historians began to probe the experience of public sector workers more fully.

(1992). Using “The gun act”: Federal regulation and the politics of the strike threat during World War I. Labor History: Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 519-528.

The colonies established on the North American mainland and the Caribbean islands by rival European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an age of mercantilism, aimed at enriching the colonial powers. The Spanish, who led the way, wrested silver, gold, and other precious materials from their Western Hemisphere possessions. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British who followed sought similar riches but failed to find the precious metals dug from the earth by indigenous and imported slave labor under Spanish domination. Instead, the Dutch, French, and British relied on other avenues of trade and exploitation to amass wealth. All three imperial nations, the Dutch and the British most especially and the French less so, turned to private entrepreneurs in the form of joint-stock companies to nourish the streams of trans-Atlantic commerce that would fill the coffers of the home country with bullion, the residue of a positive balance of trade.

Howell John Harris’s magisterial history of labor relations in the Philadelphia metal trades has provoked surprisingly little discussion thus far in the United States. Three years after its publication, the book had garnered only a smattering of reviews by labor historians. Indeed, the U.S. journal of record, Labor History, had yet to review the book. Nor had this long-awaited volume by a well-known and passionate participant in U.S. labor historians’ debates drawn the attention of scholarly ...