ABSTRACT
Historians have recently argued that much of the ‘exceptionalism’ of the American industrial-relations system results from the attitudes, behaviour and characteristics of the employing class and business community. Much of their work concentrates on large firms. Given that their principal concern is the development of bureaucratic methods of production and personnel management, this emphasis has been understandable; but perhaps it has also been a little misleading.1 One cannot safely assume that trends observed in the core economy give an accurate idea of what was happening in smaller firms. This chapter offers a complementary account of the history of employment relations in America’s emerging industrial periphery. It examines a group of small and middle-sized metalworking firms through the open-shop era. Historians tell us that their industry was a storm-centre of managerially induced transformations in technology, the labour process and the experience of work. It was certainly one of the most important bastions of employer opposition to unionism.2 The American labour movement’s weakness in the metal trades resulted only in part from the well-publicized resistance of ‘center firms’ like US Steel, International Harvester or National Cash Register. Failure to expand or preserve membership in middle-sized firms was also crucial to the stagnation of metal-trades unionism in the 1900s and its decay in the 1920s.
