WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

This is a book about power. It is an examination of how and why American employers were so successful for so long in their campaign to construct and maintain a system of industrial relations in which unions would play no part. The creation, persistence, and sudden collapse of the resulting Open Shop order define the chronological limits of this work, c. 1890–1940. This periodization allows us to study the vicissitudes of organized class relations through successive booms and depressions, the systemic crises of the First World War and New Deal, and across two generations of change in the structures of industrial enterprises themselves and, to a lesser extent, in the ideologies of those who controlled them.

This book is therefore about some of the main industrial relations issues confronting American employers and their workers, the public, and the state, through five decades. It aims to illuminate these large national realities, but does so from a particular local standpoint. It is rooted in the experiences and behavior of one self-selected group of employers, in one industry, in one city. The city is Philadelphia; the industry is secondary metal manufacturing, the heart of the Open Shop movement there and elsewhere; and the group is the Metal Manufacturers' Association of Philadelphia (MMA), set up in December 1903 to fight the good fight against organized labor, and doing so with considerable success throughout the next thirty years.