Bloodless Victories

This book examines how a group of manufacturers of metal products - ‘everything from buttonhooks to battleships’ - in America’s third biggest city helped each other to meet the challenges of organized labor (and sometimes an interventionist state) in the half-century between the ‘second industrial revolution’ and the Second World War. After thirty years of success, the employers were finally overwhelmed by a resurgent labor movement backed by New Deal politicians and administrators. Their story offers the broadest and most detailed account available of the industrial relations problems and policies of small and mid-sized firms in this period. This book analyzes labor issues by means of a careful local case-study, but its conclusions about the interplay of labor, organized capital, law, and the state in determining the fate of workers’ rights and employers’ interests have broad relevance to the history and politics of twentieth-century industrial relations.