The Origins of Right to Work

Cedric de Leon
Associate Professor of Sociology
Providence College
 Gov. Rick Snyder (R-Michigan)

• Right to work is “about being pro-worker,

about giving the freedom to choose who they
associate with” (Dec. 6, 2012)
 Gov. Bruce Rauner (R-Illinois)

• “I’m not anti-union … I don’t want people to be forced to join

a union to work for a school district or a factory. Local voters
should decide. If you like the union and it works for you, you
keep it. I’m just anti-conflict of interest” (March 5, 2015)
 Mayor Joseph Medill (R-Chicago)
• “Journeymen have the
lawful right to combine by
trades or unions…but they
have no legal right to
compel any outside worker
to accept their conditions
or to sell his labor only at
their price, for that would
be to destroy his personal
freedom and liberty of
action” (May 16, 1872).
 The Puzzle
• Why did the critics of wage dependency
reorganize in favor of liberal capitalist
democracy only to reject it shortly thereafter?
• Three phases of partisan struggle
– Phase 1: The Critique of Wage Dependency
– Phase 2: The Slave Power Conspiracy
– Phase 3: Free Contract & Right to Work
 My Answer
Mass parties pressed formerly adversarial class
and ethnic voting blocs into the service of liberal
capitalist democracy and then incurred the
wrath of immigrant workers when they
abandoned the critique of wage dependency in
favor the doctrine of free contract and its core
implication, the right to work.
 Alternative Hypotheses
• American Exceptionalism & Democratization
 The Sociology of Party Politics
• Classical
– Michels (1911), Weber (1922)
– Lazarsfeld (1944, 1948)
– Lipset (1950, 1960); Lipset et al (1956, 1967)
 The Sociology of Party Politics
• Contemporary
– DiMaggio et al (1996); Manza & Brooks (1999)
– Aminzade (1993); Auyero (2001); Goldstone (2003); Redding (2003); Gerteis
(2007); Slez & Martin (2007); Chen (2009); Hiers (2013); Mudge & Chen
(2014)
– Desai (2001, 2002); Riley & Desai (2007); Tugal (2009); de Leon (2008, 2010,
2011, 2014); de Leon et al (2009, 2015)
 Political Articulation
“The process by which parties ‘suture’ together coherent blocs
and cleavages from a disparate set of constituencies and
individuals, who, even by virtue of sharing circumstances, may
not necessarily share the same political identity” (de Leon et al
2015: 2)
1. Parties politicize putative social differences…
2. …because winning requires framing a natural majority who
should rule and an illegitimate minority who should not
3. The consent to rule is impermanent and thus always at risk;
when a coalition partner withdraws consent, power may
pass from hegemony to domination
 Why Chicago?
• A key theater in the
political crisis over slavery
– Lincoln and Douglas
– 1860 Republican National
Convention
• The vanguard of late-19th
century labor unrest
– Haymarket, the first strike
for an eight-hour day
– Leaders: Albert Parsons,
Andrew Cameron
 Data
Three sets of data
1. Individual-level manuscript census data cross-checked against
archival ward-level electoral returns
2. Content analysis of party and labor newspapers
3. Private papers
Archives
- Chicago History Museum
- Newberry Library
- Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University Library
- Lincoln Library
- Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Graduate Library
 Timeline
• Phase I: Jacksonian Era (1828-1844)
• Phase II: Political Crisis over Slavery (1846-1865)
– Mexican War (1846-1848)
– Compromise of 1850
– Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)
– Civil War (1861-1865)

• Phase III: Reconstruction (1865-1877) & Gilded

Age (1878-1900)
– First strike for the eight-hour day (1867)
– The Great Railroad Strike (1877)
– Great Upheaval, Knights of Labor, & Haymarket (1886-1887)
 The Players
• Whigs (1836-1852)
– Abraham Lincoln

• Regular Dems (1828-)

– Stephen A. Douglas

• Free Soiler Dems (1846-1850)

– John Wentworth

• Republicans (1856-)
– Abraham Lincoln
Battle of Halsted, August 1877
Vorwaerts Turner Hall, August 1877
Haymarket, May 1886
Phase I: The Critique of Wage Dependency

The effect of cheap land in the West

“would be to invite a large number of individuals
who had settled in eastern cities, who were half-
starved and dependent on those who employed
them, to go to the West, where with little funds,
they could secure a small farm on which to
subsist and . . . get rid of that feeling of
dependence which made them slaves.”
 Phase II: The Slave Power Conspiracy

