Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Union Decline: Business Political Mobilization and Restrictive Labor Legislation, 1938-1958

尽管有相当多的社会科学研究与战后美国劳工运动的衰落有关，但人们对过去半个世纪里帮助塑造美国劳工政策的政治斗争，以及持续了半个世纪的工会的地理和行业模式知之甚少。这项研究考虑了1938年至1958年间在各州蔓延的限制性劳工立法的激增，其中包括竞争激烈的工作权法律，这些法律削弱了劳工的财务和组织能力。我们质疑，在一个空前增长和数量强大的时期，劳工运动是如何遭受如此一连串的政治失败的。我们建议，最好在政治进程框架内理解反劳工政治活动、工会反应及其跨越时间和空间的展开。因此，根据这一时期的州级量化数据和特定案件的深入档案材料进行的分析，考虑了雇主和工会力量的重要维度，以及这些竞争群体面临的不同国家结构，可能会影响政策的制定。首先使用事件历史方法是为了确定在所有州导致限制性劳工立法的更一般过程。然后使用定性事件结构分析(ESA)来检查三个具体的反劳工运动，它们代表了我们感兴趣的时期的动员范围以及成功和失败。这一比较战略将使我们能够系统地处理当地行为者试图改变政策的复杂机制和因果联系。结合反劳工活动的定量事件史模型，这些分析将(1)提高我们对美国劳工史上一个重要而未被研究的时期的理解，(2)讲述和告知国家的社会学概念，(3)通过考虑政治上的瓦解和工人运动的紧缩来扩展新政政策形成的大量文献=那个时代的S历史性的立法收获。通过系统分析不同时间和社会政治背景下的多种政策结果，我们还探讨了社会运动行为者更广泛地影响政治进程的能力。这一方法及其将产生的理解，将对现有的社会科学关于政策成果和社会运动进程的观点提供信息。它还将用于向学生和更广泛的公众宣传美国工会的历史和与之相关的政治动态。

Despite considerable social science research pertaining to the decline of the American labor movement in the postwar era, relatively little is known about the political struggles that helped shape U.S. labor policy and the geographic and industrial patterns of unionization that have persisted over the last half century. This research considers the surge of restrictive labor legislation that spread across states between 1938 and 1958, including intensely contested Right-to-Work laws that diminished labor's financial and organizational capacity. We question how the labor movement, during a period of unparalleled growth and numerical strength, suffered such a string of political defeats. We suggest that anti-labor political activity, union response, and its unfolding across time and space are best understood within a political process framework. Consequently, analyses, which draw from state-level quantitative data over the period and in-depth archival material from particular cases, consider how important dimensions of employer and union strength, and the varying state structures these contending groups face, may influence policy enactment. Event history methods are first used in order to identify more general processes leading to restrictive labor legislation across all states. Qualitative event structure analysis (ESA) is then used to examine three specific anti-labor campaigns that are representative of the range of mobilization, and successes and defeats, during our period of interest. This comparative strategy will enable us to systematically address the complex mechanisms and causal linkages through which local actors attempt to alter policy. Coupled with the quantitative event history modeling of anti-labor activity, these analyses will (1) improve our understanding of an important and understudied period in American labor history, (2) speak to and inform sociological conceptions of the state, and (3) extend the substantial literature on new deal policy formation by considering the political unraveling and retrenchment of the labor movement=s historic legislative gains of that era. By systematically analyzing multiple policy outcomes across varying temporal and sociopolitical contexts, we also address the ability of social movement actors to influence the political process more generally. This approach, and the understanding it will generate, will be informative to existing social science perspectives on policy outcomes and social movement processes. It will also serve the purposes of informing students and a more general public about the history of, and political dynamics associated with, labor unions in the U.S.