1. Cowie, Jefferson, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010), 292.Google Scholar

2. Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York, 2009)Google Scholar. For her treatment of the rise of business activism in the 1970s, see 185–212.

3. Moody, Kim, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London, 1988), 130–34Google Scholar. Moody summarizes the BR’s efforts as follows: “Unlike previous policy groups, it mobilized its business constituents to carry through its more important lobbying efforts. The high point of this strategy came in 1978 when the Roundtable flew small businessmen from around the country to Washington in corporate jets to lobby Congress in the successful fight against labor law reform.” See p. 134.

4. See Lee, Sophia, The Workplace Constitution: From the New Deal to the New Right (New York, 2014), chaps. 3, 6, and 12Google Scholar. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer shows that Sunbelt conservatives like Barry Goldwater used the issue of right-to-work to attack and weaken unions in Southwestern states like Nevada and Arizona. Further, beyond the advent of right-to-work laws, such arguments had even broader purchase. As she puts it: “Not every proposition or bill passed [in southwestern states in the 1950s and 60s], yet this argument won over many voters, including those from the middle and working classes worried over labor’s rapid growth and newfound power.” See “‘Is Freedom of the Individual Un-American?’: Right-to-Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1944–1958,” in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Philadelphia, 2012), 114–36 (115). Reuel Schiller has also shown that an effort from the right to use a ballot proposition to illegalize union security clauses in California in 1958 specifically attempted (unsuccessfully) to court black voters by appealing to civil rights. “Singing the ‘Right to Work Blues’: The Politics of Race in the Campaign for ‘Voluntary Unionism’ in Postwar California,” in The Right and Labor, ed. Lichtenstein and Shermer, 139–59.

5. It has been assumed that Carter’s support for labor reform was limited, but a recent interview of Carter’s Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall by Joseph McCartin and Joseph Hower casts some doubt on this assumption. Said Marshall: “President Carter was completely in favor of doing it and did whatever he could. My reading on it is he did not have the kind of influence with his fellow southern politicians and with the Senate people. . . . I thought we had sixty [votes to invoke cloture].” See Hower and McCartin, “Marshall’s Principle: A Former Labor Secretary Looks Back (and Ahead),” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11 (Winter 2014): 91–107 (101).

6. Before labor law reform, the AFL-CIO warmed up by attempting to get Congress to pass common situs legislation. The common situs bill—similar to one that had fallen victim to President Gerald Ford’s veto pen—represented an effort of interest primarily to construction unions that found Taft-Hartley’s restriction on secondary boycotts problematic. Since many construction sites featured a variety of subcontractors, the building trades unions wanted to be able to picket an entire construction site if, say, electrical workers were striking against a subcontractor.

Shockingly, however, the bill was defeated in the House in March 1977 by twelve votes after corporate interest groups, led primarily by the Business Roundtable, lobbied hard against it. Groups like the BR had begun mobilizing—initially to combat what they viewed as the inflationary practices of labor organization, especially in construction (the BR’s precursor had been the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable)—early in the 1970s. It was not until mid-decade, however, that its efforts began to seriously pay off. In the words of political scientists Sar Levitan and Martha Cooper, the defeat of the common situs bill was “almost as much of a surprise to the victors as it was to labor.” Labor chalked up the failure to poor strategy and a peculiar public animus toward construction unions. See Levitan and Cooper, Business Lobbies: The Public Good and the Bottom Line (Baltimore, 1983), 122.

7. Ibid., 123–26; The notorious textile manufacturer J.P. Stevens represented the most egregious example of these tactics, delaying elections and then contracts for years. The best account of J.P. Stevens is Timothy Minchin’s Don’t Sleep with Stevens: The J.P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South (Gainesville, 2005).

8. Martin Halpern has argued that Carter expended virtually no effort on the bill, making no public address on the subject and only offering lukewarm support when specifically questioned by reporters. Further, in spite of expending massive effort to secure ratification of the Panama Canal treaty, Carter spent more time bowling on the most integral date of the vote than he did attempting to persuade the last few senators needed for cloture. See Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Conn., 2003), 123–26.

