The Bosses Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor before the New Deal

This is an extraordinarily well-researched and informative history of how US employers' associations sought to impede unions before the New Deal era. Significantly, it is also a history of the "closed shop," the main target of early twentieth-century union-fighting employers, which sets it apart from previous work on organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the National Civic Federation (NCF) during this era.I have always found it odd that NAM aimed its most calculated fire not at the Wobblies or various socialist or anarchist groups but, rather, at the most "conservative" union of the day, the AFL, whose leader forthrightly endorsed the capitalist system and its mythology of individual liberty and progress. NAM was laser-focused on destroying AFL head Samuel Gompers because Gompers sought to secure power for unions via the "closed shop," a gatekeeping policy/strategy that required all workers in a workplace to be union members and abide by union rules. As Hulden shows and insists, the closed shop was the only way labor could hope to have any role in governing and controlling the workplace. Therefore, it was a real threat to employers' power and, according to Hulden, a truly radical policy that is as necessary today as it was in the early twentieth century.Hulden acknowledges that the closed shop affirmed union hierarchies, overrode individual workers' choices (liberty), disciplined rulebreakers, and discriminated against racial minorities and women—all charges that NAM and employers raised in their public relations campaigns against it. But she also helps us understand and balance these shortcomings, excavating the closed shop's long history and evolution, its possibilities and reasoning, its surprising allies and enemies. We learn that abolitionists (like employers) were suspicious of craft traditions rooted in community and coercion rather than individual liberty and impersonal markets. Like NAM, nineteenth-century abolitionists and progressives equated "free labor" with "freedom of contract," which craft traditions and the closed shop seemed to resist. Hulden counters that construction by comparing craft unions' attempts to create and enforce rules about credentialing and training to modern professional associations (for doctors and historians, for instance), which likewise sought to gatekeep who got into their "unions." This is a highly textured and detailed history, which provides excellent context for understanding employers' strategies to uphold the "open shop."The book focuses on the two largest and most famous employers' organizations, the NCF and NAM. There is an extensive historiography on these organizations from both labor and business perspectives, and Hulden usefully draws from them. But what sets her work apart is her nuanced, objective consideration of every issue and policy in terms of the history, costs, and benefits for each group. Allergic to overgeneralization, she rigorously identifies exceptions to her broader claims.She also revisits old questions with surprising new insight. In just one example, historians have long argued about why some industrialists gravitated toward the NCF, with its seemingly enlightened acceptance of unions and even the closed shop, while others went to the combative and vitriolic NAM. A common assessment is that the largest, most rationalized, publicly owned enterprises went with the NCF for public relations reasons, while smaller, privately owned proprietorships went with NAM. Hulden affirms that business leaders in the NCF were in highly rationalized mass production industries. But then she suggests that employers in these industries were more open to unions and the closed shop because agreements with those unions made labor markets more uniform and predictable for them. Unions in those industries were strong and could guarantee worker compliance via the closed shop, whereas NAM members were overrepresented in the metal industries, which were not yet rationalized mass producers but, rather, "batch producers" (100). There was little deskilling and a myriad of unions, none of them large or strong enough to deliver compliant workers. Thus, the closed shop offered no benefits for employers in these industries. Hulden provides a useful chart to map this contention with data taken from NAM membership rosters.In addition to this original analysis and insight, Hulden deploys digital technology to map out the data in her sources. St. Louis, for instance, was home to a thriving "open shop" movement with many NAM member employers. Using data from various St. Louis social and business registers, Hulden digitally maps the social networks of NAM members, identifying overlapping memberships in social clubs, business organizations, and neighborhoods and providing evidence of the collective unity of employers. While it is hardly news that employers occupied the same social networks and class, this digital methodology is promising for mapping other connections and networks that are not so obvious. Hulden provides similarly thick analyses of how these associations navigated the courts, public relations, and Congress, taking the reader to the triumph of welfare capitalism and the "open shop" in the 1920s.There is plenty that one may quibble with in this book, which is only to be expected in any thoughtful, ambitious work. But one leaves thoroughly impressed by its high level of historical research and argumentation.