Mortal politics of the U.S. labor movement: When? Where? Why? Success?

The early U.S. labor movement faced a highly repressive environment, one often characterized as the most violent of all Western capitalist nations.  Drawing on our unique data set, we address several key questions surrounding the study of death as the ultimate mode of repressive politics.  We ask when and where the labor movement faced lethal violence and offer an empirically-grounded theoretical explanation for why lethal bloodshed was directed toward the labor movement unevenly across, time, space, and industry.  We also offer some preliminary evidence on the question of success—i.e., did the use of lethal violence against the labor movement actually retard its self-organization?

We find that strike-related deaths were disproportionately located in the historical period between the 1870s and the Second World War, with regional and industrial peaks shifting over time.  Over this highly contentious era, there were no less than 270 strikes wherein at least one person was killed; at least 1,150 perished in strike-related actions, and no fewer than 240 were eliminated in movement-related actions other than strikes.  The long-term forces driving the epoch of violent contention between capital and labor were shaped primarily by: the lack of labor rights that made it relatively easy to treat labor self-activity as outlaw or insurgent; and forces of armed repression were heavily privatized and available for use by employers against labor uprisings.  Both conditions changed in significant ways by World War II.  We also find that lethal violence tended to undermine the fortunes of labor by retarding union formation, at least in the period before WW II.

Our findings have important implications for the U.S. exceptionalism debate, for theories of labor organizing, and for the role of violent repression in the study of social movements.