The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, edited by Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, is self-admittedly non-encyclopedic in that, “A comprehensive explanation of the hundreds of thousands of strikes in US history would be impossible” (p. xxxiv). The editors’ goal, rather, is to provide their readers with the “tools” requisite to analyze not only the strikes included in its pages, but those outside them. For those interested in the American labor movement, both professionals and hobbyists alike, a “multi-faceted tool” such as the Encyclopedia provides great analytical utility. Caveat emptor, however – “some assembly required”.
The Encyclopedia includes sixty-five essays individually authored by a diverse array of historians, social scientists, philosophers, and past or current activists. The essays focus upon either a particular theme or industry and are arranged in five sections: (1) “Strikes: Theory and Practice”; (2) “Strikes and Working Class Culture”; (3) “Strike Waves”; (4) “Public Sector Strikes”; and (5) “Private Sector Strikes”, which is further subdivided into “Manufacturing, Mining, and Agriculture Strikes”, “Infrastructure Industry Strikes”, and “Service Industry Strikes”. The thematic essays – designed to “answer questions that can only be answered by looking at a variety of strikes across industries, groups of workers, and time” (p. xxxiv) – are concentrated within the first three sections. The industry-specific essays – designed to analyze strike activities within the specific social, political, and economic contexts within which they occurred – comprise the final two-thirds of the text. Space constraints prohibit a review of each individual chapter. Suffice it to say that the text reads well. Only rarely do any of the pieces degenerate into monotonous litanies of strike records. In fact, enough contextual material is often brought to bear upon the individual topics at hand to educate the reader not only in American strike history, but its political, industrial and cultural histories, as well.
Despite the fact that “the editors have not sought to impose any unifying theoretical or political approach to the topics covered” (p. xxxv), the text is remarkably consistent in tone and tenor. The selection of the individual authors, who for the most part were sympathetic to the strikers, no doubt helped. But beyond that, if there were common themes inherent to American strike history then one might have expected (or at least hoped) for them to emerge over the course of sixty-five strategically selected topical essays. As it stands, the Encyclopedia is self-policing and mutually reinforcing. The compilation is structured such that the material flows from the general thematic essays to their industry-specific counterparts. As such, the relevance and accuracy of the thematic essays are indicated by their recurrence within the industry-specific pieces, and vice versa.
This is certainly true of the second and third collections of thematic essays regarding the heterogeneity of American strike participants and the occurrence and impact of various strike waves on American soil, respectively. Carry-over themes developed in the former included the intersection of class, racial, ethnic, gender, and even religious issues; the intersection of the labor, civil rights, and women’s movements; radical versus conservative approaches to organizing; the impact of existent enmity among the disparate groups on strike success/failure; and also the efforts by employers to utilize, if not exacerbate, intra-class tensions by pitting groups against one another either on the job or as strike-breakers. Similarly successful arguments regarding the contemporaneous and long-term significance of strike waves upon American industry and labor relations as developed in section III are also made – especially those of 1877, World War I, the New-Deal Era, and 1945–1946 – as these dates achieve prominence in chapter after chapter.
Where such symmetry does not emerge, however, the problems do. First and foremost, treatment of the government’s relationship to and role within strikes is unsatisfactory – an editorial oversight, perhaps, in that the significance of the state is lost on few individual authors. In his thematic contribution, “Strikes: Theory and Practice” for instance, Gerald Friedman concludes that, “Thus the study of strike outcomes returns the discussion of strikes to politics and to the history behind any political regime,” (p. 27). The material regarding strike waves frequently cites the direct government repression of broad-based insurgency, the influence of the legal code on strikes and vice versa, and the decisive roles often played by key political actors – themes carried forward into virtually every industry-specific essay.
Perhaps the editors assumed that a decentralized approach to the issue would be adequate. It certainly makes sense in terms of industry-specific legislation such as the Erdman Act among railroaders, the Motor Carriers’ Act among teamsters, or the Lea Act among musicians. But the piecemeal approach to major enactments such as Wagner and Taft–Hartley prompt confusion and oversights. The judicial regime commonly referred to as “government by injunction”, for instance, receives nary a mention throughout the text. Perhaps the authors were concerned that the inclusion of a thematic essay directly addressing the state’s legislative, judicial, and oftentimes martial impact would smack of political bias. Nevertheless, the better parts of two essays are dedicated to the private use of spies and mercenaries in the employers’ private war against strikers. Why not then one further essay dedicated to the very entity which structured the legal environment wherein such practices were allowed? Scattered references to key pieces of legislation and court rulings within the work’s “Timeline” and “Additional Bibliography” are no substitute for an essay specifically dedicated to explaining what was legal, when, and why.
The problems regarding coverage of the decline of strike activity over the past several decades, on the other hand, are more subtle. Key issues, including the repressive effect of the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, the increasingly conservative political climate punctuated by the Reagan Era and deregulation, the bureaucratization of organized labor and/or it’s tactical errors, technological change, globalization and capital flight and mobility are not raised either in Jeremy Brecher’s thematic, “The Decline of Strikes”, or in many of the other myriad essays throughout the text. Within the context of the essays regarding manufacturing in particular, however, where the decline has been especially pronounced, key issues regarding the impact of global competition and capital flight are advanced uncritically. Rather than accept the inevitability of such phenomena, readers would do well to recall Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s thesis that deindustrialization has been at least in part a conscious corporate decision on the part of employers to abandon the postwar “social contract” with labor, i.e. failure was not inevitable.
The location of essays regarding the service sector within the final subsection of the text is thus well served. Many of the preceding essays are notably pessimistic if not defeatist regarding the prospects for renewed militancy. Yet among the service-sector essays, a sense of hope pervades, buoyed by the dynamism of their still-emergent industries, albeit tempered by many of the same concerns of their old-economy counterparts. They emphasize not only the failed opportunities but the opportunities through labor militancy that still remain. It is thus perhaps fitting that the Encylopedia includes no summary chapter, no final statement. If the end has not yet come, then how can it be written?
Given the scope, length, and structure of the work, there may well be a tendency for some to approach The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History as a reference book, dipping into and among the chapters as seems necessary. That would be unfortunate. Yes, the individual essays are in and of themselves informative and references are provided at the end of each chapter and additionally in the epilogue, providing, perhaps, the starting point for further research. However, the true strength and value of the Encyclopedia is captured less within its individual parts than in its sum total, wherein the recurrent themes, far from appearing redundant, develop a rhythm which serves to reinforce within the determined reader that the triumphs and travails of restive laborers were not isolated among miners, longshoremen, construction workers, teamsters, steelworkers or any other group of laborers commonly associated with American labor history. But, rather, otherwise disparate workers such as newsboys, telegraphers, waitresses, plumbers, and office workers, as well as millions of other strikers, have shared a commonality of cause despite their apparent diversity.
