The War On Labor And The Left: Understanding America's Unique Conservatism [Paperback]

For Brendan Sexton and Michael Harrington in Absentia -- Introduction -- Conservatism and Union Decline -- Conservatism and the War on Labor -- Consensus, Constraints, Conflict -- Unions and Leaders -- Unionism: Strategies of Repression -- Employers, Mercenaries, and Armed Force -- The Legal System: We Are the Law -- Steel: 1892 and 1919 -- Critical Conflicts: Railway, Craft, and Industrial Unionism -- Labor-left Politics: Strategies of Repression -- Socialists and Sedition: The World War I Era -- Un-Americanism: World War II and Cold War Eras -- Peculiarities of the American Political System -- Labor-left Politics -- Strategies of Economic Manipulation and Violence -- Subtler Technologies of Subjection: Managing Workers -- Labor Law, the NLRB, and Gentrified Union Busters -- Macroeconomic and Political Manipulations -- The Power to Repress -- That Peculiar Institution, American Capitalism -- The Media Monopoly -- Reprise and ProspectsIn all countries, labor has ?war stories? to tell, but none are so violent as those of American labor. Since the 1870s at least 700 workers have been killed and thousands seriously injured in labor disputes. Nowhere but in this country have employers so actively fought back against strikes through the use of ?scabs,? surveillance, and mercenary armies.Although much of the violence occurred decades ago, author Patricia Sexton contends that this rich history sheds light on questions that still plague observers of the American political system: Why has the United States been more conservative in its domestic policies than other Western democracies? Why is it almost alone among them in lacking a mass labor or democratic socialist party?or the kind of social policies favored by such parties? And why has American labor unionism been in serious decline in recent decades?The most familiar answers to these questions involve consensus explanations of what has come to be known as American exceptionalism. America is conservative, observers say, l-