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<DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Michael Yates</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Message: 1<BR>Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 16:54:45 -0400<BR>From: Doug Henwood
<<A href="mailto:dhenwood@panix.com">dhenwood@panix.com</A>><BR>Subject:
Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Paul Felton: Open Letter to Progressive<BR>Democrats<BR>To:
<A href="mailto:lbo-talk@lbo-talk.org">lbo-talk@lbo-talk.org</A><BR>Message-ID:
<<A
href="mailto:p05200f0bbc97779ce593@[192.168.0.196">p05200f0bbc97779ce593@[192.168.0.196</A>]><BR>Content-Type:
text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"<BR><BR><A
href="mailto:uvj@vsnl.com">uvj@vsnl.com</A> wrote:<BR><BR>>Carrol Cox
wrote:<BR>><BR>>> To respond first to Ulhas's last question: "Is
it the drive for higher<BR>>> profitability that behind this
programme?" The answer is tautological,<BR>>> of course, that's what
being a capitalist class _means_.<BR>><BR>>The question was specific to
the US capitalism. The European and Japanese<BR>>capitalisms have not found
it necessary (or possible) to think of the<BR>>rollback of the the entire
framework of civil rights and the welfare state,<BR><BR>My friend Kim
Phillips-Fein is doing a diss for the Columbia history <BR>department on biz
reactions to the New Deal. In a phrase, her <BR>argument (based on lots of
archival research) is that the U.S. <BR>business class *never* accepted the New
Deal, and once WW II was <BR>over, set about undoing it. They were pretty
marginal in politics <BR>until the 1970s, but now they've pretty much won the
battle.<BR><BR>Doug<BR></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>