An original analysis of the relationship between slavery and the labor movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
During the rise of the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, why were American workers unable to organize inclusive trade unions like those formed by their counterparts in the United Kingdom? Comparing American and British capitalism in the port cities of Baltimore and Liverpool and the steel cities of Pittsburgh and Sheffield, Rudi Batzell reveals that the answer lies in the legacies of slavery and entrenched structures of racial inequality. Strikebreaking succeeded more often in the United States because landless Black Americans were, out of economic desperation, more likely to become scabs and fracture the class solidarity of any union movement. Batzell shows, in short, how racism was and is deeply connected to class, migration, and capitalism in a global economy marked by slavery and empire. In emphasizing the geography of economic inequality, this book offers new clarity on the late-nineteenth-century successes and failures of working-class formation. More broadly, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery makes it clear that the pursuit of justice today will require sustained economic reparations for slavery and colonialism.

Rudi Batzell is associate professor of history at Lake Forest College. His research has appeared in journals including Past & Present, Gender & History, and the Journal of Social History.
 

Introduction

Part I. Rural Peripheries, Labor Uprisings, and the Migrant Strikebreaker
1. Near-Peripheries: Land and the Reserve Army of Labor
2. Parallel Rebellions: The Knights of Labor and the New Unionism
3. Divergence: Strikebreaking at Labor’s Turning Point

Part II. The Pivot of the 1890s: Organized Workers and the Construction of Racial Boundaries
4. Drawing the Boundaries of Craft: The Challenge of Inclusive Unionism
5. Black Workers and the Boundaries of White Supremacy in the United States
6. National Boundaries: Immigration Restriction in the Shadow of Slavery
7. Drawing the Boundaries of White Supremacy in the British Empire

Part III. Homes, Sports, and the Rise of Unions: Solidarity and Segregation in Workers’ Social Worlds
8. Solidarity and Segregation in the Industrial Suburb
9. Fordist Masculinity: Workers Organized in the Sports Bureaucracy
10. Crowds, Labor Bureaucrats, and the Politics of Redistribution

Conclusion: The Shadow of Slavery, Present and Future

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index