[lbo-talk] Re: business and the new deal

[MICHAEL YATES]

After the Wagner Act was passed (although Staughton Lynd and others think that this was entirely a co-optive piece of legislation, others think it was the most radical legislation of the New Deal), business immediately began to fight against it.  First business leaders urged companies to ignore the Act, thinking that it would be found unconstitutional.  Then they began to attack the NLRB as a den of radicals and managed to get congressional hearings on the NLRB and some changes in NLRB personnel (BTW, the AFL cooperated in these efforts).  Then they moved to the states and got state legislators to enact anti-union laws, most notable of which were what are now known as right-to-work laws.  The war period muted the business attack on the Wagner Act, but after the war it began in earnest, with bad results for workers.

Michael Yates

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 16:54:45 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Paul Felton: Open Letter to Progressive
Democrats
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Message-ID: <p05200f0bbc97779ce593@[192.168.0.196]>
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uvj at vsnl.com wrote:


>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>  To respond first to Ulhas's last question: "Is it the drive for higher
>>  profitability that behind this programme?" The answer is tautological,
>>  of course, that's what being a capitalist class _means_.
>
>The question was specific to the US capitalism. The European and Japanese
>capitalisms have not found it necessary (or possible) to think of the
>rollback of the the entire framework of civil rights and the welfare state,

My friend Kim Phillips-Fein is doing a diss for the Columbia history 
department on biz reactions to the New Deal. In a phrase, her 
argument (based on lots of archival research) is that the U.S. 
business class *never* accepted the New Deal, and once WW II was 
over, set about undoing it. They were pretty marginal in politics 
until the 1970s, but now they've pretty much won the battle.

Doug

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