Editor's Introduction

It is with bittersweet pride that I introduce my last of a twenty-year run of Labor issues. “Sweet” in the sense of the collective accomplishment of authors, reviewers, and editors, as well as Duke University Press staff, to turn out quality copy always worth reading and pondering. Sweet also in an ever-happy, good-humored partnership with Managing Editor Patrick Dixon. “Bitter,” or rather a touch sad, in the knowledge that this long-established creative routine has come to a natural, inevitable end. The best news, however, is that an eager new cohort of editors led by longtime collaborator Julie Greene will provide both continuity and innovative departures across the coming years.The issue begins with then-LAWCHA president Will Jones's address on linkages in the treatment of “essential workers” from the Progressive Era to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jones emphasizes the basic tension between an acknowledged public reliance on and simultaneous hostility toward a “colored” urban labor force beginning during World War I and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The roots of the tension, he suggests, lay in a perceived overlap between female-coded “public” work (or “domestic housekeeping”) and earlier domestic work relations resting on servile, and even slavery-based, foundations. Organized workers themselves would challenge such subservience by the 1930s, but as Jones reminds us, the mainsprings of New Deal Era labor reforms notably avoided coverage and inclusion of the public sector workforce. As recently as the COVID-19 pandemic, long-delayed appreciation and recognition of essential workers was still too often short-sighted and inadequate considering the risks undertaken by care workers.We recently commemorated one of New Labor History's founding spirits, Herbert Gutman, on the fiftieth anniversary of his first seminal collection of published essays. To address the work of another driving and, happily, still very vibrant talent in our field, we have asked intellectual historian Howard Brick—himself an eminent scholar of social movements and social theory—to comment on the multifold contributions of historian Nelson Lichtenstein. One of the first among a politically charged generation of young labor historians to set worker struggles within a context of state as well as employer power—effectively a “history of capitalism” avant la lettre—Lichtenstein emerges, in Brick's telling, as an always-sympathetic yet unblinking observer of organized labor's mixture of crushing defeats and wily compromise wins in the face of (usually) overwhelming corporate power. From analysis of shopfloor revolts during World War II to institution-building in Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers to the “fall” of the New Deal order to the regime of Walmart and the “retail revolution” and, even beyond, to assessment of liberal default across the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, Lichtenstein has demonstrated that labor relations and the “state of the union” are basic components of any understanding of modern-day American life.Since 2006, Associate Editor Eric Arnesen has presided with unfailing competence and aplomb over our “Up for Debate” feature. Now, in his final assignment for that section, he assembles a sterling roster to assess the impact and legacy of the 1924 Immigration Act. In stressing the roots of exclusion well before 1924, Mae Ngai points to a “racial hierarchy of desirability” that defied even the norms of eugenic theory. Daniel Tichenor stresses a basic tension in the “migration state” between racial exclusivism and the perceived need for tractable labor. John Weber zeroes in on the latter category to account for the consistently discriminatory, not to mention inhumane, treatment of farm labor over time. Ruth Milkman reexamines organized labor's about-face on immigration policy from longtime restrictionism extending to demands to end the Bracero Program in the 1960s and support for “employer sanctions” to stem undocumented immigration in the 1980s to a post-2000 commitment by the AFL-CIO to legalize, enfranchise, as well as organize as many immigrants as possible. Emphasizing the transformative effects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act on the demography of immigrant flows, Nancy Foner salutes the decline of all-white neighborhoods in metropolitan areas and the economic vitality and innovation evident in new-immigrant centers.In “Arts & Media,” Sharon Szymanski takes us inside our own Susan Eisenberg's powerful digital rendering of life on the job for the first generation of women who entered the skilled construction trades in the 1970s.While introducing the book review section, I've often tried to single out works about which the reviewers expressed special enthusiasm, like William S. Kiser's Borderlands of Slavery, Frank P. Barajas's Mexican Americans with Moxie, or Bryant Simon's The Hamlet Fire. But it's also fun to underscore the skill of the reviewers themselves as they mix criticism with appreciation of their subjects. Reviewer Tamara Venit Shelton thus expresses frustration with the seeming ambivalence of Andrea McDowell's We the Miners in its treatment of gold camp “lynch law”: “McDowell concludes that miners’ meetings were ‘neither good nor bad.’ They were simply insufficient to deal with the many problems of the California Gold Rush. That may be true, but so what? This work, rich in historical anecdotes, seems not to know.” Similarly, while agreeing that authors Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt have “add[ed] a great deal to our understanding of early twentieth-century Canadian radicalism,” Craig Heron wonders about the emphasis of a book titled Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E. T. Kingsley. To be sure, Kingsley, a former railway brakeman, relied on prosthetic devices following partial amputation of both legs in an 1890 accident, rehabilitation from which heuristically provided the basis for his political education in Marxism. “The problem with making his disability a central thread in his story,” argues Heron, “is that he made every effort to avoid drawing attention to his weak legs” and “never showed any political interest in compensation for injured workers or the disabled more generally.” Read on, friends!

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