Labor in America
Labor in America, 10th ed., by Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2025)
Revised editions of classic textbooks rarely undergo extensive rewriting and reorganization. Such is decidedly not the case with Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America. Published on the eve of Donald J. Trump’s re-election to the United States presidency in 2024, the tenth edition of this work traces the path of American workers from their colonial origins through his first election in 2016 and concludes with the aftermath of the election of 2020, noting the “continuing decline” of labor union membership during Joe Biden’s presidency. Throughout this volume are wage earners seeking to improve their working conditions, most prominently through trade unionism.
The authors’ preface acknowledges that the current edition “has changed enormously” since the text’s initial appearance, authored by Foster Rhea Dulles, in 1949. Such change is evident in the table of contents, which reveals significant reorganization and a rethinking of the place of traditional trade unionism in workers’ lives. For example, gone are chapters headed “Toward National Organization” and “The Rise and Decline of the Knights of Labor,” and inserted are ones on “Irrepressible Conflicts, 1840 to 1860” and “The Incomplete Triumph of Free Labor, 1861to 1877,” shifting the focus to slavery and race relations as well as institutional organization. Similarly, there is a new chapter section on race and gender in the American Federation of Labor and a rearrangement of sections on radicalism and reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In sum, discussion of race and immigration appears in no chapter heads and only three subheads in the ninth edition, but is prevalent throughout the tenth, beginning with colonial bound labor and continuing to the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
As a textbook for United States labor history courses, this volume is without peer and is more accurately a history of the American people, with the diversity of those who toiled woven throughout. Dubofsky and McCartin begin by describing a world that was a “history of settler colonialism that flourished on land forcibly taken from inhabitants whose ideas of ownership and labor it replaced with alien European models.” It is “the history of an economy reliant on bound labor—enslaved and indentured—and resting on patriarchal structures and paternalistic assumptions.”
Transcending race, gender and national origin, workers created a new republic, overcoming Old and New World attitudes to seek justice while forming journeymen’s societies, trade unions, and national labor organizations. Accordingly, chattel slavery is an integral part of the story as is the era of Reconstruction and its aftermath, including the contributions of Black workers to late nineteenth century trade unionism. Often ignored or minimized by historians, such efforts likewise extend to our own times. They stand in importance alongside the record of labor violence, be it in Pittsburgh in 1877, Chicago in 1886, or Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, and labor radicalism as exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). This is American history without cosmetics.
Though this volume was published without the benefit of lengthy chronological reflection concerning recent developments, it is refreshing to see what might otherwise be dismissed as “current events” in historical perspective. When the Great Recession began, in 2007-2008, the labor force was weakened not only by global economic forces, but also by corporations that shed their “responsibility for their workers’ welfare” while making them more flexible. The wreckage included 16.9 percent Black American unemployment. Similarly, when President Barack Obama succeeded in enacting health care to the uninsured via the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Dubofsky and McCartin succinctly describe its close call when Republican critics nearly destroyed it in 2017. On the 2016 election the authors note Donald Trump’s nativism, racism and sexism. Advancing the narrative to his first presidency, the authors cite his “selective” support of worker issues and general absence of “pro-worker policies.” Their account of Trump and his white working-class support is direct, hard-hitting, and American political and labor history at its best. Such forthrightness is refreshing in an era when false patriotism and morality seem to dominate classrooms and libraries. It is the inclusiveness and honesty of Labor and America that make its new edition especially welcome.
Reviewed by Robert D. Parmet, York College of the City University of New York