Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:06:22.445Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Governing Labor in Modernizing Texas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Stephen Amberg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The United States is a country in which the working classes are not well organized to participate in politics and the workplace. Four theoretical approaches encompass most explanations. They are culture and identity theories, convergence theories, centerperiphery theories, and institutional theories. Focusing on one specific case, the state of Texas, this article suggests that each approach can contribute to a political construction approach to the labor field that can better explain the patterns of organization. In Texas today working-class participation is very low, but 30 years ago union membership and voting were increasing; 100 years ago Texas was a fount of populism. A focus on the specific historical contexts of labor-management relations enables us to penetrate the contemporary post-facto image of Texas as one member of a category of conservative or nonunion states in contrast to liberal or union-friendly states. That binary image elides the actual more complex and diverse histories of labor struggles that constitute each side of this symbolic opposition. This article demonstrates that there is a real problem to investigate and suggests how we should think about it. What will become clear is that Texas is not exceptional when it comes to the status of workers in the polity. The specific historical pathways to the present suggest the significance of political struggles and ideological debate for the creation of a working class with influence and power.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 145 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2004 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abernathy, Frederick, Dunlop, John, Hammond, Janice, and Weil, David (1999) A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Allen, Ruth (1941) Chapters in the History of Organized Labor in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Bureau of Research in the Social Sciences.Google Scholar
Amberg, Stephen (1994) The Union Inspiration in American Politics: The Autoworkers and the Making of a Liberal Industrial Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Arpan, Jeffrey, de la Torre, Jose, and Toyne, Brian (1982) The U.S. Apparel Industry: International Challenge, Domestic Response. Atlanta: Georgia State University Business Publishing Division.Google Scholar
Bartley, Numan V. (1969) The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950’s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard (1984) Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Berk, Gerald (1994) Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Blakeslee, Nate (2002) “Morales vs. Sanchez.” Texas Observer, 1 February,4–7.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Brewer, Thomas B. (1970) “State anti-labor legislation: Texas–A case study.” Labor History 11: 58–76.Google Scholar
Bridges, Amy (1986) “Becoming American: The working classes in the United States before the Civil War,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide (eds.) Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press:157–96.Google Scholar
Bridges, Amy (1998) Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Briggs, Vernon M. (1975) Mexican Migration and the U.S. Labor Market. Austin, TX: Center for the Study of Human Resources and the Bureau of Business Research.Google Scholar
Brody, David (1980) Workers in Industrial America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Burnham, Walter Dean (1975) “Party systems and the political process,” in Chambers, William Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean (eds.) The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press:277–307.Google Scholar
Burnham, Walter Dean (1984) “The changing shape of the American political universe,” in Burnham, Walter D. (ed.) The Current Crisis in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press:25–57.Google Scholar
Caro, Robert A. (1981) The Path to Power. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
CCMAA (Inter-Agency Cabinet Committee on Mexican American Affairs) (1967) Mexican American: New Focus on Opportunity. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chandra, Kanchan (2001) “Symposium: Cumulative findings in the study of ethnic politics.” Newsletter of the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association 12:7–25.Google Scholar
Clemens, Elisabeth S. (1997) The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, Chandler (1990) Race and Class in Texas Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
DeMoss, Dorothy (1989) The History of Apparel Manufacturing in Texas. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Dempsey, Joseph (1961) The Operation of Right-to-Work Laws. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.Google Scholar
Dubofsky, Melvin (1994) The State and Labor in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Dunlop, John T. (1958) Industrial Relations Systems. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Sara, and Boyte, Harry (1986) Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Feffer, Andrew (1994) The Chicago Pragmatists and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fink, Leon (1983) Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. (1991) Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Steven (1991) Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Gall, Gilbert J. (1988) The Politics of Right to Work: The Labor Federations as Special Interests, 1943-1979. New York: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Gall, Gilbert J. (1998) “‘Rights which have meaning’: Reconceiving labor liberty in the 1940s.” Labor History 39: 273–89.Google Scholar
Garson, Robert A. (1974) The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941-1948. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Gillette, Michael (1984) “The NAACP in Texas, 1937-1957.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Gilpin, Robert (2001) Global Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Glover, Robert W., and King, Allan G. (1978) “Organized labor in Texas,” in Rodriguez, Louis J. (ed.) Dynamics of Growth: An Economic Profile of Texas. Austin, TX: Madrona: 136–56.Google Scholar
Goodwyn, Lawrence (1976) Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gould, Lewis L. (1971) “Progressives and prohibitionists: Texas Democratic politics, 1911-1921.”Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75:5–18.Google Scholar
