SHIFTING FORTUNES: The Rise and Decline of American Labor, from the 1820s to the Present.

By Daniel Nelson. Ivan R. Dee. 181 pp. $22.50

Why have American labor unions grown strong in some periods and withered in others? For answers, both friends and foes of organized labor usually point to dramatic events and personalities: state militias stamping out strikes in the Gilded Age, class-conscious workers surging into John L. Lewis’s CIO during the Great Depression, leaders of the Teamsters getting married to the Mob in the 1950s.

Nelson, the author of several fine books on labor and business history, discounts any explanation that relies so much on headlines. To him, working people are rational men and women whose reasons for joining or not joining unions have changed little over time. Three intersecting factors, he argues, account for the ebb and flow of union membership: the leverage of workers who enjoy some autonomy on the job, the fear of reprisals by employers, and the larger economic and political environment. As that list suggests, labor organizers have had to make the best of a situation shaped by more powerful forces. Their fortunes have shifted over time, but the structures that govern those outcomes persist.

Nelson’s approach enables him to resolve some of the nagging anomalies of U.S. labor history. He describes, for example, how coal miners were able to build the United Mine Workers, the only durable industrial union in the nation until the mid-20th century. Mining was dangerous work but difficult for bosses to supervise, and the camaraderie miners forged both underground and in their isolated communities sustained the UMW against employer attacks.

Factory labor was much harder to organize. At giant companies such as Ford and U.S. Steel, workers toiled for decades under the constant eye and thumb of management. Everyone knew a troublemaker could easily be replaced. It took the political earthquake of the New Deal—which established the pro-union National Labor Relations Board—to alter that condition. In recent years, as federal support for organizing has eroded, manufacturing unions have again become vulnerable. As Nelson notes, "By the late 1980s the NLRB did not even give lip service to the goal of encouraging collective bargaining. Instead it provided a veneer of legality for traditional open-shop policies."

Nelson’s pithy survey is full of such sensible judgments. Writing in a crisp if bloodless style, he provides what amounts to a balance sheet of union history. In outlining which paths led to organizational victory and which to failure, his approach has more in common with the models that economists construct than with the empathetic "history from the bottom up" that has dominated the study of American workers since the 1960s. His sober book helps dispel the illusion that labor’s power has ever been great or secure in this most capitalist of nations.

But Nelson’s stern antiromanticism also neglects the spirit of solidarity that at times has enabled American unions to generate a social movement. There is no place in his account for the 19th-century vision of a producer’s commonwealth, for the collective rage that followed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, or for the mix of piety and ethnic pride that coursed through the California grape strike and boycott of the 1960s. Organized labor has a moral claim as well as an economic one, and the former has galvanized people inside and outside union ranks as much as the demand for higher wages and shorter hours. San Francisco organizer Frank Roney warned nearly a century ago, "A movement, however laudable and externally worthy, is bound to fail if it has no soul." He would find an ally in current AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, a long-time apostle of Catholic teachings on social justice.

—Michael Kazin