Labor Visions and State Power

This study explains why labour has played a more limited role in US national politics than it has in many other industrial societies. It documents how the American Federation of Labor developed a deep mistrust of politics and devised other means of advancing its workers' interests.

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Why has labor played a more limited role in national politics in the United States than it has in other advanced industrial societies? Victoria Hattam demonstrates that voluntarism, as American labor's policy was known, was the American Federation of Labor's strategic response to the structure of the American state, particularly to the influence of American courts. The AFL's strategic calculation was not universal, however. This book reveals the competing ideologies and acts of interpretation that produced these variations in state-labor relations.

Originally published in 1993.

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