9. Indeed, Marshall believed that the major reason for the bill’s failure stemmed from Carter’s inability to sway fellow southern Democrats. He believed Alabama’s John Sparkman, in particular, would vote for cloture. See Hower and McCartin, “Marshall’s Principle,” 101.

10. As Lee shows, filmmaker Cecil DeMille, for instance, fought representation fees for the American Federation of Radio Artists, in both the courts and in the court of public opinion, prominently comparing union security clauses to the plight of Dred Scott, and comparing the right to work to the black civil rights movement. The Workplace Constitution, 56–78, 115–32.

11. Shermer, “Is Freedom of the Individual ‘Un-American?,’” 119.

12. On Pegler, see Witwer, David, Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (Urbana, 2009)Google Scholar. Joseph McCartin and Jean-Christian Vinel, “‘Compulsory Unionism’: Sylvester Petro and the Career of an Anti-Union Idea, 1957–1987,” in The Right and Labor in America, ed. Lichtenstein and Shermer, 226–51. On Petro’s earlier work, see his pro-Kohler history of the decade-long United Auto Workers Local 833 strike of the plumbing fixtures company in 1961, as well as an examination of what he believed was the deep corruption that had been made evident during the McClellan hearings in the late 1950s. The Kohler Strike: Union Violence and Administrative Law (Chicago, 1961) and Power Unlimited: The Corruption of Union Leadership (New York, 1959).

13. Jerry Flint, “Reed Larson Versus the Union Shop,” New York Times, 4 December 1977; “Stoking up a Drive for Right-to-Work,” Business Week, 14 March 1970.

14. For an excellent concise treatment of this strategy, see Sophia Lee, “Whose Rights? Litigating the Right to Work, 1940–1980,” in The Right and Labor, ed. Lichtenstein and Shermer, 160–80.

15. Though the NRTWC and the Legal Defense Foundation were separate entities, both because of the interconnection of their goals and for simplicity’s sake, I will simply refer to all activity—legal and political—as the effort of the NRTWC.

16. The high water point of union density in the private sector was in 1953. In that year, 15.5 million working Americans in the private sector belonged to unions, a number representing around 36 percent of those who worked for private employers. By 1962, however, that percentage declined to 32 percent, by 1973 to 27 percent, and by 1983 to half of its 1953 mark. The aggregate number of Americans in private-sector unions also declined to just over 13 million from 1953 to 1983. Public-sector growth in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s helped to obscure this trend as it kept total unionization rates robust. From 1953 to 1983, the number of public-sector workers in unions increased sevenfold from 770,000 to 5.4 million, and union density in the public sector increased from 12 percent to 40 percent by 1974. See Leo Troy, “The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unions: The Labor Movement from FDR to RR,” in Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (San Francisco, 1986), 80–84.

17. For an account of the controversy of teacher strikes, see Shelton, Jon, “Letters to the Essex County Penitentiary: David Selden and the Fracturing of America,” Journal of Social History 48 (Fall 2014): 135–55;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Golin, Steve, The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002)Google Scholar; and Podair, Jerald, The Strike That Changed New York Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, 2004).Google Scholar

18. On inflation, see U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Databases, Tables, & Calculators By Subject, “Consumer Price Index—All Urban Consumers, 1958–2015” http://www.bls.gov/data/ (accessed 8 November 2015).

19. Letter from Ernest Smith, 20 March 1970, Ernest C. Smith Papers, Walter Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Box 2. Sophia Lee argues that “there was no question” that the Legal Defense Foundation “called the shots.” See The Workplace Constitution, 231.

20. Letter from Christine Warczak, 22 August 1969; undated DTOCU newsletter, Smith papers WRA, Box 2.

21. Letter from [name illegible in document], 20 December 1969; letter from Steve Dobkowski Jr., 21 January 1970; unsigned, undated response card, in ibid.

22. “Teachers Mount Legal Challenge to Compulsory Agency Shop Contract,” Free Choice, November–December 1969; “Over 300 Detroit Teachers Join in Legal Battle against Compulsory Agency Shop,” Free Choice, January–February 1970, ESP, Box 3.

23. Right to Work Profiles (NWTRC, 1973), in ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Schiller, “Singing ‘The Right-to-Work Blues,’” 149–56.

