INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Ideological Origins of the National
Labor Relations Policy
Howard Dickman
LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987.
445 pp., $32.95
This book lives up entirely to its title, but it would be a pity to suppose in advance that it is nothing more than what its title declares. For, in the process of writing a detailed, thoroughly documented history of labor relations policy in the United States, Dickman provides us with a fascinating background to his main subject; one that takes us back to the breakup of the Middle Ages and to early efforts by the new national states to curb, regulate, and apply criminal law to organizations of workers. Thirteen appendices supply us with key documents, in full or in extracts, ranging from The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349 down through the centuries to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 - the historic Wagner Act.
The first sentence of the 1349 Ordinance reads: "Every person able in body under the age of sixty years, not having to live on, being required, shall be bound to serve him that doth require him, or else committed to the gaol, until he find surety to serve." Now turn to the third paragraph of the Wagner Act 586 years later: "Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury, impairment, or interruption, and promotes the flow of commerce by removing certain recognized sources of industrial strife and unrest, by encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes arising out of differences as to wages, hours, or other working conditions, and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees."
The reader, having compared the two statements, will know first of all that they wrote better English 586 years ago - more direct, lucid, and unpretentious - than congressmen were able to write in 1935. But he will know too, and mourn accordingly, the astounding capacity of contemporary users of the English language to make of words cloaks for the most dubious of assertions, even flat out lies. We learn from Dickman's book that a great many assertions of that sort have gone into the history of labor relations in America.
But there is more. Dickman properly sees American labor union history as importantly affected by philosophical and legal currents involved in the rise of political pluralism in the last century. In Germany, Otto von Gierke, in France, Duguit and Durkheim, and in England, Maitland, Figgis, and Laski were almost magnetized by the problem of the state's relationship to the intermediate groups and associations, which constituted (whether constitutionally recognized or not) the social order in which citizens lived. The Western state had grown strong during postmedieval history by diminishing the authorities of groups which, like the Church, monasteries, and guilds, had been strong in the Middle Ages, and by elevating the concept of the individual citizen or subject as the real unit of polity. The atomistic individual of natural-law theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in a sense the residual legatee of the state's thrust into society for its own aggrandizement. The great French Revolution at the very end of the eighteenth century
...
Read Full Article
|
