Volume 37, Number 11 · June 28, 1990
The Best Years of Their Lives
By Alan Brinkley
In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966
by Joshua B. Freeman
Oxford University Press, 434 pp., $34.50
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
by Gary Gerstle
Cambridge University Press, 356 pp., $39.50
Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s
by Bruce Nelson
University of Illinois Press, 352 pp., $11.95 (paper)
What has happened to the trade union movement in America? During the 1930s and 1940s, when millions of American workers joined industrial unions, it seemed to many people that one of the deepest social changes of the century was about to take place. The moment inspired hopes (and fears) of an almost revolutionary shift in political and economic power. Now, fifty years later, unions are struggling to survive. Most political candidates fear appearing too closely associated with them. Public officials see few risks in defying them. Few employers find it difficult to exclude (and at times even to expel) unions from their plants. In 1945, over 35 percent of the nonagricultural work force consisted of union members. In 1989, the figure was less than 17 percent.
Review, 6177 words
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