26. See Mirel, Jeffrey, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, Detroit, 1907–1981, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 1999), 293–370Google Scholar. On this conflict in Chicago, see Lyons, John, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–1970 (Urbana, 2008)Google Scholar; in New York City, see Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, and Perrillo, Jonna, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago, 2012).Google Scholar

27. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, “A Tale of Two Teachers,” Readers’ Digest, November 1975, 29–35.

28. Letter from Albert Shanker to Kenneth O. Gilmore, 11 November 1975, “Office of the President’s Records,” AFT Collection, WRA, Box 16.

29. Letter from Gilmore to Shanker, 10 December 1975, in ibid.

30. Vermont Royster, “The Undoing of Great Britain,” RD, January 1976; Paul Friggins, “Teachers on the March,” February 1976.

31. Damon Stetson, “Labor Urges Public Sector Job Help,” New York Times, 8 October 1974. For more on the proposed expansion of the Wagner Act, see McCartin, Joseph, “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Dream Deferred, Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (2008): 123–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The quotation attributed to the NRTWC can be found in the McCartin article, p. 134.

32. McCartin, “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees,’” 123–48.

33. Keller, Thomas, McManus, and Keller, “Brief in Support of Claim of Appeal,” Warczak, v. Detroit Board of Education (1975).

34. State of Michigan Court of Appeals decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and Warczak v. Detroit Board of Education (1975).

35. John L. Kilcullen, “Jurisdictional Statement,” Abood v. Board and Warczak v. Board, February 1976.

36. McCartin and Vinel, “‘Compulsory Unionism,’” 248–49. The free-speech argument would be resurrected by the National Right to Work Committee in the 2013 decision of Harris v. Quinn.

37. Majority Opinion, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977).

38. Though imperfect, public opinion polls powerfully evidence this trend. According to a Gallup poll, in 1965, 71 percent of respondents approved of labor unions, while only 19 percent opposed them. By 1973, these numbers had shifted drastically, to 59 percent and 26 percent, respectively. By May 1979, support had fallen further to 55 percent, and by August 1981, 35 percent of Americans—without being asked about any union specifically—disapproved of labor unions. See Seymour Martin Lipset, “Labor Unions in the Public Mind,” in Unions in Transition, ed. Lipset, 301. The poll was developed by asking a random sample to respond to the question, “In general, do you approve or disapprove of labor unions?”

39. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Human Resources of the United States Senate Part I (Washington, D.C., 1978), 30–31.

40. Senate Hearings, Part I, 144–45; 162–267.

41. Senate Hearings, Part II, 1827–1841. Winpisinger provided examples—of auto mechanics in West Virginia who attended meetings in wigs and false mustaches to avoid being identified by a union “spy,” and an employer in Long Island who followed the Stevens tactic of refusing to bargain after a representation election, finally forcing the IAM to withdraw its backing because of the expense.

42. Senate Hearings, Part I, 100–101, 110–12.

43. In Phillips-Fein’s estimation, Lesher was the “man most responsible for remaking the Chamber” into an effective political force in the 1970s. See Invisible Hands, 200.

44. Senate Hearings, Part I, 729–30, 947, 991.

45. Ibid., 433–47; original Hayek quote is in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960).

46. Mark Green and Andrew Buchsbaum, The Corporate Lobbies: Political Profiles of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce (Washington, D.C., 1980), 118–19; Helen Dewar Jackson, “Grassroots Lobbying in Full Flower,” Washington Post, 28 May 1978.

47. Green and Buchsbaum, The Corporate Lobbies, 123.

48. “Labor Reform Bill a Presidential Payoff,” Harrisburg Patriot, 19 February 1978; and “‘Labor Reform’ Is a Fraud,” Valley News Dispatch, 1 February 1978.

49. Patrick Buchanan, “Labor Sends Its Bill to the Hill,” New York Daily News, 28 February 1978; “Do Labor Unions Need More Muscle?” Tucson Citizen, 3 February 1978; A Meriden, Connecticut, newspaper, The Morning Record and Journal, called the bill a “tilt toward the big unions.” Labor law reform would not bring “a necessary protection for workers, or a step toward a fairer balance between unionism and management.” It represented instead “an attempt to give a break not to workers but to union organizers.” See “Tilt for Big Unions,” 6 February 1978.

