IALHI News Service
State and Labour in France and the US
Gerald Friedman. State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States 1876-1914. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. xiv + 317 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-2325-2.
Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky, Departments of History and Sociology, Binghamton University, SUNY. Published by EH.Net (January, 2000)
...Friedman uses the comparative history of U.S. and French labor movements to make his case. Not only that; he also attempts to reverse the conventional portrait of the two national labor movements. He suggests that an increasingly radical and militant French labor movement led by revolutionary syndicalists grew more rapidly than its U.S. counterpart; better served the material interests of its members; and succeeded in organizing the "towering heights" of the French economy, its mass-production enterprises. By way of contrast, after 1904, a "conservative" "pure and simple" U.S. labor movement failed to advance; did little or nothing for the great mass of workers; and failed absolutely to penetrate the dominant "Fordist" sector of the economy. How does Friedman explain the relative success of French labor and failure of U.S. labor? Simply put, he argues that trade unions and the labor movements in both countries were too weak alone to counteract the greater power of capitalists. In France, however, Republicans could not defend the Third Republic against Monarchists and reactionaries (with whom businesspeople allied) without the support of labor. Hence the French state protected unions against attacks by capital and encouraged public mediation in place of private or public repression. In the U.S., however, a liberal state faced no challenge from anti-Republican reactionaries, hence had no need to build alliances with labor, and thus enabled employers to crush unions and, on occasion, used public power to the same end. Put another way, as Friedman does, the dynamics of French politics and state-making enabled labor to drift left and remain rhetorically revolutionary while the political process in the U.S. left labor no choice but to practice "prudential unionism" and the principle of sauve qui peut.
Does Friedman establish his case? Here I remain less convinced. As an economist trained in the use of statistics and quantification, Friedman deploys a variety of data bases, tables, graphs, standard deviations, and regression analyses to prove his points. A review of this length is not the place to engage in a debate over the validity of such quantifiable evidence. Suffice it to say that the meaning of Friedman's numbers can be interpreted in more than one way. I prefer to focus on more substantial shortcomings. Are France and the U.S. actually a good comparison, and is it true, as Friedman claims (p. 12), that the economic and political differences between the two nations "were relatively small." Yes, the U.S. and France were both capitalist economies and republican polities. Beyond that, however, it seems to me that enormous differences loomed. One nation was a centralized, unitary state administered by a trained bureaucracy and governed by codified legal principles under Roman law. The other was a decentralized, federal state lacking a trained cadre of administrators and governed by a common law regime that gave judges enormous autonomy and authority. One nation had a relatively, large and stable agricultural sector characterized by small-scale peasant farming and a manufacturing sector dominated in the main by relatively small enterprises dependent on skilled craftsmen adept at small-batch production. The other had an agricultural sector that declined quite rapidly relative to the non-agricultural sector and in which large holdings increasingly characterized the dynamic staple-producing, export-driven side of farming; it also had an industrial sector increasingly characterized by gargantuan enterprises employing armies of machine operators to mass produce capital and consumer goods. Should one expect comparable trajectories for labor movements in Fordist and pre-Fordist economic regimes?...
[The full text of the review is available at <http://www.ialhi.org/news/i0002_14.html>.]
-- Yoshie
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