raghu wrote:
Thanks for this info Michael. Do you have any references for this period?
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 is certainly the best, most lucid argument for the centrality of struggles over workplace control in shaping the American labor movement. For detailed descriptions of the values of craft workers, their commitments to job control, irregularity of work patterns, and maintenance of group discipline and solidarity see David Bensman, The Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century and Patricia Cooper, Once A Cigarmaker: Men, Women and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. You can find a discussion of labor's legal standing during the nineteenth century and of the assassination of labor's freedom at the hands of the New Deal in William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement and the very important work by Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960.
I am curipous about what kind of "entitlements" they were looking for. If it is just better pay then it is not really that different from Fordism (and inevitably, mass-consumption), right?
Yes, if it is just better pay, but, before the 1930s, that was not often the issue. In many trades, the union developed rules at its assemblies which governed specific aspects of the craft. The iron workers, for example, had rules about the amount of iron that could be fired per day in a furnace. When the capitalist, who owned the furnaces, contracted with, or recognized, the union, they were agreeing to abide by the union's rules. This is why the closed shop was an essential element of the union's goals, providing for the maintenance and enforcement of union rules. When union membership is a pre-condition for employment, the union could enforce its rules via its own internal disciplinary procedures. This is the type of thing that the workers believed they were entitled too. Today, under the law, management is entitled to make decisions about the organization of work. Management is the master and the employee is the servant.
Also doesn't the idea of organized workplaces automatically assume the factory system as the predominant organizational unit? Isn't there a rather basic contradiction here? i.e. how can you decommodify labor while staying within the organized workplace (which is premised on division of labor ad-absurdum)?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're getting at. All workplaces are organized in some why or another. You seem to have a particular kind of organization in mind, but I'm not clear on what that is.
