Conclusion

Abstract

In fifty years the American labour movement seemed to have come full circle. In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the employers’ counter-offensive against unions launched at the end of the war had been so successful that the AFL was near the point of collapse. In a period of unparalleled prosperity unions had been outflanked by welfare capitalism, company unionism and the open shop. To some it looked as if the United States, alone among Western capitalist nations, would develop an industrial economy without independent labour unions. Many perceptive observers spoke of unionism as ‘a largely spent force’ or ‘having less and less impact on society’.¹ The doyen of labour relations experts, William M. Leiserson, believed that the ‘labor problem’, which had dominated serious discussion of industrial society since the 1870s, had been essentially solved. ‘Scientific study of labor questions today’, he concluded, ‘is directed rather at understanding the nature of the relationship between employers, wage-earners, and the public, and finding the methods by which these labor relations may be organized, administered, and adjusted to the satisfaction of all concerned.’²