Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement

William E. Forbath, William E. FORBATH

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780674517820, 9780674517813
• eBook ISBN: 9780674037083
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American "individualism." In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe's labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor's outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Broad Contexts
• 2. Judicial Review in Labor's Political Culture
• 3. Government by Injunction
• 4. Semi-Outlawry
• 5. The Language of the Law and the Remaking of Labor's Rights Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Labor Legislation in the Courts, 1885–1930
• Appendix B: Approximating the Numbers of Labor Injunctions and Their Relation to Other Strike Statistics, 1880–1930
• Appendix C: Judicial Treatment of Statutes Seeking to Protect Union Organizing and Action by Revising Equity and Common Law Doctrine
• Index