bwaber@bookwyrm.social reviewed The Bosses' Union by Vilja Hulden
A Unique Dive into a Formative Period of Labor Rights
5 stars
This is an incredible book, with Hulden zooming in on the formative decades of the labor movement to illuminate how employer organizations, principally led by the infamous NAM, worked to deny worker rights. While these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, this book shows their tight integration with political networks to delay gains for organized labor for decades, engaging in astroturfing campaigns and coordinated advertising boycotts of pro-labor newspapers to warp the public narrative. Hulden even uses word embeddings to illustrate how the usage of certain terms changed over time, one of the best uses of computational linguistics I've seen in a historical work. This is an essential book for understanding the legal and social roots of the structural scaffolding of organized labor in the US, and further convinced me that the NAM is the most corrosive organization of the 20th century that most people haven't heard of. Highly recommend
This is an incredible book, with Hulden zooming in on the formative decades of the labor movement to illuminate how employer organizations, principally led by the infamous NAM, worked to deny worker rights. While these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, this book shows their tight integration with political networks to delay gains for organized labor for decades, engaging in astroturfing campaigns and coordinated advertising boycotts of pro-labor newspapers to warp the public narrative. Hulden even uses word embeddings to illustrate how the usage of certain terms changed over time, one of the best uses of computational linguistics I've seen in a historical work. This is an essential book for understanding the legal and social roots of the structural scaffolding of organized labor in the US, and further convinced me that the NAM is the most corrosive organization of the 20th century that most people haven't heard of. Highly recommend