Ken's Labor Book Reviews From The Archives

"Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II." By Nelson Lichtenstein. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1982. 245p. $17.95.

In this book, historian Nelson Lichtenstein examines the impact of the Second World War on the growing U.S. labor movement as it emerged from the Great Depression. Lichtenstein was a prime sponsor of the recent Teach-in With the Labor Movement at Columbia University (see pages 16-17). He also is the author of a recent masterful biography of Walter Reuther. In this earlier work, he seeks to explain why American workers lost their activism and unions became "sclerotic and increasingly impotent." Even before U.S. entry into the war, the country was drifting in a more conservative direction. With John L. Lewis dissenting, many CIO leaders, especially Sidney Hillman, saw the war as an opportunity to involve the unions in national economic planning. But, as it turned out, Roosevelt treated labor as a very junior partner, even within the labor sphere, while excluding it from larger economic wartime planning. As the war grew nearer and the labor market tightened, workers staged a massive wave of sanctioned and wildcat strikes. The Roosevelt administration fought back, sometimes sending in troops and sometimes offering inducements like limited union shop arrangements to cool off the movement. Unions were rewarded or punished, depending on their ability to keep the membership in line. Thanks to a wartime no-strike pledge by unions and government appeals to patriotism, management was able to use the emergency to regain its authority. In addition, labor boards replaced collective action. By the middle of the war, and especially after it was assumed it was just a matter of time before the U.S. won, massive wildcats and a nationwide miners' strike led by Lewis, left wartime labor planning in a shambles. Then came a post-war wave of strikes. Lichtenstein sees the seeds of labor's future sclerosis in wartime labor restrictions, the restructuring of internal union dynamics. and union dependency on the Democrats and Roosevelt in particular. Other causes for labor's decline, which occurred after the period covered by this book, were a post-war reaction, the Taft-Hartley Law and the Red Scare. -- Ken Nash, Rifkin Solidarity Library

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