The politics of union decline: Business political mobilization and restrictive labor legislation, 1938 to 1960

This dissertation considers how business groups mobilized politically to deal with the "labor question" that exploded within various regions of the U.S. during the 1930s. I extend organizational, political, and cultural framing perspectives on social movements to address how a seemingly ascendant union movement suffered such a series of political setbacks during a period of unparalleled strength. Drawing on event history techniques as well as historical case study methods, I analyze the surge of restrictive labor legislation that spread across states between 1938 and 1960, and especially the growth of the Right-to-Work movement that sought to limit union activity and contain labor to a narrow geographic space. The analyses speak to the enduring question for political sociologists and social movement scholars of how social movements and their opponents affect the political process. Event history results reveal that business and labor organization are meaningful for policy adoption in their own right. Political opportunities, and the presence of sympathetic law-makers in particular, are also influential in determining where and when social movement actors may be successful in securing favorable legislation. Just how business and labor actors attempt to sway policy, however, is more complex. Findings indeed reveal distinct regional variation in the unfolding of Right-to-Work struggles during these pivotal years, and suggest that there are multiple routes to policy change. Historical case studies of representative anti-labor campaigns extend these insights further, and inform our understanding of how social movements matter. The cases suggest a number of mechanisms though which social movements and countermovements may influence the political process, and point to the importance of framing in particular. The historical insights also extend the quantitative findings by bringing focus to, and illustrating the importance of, the interaction of these contenders at a more proximate level in addition to their presence or absence across states. This study advances social movement perspectives by probing the political mobilization and cultural work of more elite actors, employers, and their associations, and their bearing on a range of movement processes. The project also provides an important historical window into the political relations of business groups and labor unions in the U.S., and demonstrates the relative success of employer efforts to curtail labor organization.