Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal

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Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 - 297 pages
Capital, Labor, and State is a systematic and thorough examination of American labor policy from the Civil War to the New Deal. David Brian Robertson skillfully demonstrates that although most industrializing nations began to limit employer freedom and regulate labor conditions in the 1900s, the United States continued to allow total employer discretion in decisions concerning hiring, firing, and workplace conditions. Robertson argues that the American constitution made it much more difficult for the American Federation of Labor, government, and business to cooperate for mutual gain as extensively as their counterparts abroad, so that even at the height of New Deal, American labor market policy remained a patchwork of limited protections, uneven laws, and poor enforcement, lacking basic national standards even for child labor.

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Contents

American Labor Market Policy Strategy and Political Institutions
1
Labor and Regulation 18651900
37
The American Federation of Labor Confronts Employers
65
The Employers Counterattack
95
The American Federation of Labors Strategic Retreat and Its Consequences
125
Limitations of Labor Market Regulation
153
Confining Trade Union Powers
183
Marginalizing Labor Market Management
207
Circumscribing Work Insurance
231
The American Model of Labor Market Policy
257
Index
281
About the Author
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

David Brian Robertson is associate professor of political science at University of Missouri, St. Louis.

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