McCartin, Joseph A.
Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921
UNC Press (Chapel Hill)
1997
OUR SYNOPSIS: Joseph A. McCartin illuminates how around World War I, American workers organized around calls for industrial democracy, leading to the emergence of modern labor relations in the United States. Focusing on the home front wartime struggle for labor rights, he argues, “There was no trench warfare more militant or diplomacy more complex than that practiced by the corporate managers, government administrators, trade unionists, and rank-and-file working people who fought for power on the industrial battlefield.” (1) He emphasizes three interrelated areas of crucial labor development in this era: reforms in management systems, new radicalizing union organizing, and the bureaucratic regulatory growth of the federal government. The alliance between presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1912 commences McCartin’s timeline. By the time the U.S. entered the war in 1917, labor was already unifying around industrial democracy. Wartime labor mobilization exacerbated this process, as the balance of power shifted towards workers. The Wilson administration responded by building a new government labor bureaucracy. Government regulation greatly benefited unions themselves, especially the AFL, providing policy-backed vehicles for change and skyrocketing membership. When the war ended the labor bureaucracy shrunk, with the end of government-imposed stability leading to labor conflicts. Despite postwar clashes with employers, many labor organizers viewed their wartime experience as a watershed for worker empowerment.
BIG QUESTIONS:
Why did industry and democracy coalesce to form the industrial democracy movement in this era?
What role did President Woodrow Wilson play in shaping labor relations during his presidency?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“During the era of the First World War, as the United States embarked on a crusade to make the world ‘safe for democracy’—in Mexico, in Europe, and finally in the former Russian empire—Americans fought at home to define the content of their own democracy. In this other war there was no more important theater of battle than the workplace.” (1)
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