For Labor to Build Upon: Wars, Depression and Pandemic, William B. Gould IV, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

• Author: Lindsay, Joe

Despite truly noteworthy workplace organizing and strikes across the country--from Amazon, Starbucks, Peet's Coffee, and now Trader Joe's to the nascent movements in the heart of the tech sector--union membership is not keeping pace with the growing workforce. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the "share of US workers belonging to labor unions hit a historic low last year." (1) What's up?

This is the question William Gould addresses in his latest book, For Labor to Build Upon: Wars, Depression and Pandemic. (2) Gould traces how the U.S. labor movement got to where it is today and proposes a course of action to reverse the downward trend of the past fifty-plus years. Gould, a professor emeritus at Stanford Law School, is a seasoned labor arbitrator and former Chair of the National Labor Relations Board ("NLRB") under President Clinton. In recent years, Gould--a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators for over half a century--has remained active in the labor law community, serving as Chair of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in California. Among Gould's many notable accomplishments, my fellow baseball enthusiast successfully mediated an end to the long Major League Baseball players' strike in the mid-1990s. (3)

In this piece, Gould digs deep into the history of labor law before and since the depression-era inception of the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA"), and its degradation since World War II, both through the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments, as well as through Supreme Court decisions and the effects of the politicization of the NLRB itself.

For Labor to Build Upon provides a valuable historical perspective of the development of the labor movement in the United States, from the early organization of workers in Philadelphia in the 1830s, through the Civil War years, the key thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, Reconstruction (and the betrayal of Reconstruction), and the founding of the American Federation of Labor. Key differences emerged between the labor movements in the United States and through most of Europe. As Gould notes, unions in the United States for the most part have opted to pursue member-only rights and benefits, while throughout most of Europe, labor rights, benefits, and often wage rates, have applied to all through national legislation. A corollary of these differences has been that the U.S. movement has been consistently more...