The Right to Work? Rethinking Labor and Politics in the 19th and 21st Centuries

The Right to Work? Rethinking Labor and Politics in the 19th and 21st Centuries

_PERSPECTIVES COVERVictoria Hattam, Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research

Unionization rates in the United States now stand at 11.1% and have been dropping for decades.1 Organized labors’ weakness was underscored in March 2011 when Republican Governor Scott Walker launched an all out attack on public sector unions. Walker’s ultimate victory marked the end of an era as public sector unions have been one of the last strongholds for organized labor. The outcome was all the more shocking given the site of confrontation—Madison, Wisconsin, a longstanding Democratic Party stronghold and home of the famous John R. Commons school of labor economics and labor history established just over a hundred years ago at the University of Wisconsin. Walker’s 2011 attack on organized labor on the steps of the state house, his recall, re-election, and passage of Act 10 (a law that radically reformed Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law), established Wisconsin as a right to work state and left public sector workers reeling.2 The old stomping ground of organized labor was no longer secure. Many have been asking, how did we get here? Cedric de Leon’s stunning new book, The Origins of the Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth Century Chicago, offers a powerful reinterpretation of race, class and party in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. De Leon’s radical reinterpretation of the right to work also animates new questions about the status of work today…

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 14 / Issue 02 / June 2016, pp 451-455 / Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016