Defending the “Peace of Sunday”: The Debate over Sunday Labor in the West German Steel Industry after the Second World War

Working hours were largely unregulated in nineteenth-century Germany, but a powerful alliance emerged in the 1890s between the Christian churches and the socialist labor movement to prohibit most industrial labor on Sunday, including most production of steel. In the 1950s steel management persuaded organized labor that it would be advantageous to produce steel continuously throughout the week, the prevalent system in other countries. The Evangelical Church retreated in this debate, but the Catholic Church waged a fierce and partly successful campaign from 1952 to 1961 to defend the old prohibition. Until the 1980s organized labor continued to cooperate with both major churches to keep Sunday industrial labor quite rare. Their influence declined suddenly after national reunification in 1990, however, and many Germans have come to prize individual freedom above the old principle, honored by Christians and the unchurched alike, that most people should have the same day of rest.

Labor and Chinese Exclusion in US History

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white working-class activists and their allies in the United States acted as a political vanguard in efforts to limit the entry, naturalization, and civil rights of Chinese migrants, especially laborers. First in California in the 1850s, and then throughout the North American West and the nation at large, a militant racist-nativist minority of trade unionists and labor reformers assailed Chinese as an economic, cultural, and political threat to white workers, their living standards, and the republic itself. Uniting with Democrats and independent antimonopoly parties, workers and their organizations formed the base of a cross-class anti-Chinese movement that, by the 1880s, eroded Republicans’ support for Chinese labor migrants and won severe legal restrictions against them. Organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor and its leadership, played a key role, lobbying Congress to refine and extend Chinese exclusion and erect similar barriers against other Asian migrants, including Japanese and Filipinos. Anti-Chinese labor advocates also influenced and coordinated with parallel pro-exclusion movements abroad, leading a global white working-class reaction to the Chinese labor diaspora across parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In many ways, anti-Asian working-class nativism prefigured early-20th-century measures placing unprecedented constraints on white European migration. Yet organized labor barely opposed the demise of anti-Chinese and national-quota restrictions during World War II and the Cold War, as diplomatic demands, economic expansion, and a changing international system weakened domestic political support for exclusion.

Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies: The CIO and the Taft-Hartley Act

The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that followed the end of World War II. Second, southern Democrats were concerned that powerful labor unions would organize African Americans and upset the South's racial hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party was increasingly embracing a conservative, probusiness ideology. This article contributes a new angle to this old debate by exploring the role of the CIO, its 1943 decision to create the country's first political action committee (PAC), and the consequences of its informal alliance with the Democratic Party. Using original data on CIO density and congressional voting on the Taft-Hartley Act, we demonstrate that CIO strength polarized the parties: higher levels of CIO density led Democrats to vote in favor of organized labor but led Republicans to vote in an increasingly anti-labor manner.

Warring Brothers: Constructing Komatsu’s and Caterpillar’s Globalization

We detail how the world’s two largest engineering machinery firms, Japan’s Komatsu and the us’s Caterpillar, actively managed geographical concerns to become global actors. We argue that their globalization was not a teleological given but had to be proactively made. Both the state and organized labor played significant roles in shaping their geographical evolutions, as did their efforts to outmaneuver each other spatially. Their globalization, then, was part of a broader spatial politics under capitalism.