Can someone recommend a book or two on the history of labor unions and their impact on society from an Austrian perspective?
Woods recommends: "Industrial Democracy in America" by Howard Dickman. It doesn't seem to be necessarily from an Austrian perspective, but a free market perspective.
Here is the Woods video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlX-QORf1KY
Howard Zinn "A People's History of the United States"
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
jonthompson:Can someone recommend a book or two on the history of labor unions and their impact on society from an Austrian perspective?
This is the best piece of work on labor union history I have read from an Austrian.
A History of Labor Unions From Colonial Times to 2009
Tom Woods also covers labor unions in one of his lectures in the media section (video is available at the MisesMedia YouTube channel)
Major Episodes in American Labor History: An Austrian Reevaluation, Part I
Major Episodes in American Labor History: An Austrian Reevaluation, Part II
You can read some of my opinions on labor unions here
http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/7925/150565.aspx
Howard Zinn is not an Austrian, he probably had no conception of Austrian methods.
I willflully left out the "austrian author" aspect. I'm willing to bet it's far more accurate than any bourgie apologentsia revisionist will give you.
But I'm always down for opposing ideologies, so.. I'll check out your austrian perspective.
Some unions were secret societies with secret oaths, and unionists engaged in intimidation, threats, vandalism and violence, especially against uncooperative workers denounced as subhuman “scabs” and “blacklegs.”
Sources, specifics, anything? I'm not saying these unions did not exist or practice such practices. But you can't just assert it, and act like that was the dominant methods for unions. For all we know that could be 1 union, or all of them... because "some" is not an academic term.
As in England, threats and violence accompanied strikes. The typical strike aimed to force employers to pay more than necessary for labor available on the open market while the silent corollary was that everyone – union member or not – must “strike” too, that is, withhold his or her labor, willing or not, and refuse employment at pay less than that demanded by strikers. Alternatively, the employer must be intimidated and decisively discouraged from hiring replacement workers (“strikebreakers”)
What a sneaky tactic. Say violence and threats came with, then show what they did, but don't bring up the violence again. So you initially tie violence with striking, but don't have to back it up... Genius! He does afterwards mention something from 1830, but he was supposed to be talking about the colonial era. He's just jumping around and picking out single instances, tying them to unionism at large... very convenient.
By 1810 union tactics were fully formed: bargain “collectively,” demand fixed minimum pay rates, closed shops, strikes, picket lines, scab lists, strike funds, travelling cards, unity among skilled and unskilled workers, and solidarity among locals of the same trade
^ Where is the violence there? There doesn't need to be, because his bias has already initially tied violence with unionism, so all he has to do is give evidence of unionism, and those ideologues sympathetic to his cause will tie it to violence themselves. Revisionism...
But how could threatened collective violence and actual violence
^ That's what I mean. So far he has shown one threat of violence by union members, yet all union action to the author is now "threat of violence."
I need not go any further, what a predictable piece of pseudo academia.
Epicurus ibn Kalhoun:I need not go any further, what a predictable piece of pseudo academia.
You're welcome to challenge me in that thread I linked, however your hasty critique of Reynolds is a strawman, and a waste of all our time.
His whole article is a straw man, and I already explained why
@A People's History of the United States.
Really?
Zinn and Beard are better than the mainstream, they're just of irregular quality due to their Progressive sympathies.