“A denial to the mass of mankind of their

equal right to a portion of the earth, must, in the
course of events, build up a state of society in
which the monopolists of the earth will
accumulate all the wealth of the country while
the toiling millions, who are the producers of
that wealth, must become wage slaves, and sink
into hopeless destitution and famine.”
(Gem of the Prairie, Dec. 8, 1848)
Table 1. Percentage Share of Chicago’s Popular Vote for the
Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1852 by Ward
Ward 1852 (Pierce)
1 48.7
2 In Ward 1 Count
3 65.1
4 74.9
5 56.1
6 73.2
7 86.8
8 63.5
9 In Ward 8 Count
10 n/a
Phase II: The Slave Power Conspiracy
German workers condemned the Kansas-
Nebraska Act for “reducing the free foreigner to
the position now occupied by the slave, who is
politically without any rights, depriving him of all
influence against the phalanx of slaveholders…We
have lost our confidence in, and must look with
distrust upon, the leaders of the Democratic
party, to whom, hitherto, we had confidence
enough to think that they paid some regard to our
interests.”
(Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1854)
 Table 2. Percentage Share of Chicago’s Popular Vote for
Democratic Presidential Candidates, 1852 & 1860 by Ward

Ward 1852 (Pierce) 1860 (Douglas)

1 48.7 36.5
2 In Ward 1 Count 42.1
3 65.1 46.3
4 74.9 50.05
5 56.1 “731 short of majority”
6 73.2 34.8
7 86.8 48.2
8 63.5 44.2
9 In Ward 8 Count 49.1
10 n/a 57.8
Phase II: The Slave Power Conspiracy
Democrats “cry ‘the people, the people’” for election
purposes but “degrade every poor white man below
even the slave himself…the degradation of all free
labor, and as an inevitable necessity, the mental and
physical enslavement of the great mass of the people.”
(Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1854)
“A preference for white men and white labor” vs.
“intense ‘niggerism’”
(Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1857)
“A Scheme for Africanizing Chicago”
(Chicago Tribune, Jan. 5, 1859)
 Phase III: Free Contract & Right to Work

“The right of each man to labor as much or as little

as he chooses and to enjoy his own earnings, is the
very foundation stone of free government … Take this
right from the workingman and he is as completely
enslaved as the Negro was five years ago.” The eight-
hour strike was therefore “an effort to prevent men
from selling their own property (their labor) on such
terms as were agreeable to both seller and purchaser.
It was the voice of the slave power crying out – You
shall work only when, where and on such terms as we
dictate.”
(Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1867)
 Phase III: Free Contract & Right to Work

“The right of every man in Chicago to work as

many or as few hours as he pleases, and to be
secure in the enjoyment of that right, must and
will be protected. The right of every employer in
Chicago to manage and control his own property
and to make and carry out such bargains with his
employes [sic] as he and they may agree to, must
and will also be protected … rioters should be
swept out of existence by a discharge of artillery”
(Chicago Times, May 4, 1867)
 Phase III: Free Contract & Right to Work

“It stands us in hand here to determine

that men shall work, – and that no crowd of a
dozen, or of a hundred, or a thousand, shall
keep honest labor from the privileges of work.
[Cheers.] Sir, work is worship. Every one has a
right to work. Let every man that wants to work
have the privilege, and let the remainder of us
see that the muscle that wants to labor shall be
protected.”
(Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1877)
 Phase III: Free Contract & Right to Work

Workers “had settled the black labor

question, and now … would settle the white
labor question…The course of the [Democratic]
Times and the [Republican] Tribune showed
them that they had nothing to hope from the
old parties. They would both join when capital is
endangered. Both were catspaws of the same
power – capital.”
(Chicago Times, May 10, 1867)
 Phase III: Free Contract & Right to Work

“That they lived in an age of freedom was

true, but there were forms of slavery worse than
that from which the black men had been
released. There were thousands of white slaves,
who spent their whole lives putting money in
the pockets of a few, and were worse off in old
age than in youth.”
(Chicago Tribune, Mar. 18, 1872)
Neoliberalism: Bait and Switch
Table 3. Michigan and Wisconsin Union
Membership by Sector, 2013-2014
(Source: 2014 CPS Data)

‘13mem ‘13% ’14mem ‘14% Δmem Δ%

MI
Private 375,707 11 353,746 9.9 -21,961 -1.1
Public 255,747 54.8 230,847 50.5 -24,900 -4.3
Total 631,454 16.2 584,593 14.5 -46,861 -1.7
WI
Private 178,471 8.2 182,373 8.2 3,902 0
Public 138,124 35.8 123,239 30.9 -14,885 -4.9
Total 316,595 12.3 305,612 11.6 10,983 -0.7
U.S Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue and AFL-CIO President
Richard Trumka agree that “American workers should have a first crack at
available jobs” (February 2013)
Neoliberalism: Political Articulation
• Economic change matters, but it has no
natural political valence
• Parties mobilize political will for or against
liberalization by naturalizing and
denaturalizing social differences
 Neoliberalism: Failed Articulation
• Some parties can interpellate docile neoliberal
subjects, but sometimes the dispossessed are
either unable or unwilling to cooperate, at
times due to pre-existing racial logics
• Parties, wielders of state power, then employ
violence to subdue the unruly masses
Cedric de Leon
Associate Professor of Sociology
Providence College
cdeleon@providence.edu