(19.) See especially Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 82-112, 145-176; and Eileen DeVault, United Apart: Gender and the Rise of
Craft Unionism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 75-104,179-214.
Today, the industrial unionism that originated nearly half a century ago appears practically as obsolete as
craft unionism did in 1932.
What began as a bold but narrow endorsement of industrial over
craft unionism broadened into a scathing indictment of Canada's political and economic system, and an embrace of the principles and economic model of Russian Bolshevism.
Chapter 3 is a key chapter because it makes the case for the masculine nature of the AFL's
craft unionism. DeVault examines a number of strikes that exemplify the connection of the social construction of skill to manhood in all four industries, particularly in cases where mechanization, most often associated with female, child, and immigrant labour, threatened to undermine the position of skilled workers.
He played five fictitious male unionists in five historical moments: 1890 (
craft unionism), 1912 (Industrial Workers of the World), 1946 (the boys come home), 1976 (women's liberation), and 1996 (faculty unions).
These systems of work and their corresponding social hierarchy were reflected in two very different ideas of unionism and industrial democracy: the
craft unionism of the AFL United Garment Workers (UGW) and the industrial unionism of the ACW.
In Denmark, in contrast, where
craft unionism remained quite strong, the labour movement was more often beset by splits among skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers, and their respective organizations.
In these ways, companies in the welfare capitalist realm were instrumental in enlarging the economic, political, and social boundaries and legitimacy of capitalist production in the 1950s and 1960s -- boundaries that had been challenged by industrial and a revitalized
craft unionism in the 1930s and 1940s.
When the ILGWU dropped out of the contest, the "all-in" industrial unionism of the ACWA prevailed over the
craft unionism of the GMU.
It argues that the radicalism of such organizations as the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) did not derive from the "violence associated with frontier conditions or to the rapid emergence of an exploitative corporate capitalism in the mining West" but rather to the "traditions embedded in the world of nineteenth-century
craft unionism and labor reform." (2) In this respect, Brundage's approach to the IWW differs from that of Melvyn Dubosky in We Shall Be All, in which the focus is on the economic and social changes that transformed the United States in the late 1800s.
In Canada, the continuing dominance of
craft unionism under American leadership hindered moves towards more effective political strategies.