50. “Labor’s Decline,” News Journal, 14 February 1978; A similar editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia) also argued that “labor bosses suffer from a terrible—and self-inflicted—public image.” Specifically, the editorial offered up as evidence the Teamsters’ embezzlement of pension funds and “unionized firefighters [who] stood by as buildings burned in Ohio this year.” See “Labor’s Christmas,” 23 December 1977.

51. “Labor Law Revision,” Pittsburgh Press, 4 January 1978; “The Right to Work Is in Trouble,” Utica Observer-Dispatch, 2 February 1978; “Labor Law Proposals Ignore Human Rights,” Palm Beach Times, 21 September 1977. A small-town Ohio newspaper asserted that the “real issue here is freedom of choice—namely, the rights of employees to make up their own minds in a free, unhurried manner. Congress . . . should be worried about protecting the American workers from further coercion—whether it comes from big labor, big business, or, for that matter, big government.” See “‘Labor Reform’: More Coercion,” Lima News, 7 January 1978.

52. William F. Buckley, “Lagging Labor Looks to Congress for Help,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 15 February 1978; “An End to Bargaining?” Arkansas Democrat, 8 February 1978. Halpern shows how conservative Arkansas politics prevented Dale Bumpers, a populist who may very well have voted for cloture under different circumstances, from providing the fifty-ninth vote (and Halpern believes Louisiana’s Russell Long would have been the sixtieth if Bumpers had voted for cloture). See Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents, 148–76. Halpern also cites an interview with Bumpers from 1998 in which he asserted that “I knew that voting for the Panama Canal treaties and labor law reform back-to-back would have been political suicide.” Quotation on p. 157.

53. Kevin Phillips, “Labor and Reform,” San Francisco Examiner, 10 February 1978.

54. “Labor Law Showdown,” Phoenix Gazette, 18 January 1978; “Hollings Should Lead Fight to Kill Labor Bill,” The State, 22 January 1978.

55. On the strikes in late 1977 and early 1978, see Sheila Cohen, Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back (Ann Arbor, 2006), chap. 2.

56. Johnny Morrow, “From Where I Sit,” The Mooresville Tribune, 2 February 1978. Also, syndicated anti-labor columnist Victor Riesel characterized the bill as “American labor’s most massive offensive to break all corporate opposition to unions. And to create American business in the image and posture of industry in Labor-controlled Britain. . . . If they can’t push the law across . . . those British correspondents who have been filing American labor’s obituaries will be clairvoyant. And if labor succeeds all of the U.S. will be one big union town.” See “Showdown Nearing on New Labor Law,” Muncie Star, 7 February 1978.

57. “Wrong Kind of Reform,” Bucks County Courier-Times, 27 January 1978; “Business Claims Unexpected Support,” Reading Eagle; “‘Labor Law Reform,’” Shreveport Times, 29 January 1978; “Do Labor Unions . . .” Tucson Citizen, 3 February 1978; “Let Your Voice Be Heard,” Polk County Democrat, 2 February 1978. In addition to Heinz, Schweiker and DeConcini would vote for cloture, while Long and the two Florida Republicans voted against it.

58. For example, a Media, Pennsylvania, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) local representative reminded Senator Heinz that “as you know this bill only rights wrongs that have prevailed for years, it makes no major changes.” Letter from Hugh Snow Sr. to Heinz, Senator John Heinz III Collection, Carnegie Mellon University, Legislative Assistants’ Files, Box 319. Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) Secretary-Treasurer Jacob Scheinkman wrote Heinz that “the machinery of the current Act has proved inadequate to check the chronic subversion of worker’s . . . rights by an unconscionably large number of the nation’s employers. . . . While [the labor reform bill] would not change the basic do’s and don’ts of the Act, it would make meaningful the rule of law.” Letter to Senator John Heinz, 13 April 1978, JHC, LAF, Box 319.

59. Letter from M. E. Treubenbach to Senator Heinz, 232 January 1978; Letter from Samuel Slokam V to Heinz, in ibid.

60. George Meany, “An Open Letter to American Business Leaders,” Wall Street Journal, 4 May 1978.