Green, George N. (1982) “Anti-labor politics in Texas, 1941-1957,” in Foster, James C. (ed.) American Labor in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press:217–27.Google Scholar
Green, George N., and Maroney, James (1982) The Heritage of Texas Labor, 1838-1980. Austin: Texas AFL-CIO.Google Scholar
Grob, Gerald (1961) Workers and Utopia: A Study of the Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter, and Soskice, David (2001) Varieties of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Halpern, Rick (1991) “Interracial unionism in the Southwest: Fort Worth’s packinghouse workers, 1937-1954,” in Zieger, Robert H. (ed.) Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press:158–82.Google Scholar
Hattam, Victoria (1993) Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Herrigel, Gary (1996) Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Barry T., and McPherson, David (1997) Union Membership and Earnings Data Book. Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs.Google Scholar
Hurt, Harry III (1981) Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, and Zolberg, Aristide (1986) Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kazin, Michael (1987) Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, John T., Harbison, Frederick, and Myers, Charles A. (1960) Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. Morgan (1974) The Shaping of Southern Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Krugman, Paul (1985) Geography and Trade. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Landolt, Robert (1975) The Mexican-American Workers of San Antonio, Texas. New York: Arno.Google Scholar
López, Ian F. Haney (1996) White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Lowi, Theodore J. (1975) “Party, policy, and Constitution in America,” in Chambers, William Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean (eds.) The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press:238–76.Google Scholar
Marshall, F. Ray (1967) Labor in the South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, F. Ray (1971) “Some reflections on labor history.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75 : 137–57.Google Scholar
McCartin, Joseph A. (1997) Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
McDonagh, Eileen L. (1999) “Race, class, and gender in the Progressive Era: Restructuring state and society,” in Milkis, Sidney M. and Mileur, Jerome M. (eds.) Progressivism and the New Democracy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press:145–91.Google Scholar
Montejano, David (1987) Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Montgomery, David (1987) The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Morris, Aldon (1984) The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Myers, Frederick (1959) The Right to Work in Practice. New York: Fund for the Republic.Google Scholar
Navarro, Armando (2000) La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
North, Douglas (1990) Institutions,Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Obadele-Starks, Ernest (2000) Black Unionism in the Industrial South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Ruth (1998) Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Harvey (1950) History of the Oil Workers International Union (CIO). Denver, CO: Oil Workers International Union.Google Scholar
Oestreicher, Richard (1998) “The rules of the game: Class politics in twentieth-century America,” in Boyle, Kevin (ed.) Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994. Albany: SUNY Press: 19–50.Google Scholar
Orren, Karen (1991) Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pedraza, Silvia (2000) “Beyond black and white: Latinos and social science research on immigration, race, and ethnicity in America.” Social Science History 24: 697–726.Google Scholar
Perlman, Selig, and Taft, Philip (1935) History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932. Vol.4, Labor Movements. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Piore, Michael, and Sabel, Charles F. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Robertson, David (2000) Capital, Labor, and State. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Rosales, Rodolfo (2000) The Illusion of Inclusion. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Sabel, Charles F. (1982) Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sanders, Elizabeth (1999) Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Selznick, Philip (1969) Law, Society, and Industrial Justice. New York: Sage.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Harold A. (1955) “The labor movement in San Antonio, Texas, 1865-1915. ”Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 36:160–75.Google Scholar
Shefter, Martin (1986) “Trade unions and political machines: The organization and disorganization of the American working class in the late nineteenth century,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide (eds.) Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 197–276.Google Scholar
Shefter, Martin (1988) “Regional receptivity to reform in the United States,” in Political Parties and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press:169–94.Google Scholar
Shulman, Bruce (1991) From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Katherine van Wezel (1981) “The post-war paradigm in American labor law.” Yale Law Journal 90: 1509–80.Google Scholar
Tarrow, Sidney, Katzenstein, Peter, and Graziano, Luigi (1978) Territorial Politics in Industrial Nations. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Texas State AFL-CIO (1957) Proceedings of the Founding Convention. Elizabeth Huth Coates Library, Trinity University, San Antonio.Google Scholar
Texas State AFL-CIO (1958) Proceedings of the Second Convention. Elizabeth Huth Coates Library, Trinity University, San Antonio.Google Scholar
Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL) (1946) Proceedings of the 48th Convention. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL) (1947) Proceedings of the 49th Convention. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca,NY.Google Scholar
Todes, Jay Littman (1949) “Organized employer opposition to unionism in Texas, 1900-1930.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. (1985) The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trubowitz, Peter (1998) Defining the National Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Vila, Pablo (2000) Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Vila, Pablo (2001) Border Ethnographies: The Limits of Border Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Warren, Mark (2001) Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wrong, Elaine (1974) The Negro in the Apparel Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Zamora, Emilio (1993) The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M Press.Google Scholar