“Striking deaths” at their roots: Assaying the social determinants of extreme labor-management violence in US labor history—1877–1947

Abstract

The seven decades framed by the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and institutionalization of organized labor in the wake of World War II constituted a unique period of US labor relations, one that labor historians have identified as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation. Despite long-standing scholarly interest in the issues of labor-management conflict, however, important questions regarding the causes of extreme labor-management violence within the United States have never been adequately addressed. In this paper, I utilize a recently compiled and unique data set of American strike fatalities to statistically model the causes of extreme strike violence in the United States. The time-series evidence suggests that picket-line violence increased in association with (1) the struggle for and against unionization and (2) economic desperation associated with tightening labor markets. The results also both depict the stultifying effect of massacres and suggest that state support for labor’s right to organize tended to decrease the likelihood of violence and vice versa. This paper not only thus provides fresh insights into classic questions, but also offers a basis for both transhistorical and international comparison.