Law, Rights, and Local Labor Politics in California, 1901–1911: Reflections on Recent Labor Law Historiography

Abstract

In a 1987 essay on labor and the American constitutional order, Leon Fink observed that, in “American labor history the law has yet to be fully explored.” Fink's observation is less true today than when he made it some ten years ago; indeed, even as the essay appeared, a number of historians, legal scholars, and political scientists were already beginning to construct new interpretations of American labor history by focusing on the complex and often decisive impact of the law and legal discourse on labor strategy, politics, and ideology. Although Fink's wide-ranging essay surveyed labor's encounters with the Constitution from the antebellum period to the post-World War II era, he concentrated on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which organized labor moved away from a broad politics of reform toward a more conservative, apolitical trade unionism. Fink notes that it was during this period of “‘exceptionalist’ drift” – when the developmental trajectory of the American labor movement be gan to diverge from its European counterparts – that “legal issues took on their most determining historical role.”