The origins of right to work : antilabor democracy in nineteenth-century Chicago / Cedric de Leon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leon, Cedric de, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Open and closed shop--Illinois--Chicago--History--19th century.

Open and closed shop.

Labor--Illinois--Chicago--History--19th century.

Labor.

Labor movement--Illinois--Chicago--History--19th century.

Labor movement.

Working class--Political activity--Illinois--Chicago--History--19th century.

Working class.

Political parties--Illinois--Chicago--History--19th century.

Political parties.

Chicago (Ill.)--Politics and government--19th century.

Chicago (Ill.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (185 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Tracing the origins of the right to work

The critique of wage dependency, 1828-1844

The political crisis over slavery and the rise of free labor, 1844-1860

The war years, or, The triumphs and reversals of free labor ideology, 1861-1865

Anti-labor democracy and the working class, 1865-1887

Epilogue : neoliberalism in the rustbelt.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780801455872

0801455871

9780801479588

0801479584

OCLC:

1080549063