“In order to change,” retired machinist Keith Thomas warned communications professor Dana L. Cloud, “union bosses would have to give up power. This isn’t going to happen. They run unions like they belonged to them, and they should have been running unions like they belonged to the rank and file” (169). Thomas’s frustrations should hardly raise the eyebrows of labor scholars, politicians, or voters, who are well aware that workers have sometimes found themselves angrier at their leaders than at their employers. Indeed, pioneering New Labor historians spent much of the 1980s and 1990s blaming business unionism, bureaucratization, routinized bargaining, and a one-sided compact with the Democratic Party for the decline of American trade unionism.

Only recently has a new cohort reconsidered this so-called postwar compact. These specialists contend that there was no labor-management accord. Conflict over union, and therefore labor, rights extended through the postwar period, when fights more...

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