The Origins of Right to Work

Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago

Cedric De Leon author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Published:21st May '15

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The Origins of Right to Work cover

"Right to work" states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws, observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era. In The Origins of Right to Work, however, Cedric de Leon contends that this antagonism began a century earlier with the northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.

In doing so, de Leon connects past and present, raising critical questions that address pressing social issues. Drawing on the changing relationship between political parties and workers in nineteenth-century Chicago, de Leon concludes that if workers’ collective rights are to be preserved in a global economy, workers must chart a course of political independence and overcome long-standing racial and ethnic divisions.

Cedric de Leon's stunning new book, The Origins of the Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago, offers a powerful reinterpretation of race, class, and party in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.... The right to work, de Leon shows, was not a twentieth-century invention developed to dismantle long established New Deal accomplishments. On the contrary, right to work politics have much deeper and more interesting antecedents reaching back to the anti-slavery politics of the mid-nineteenth century.

-- Victoria Hattam * Perspectives on Politics *

Political rhetoric is shaped by historical context. De Leon does an excellent job in using this point to help explain the historical foundations oftoday's antilabor political climate. This analysis refreshingly reorients ourattention from the macroforces shaping the industrial and now postindustrial landscape to the more microlevel, examining how what groups sayabout these issues influences what they will later do about them.

-- William A. Mirola * American Journal of Sociology *

Refreshingly, Cedric de Leon's The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago is neither historically shallow nor politically imbalanced... de Leon has made an important contribution, one that all future scholars of anti-unionism must read.

-- Chad Pearson * Labour/Le Trava

ISBN: 9780801453083

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 454g

184 pages