A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century

For the author the working class for its own wellbeing must be unified against the predations and exploitations of employers. The book focuses on the historical existence and effectiveness of worker solidarity as primarily exercised through unions.The need for working class solidarity arose as formerly independent craftsmen were forced into a factory system producing for an expansive capitalistic market and in the process lost control of their economic lives. Worker organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the Wobblies, and craft-based unions attempted to address this transformation and the accompanying brutal working conditions. Le Blanc clearly outlines their struggles: the extreme cyclic nature of late 19th century capitalism undercut worker militancy; racial, ethnic, religious, gender and skill differences undermined solidarity; employers mounted intense and often violent opposition with state support. A main theme of the book is the effect on worker solidarity when union bureaucrats seek accommodation with business or rely on the state for survival. Gompers, first president of the AFL, eschewed worker militance in cooperating with the National Civic Federation and then the Wilson administration during WWI. Later, New Deal labor legislation as elaborated and implemented by the War Labor Board of WWII essentially prohibited workers from any exercise of power on shop-floors. Union leaders demonstrated a willingness to purge dissidents, pandering to red-scare mania, and to enforce contracts that traded economic gains for union members in exchange for unchallenged management control of workplaces - an unspoken social compact that has been shredded in the era of globalization.The author points to some recent developments within and outside the labor movement as a result of the recognition of the poverty of post-WWII labor leadership. But a weakness of the book, since it purports to discuss the working class, is any real feel for the general citizenry's views on the need for worker activism. What have been the effects of consumerism and of the stunted and stilted information provided by media giants on the American public? Overall the book is a reasonably good introduction as to how the working class has fared over the last 150 years. Though not a fault of the author, the future of the working class emerges from this book as a very precarious project.