Origins of Right to Work

Cedric de Leon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Providence College. He is the author of Party and Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics and co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Before becoming a professor he was by turns an organizer, a local union president, and a rank-and-file activist in the U.S. labor movement.

• 1. Tracing the Origins of Right to Work2. The Critique of Wage Dependency, 1828–18443. The Political Crisis over Slavery and the Rise of Free Labor, 1844–18604. The War Years, or the Triumphs and Reversals of Free Labor Ideology, 1861–18655. Antilabor Democracy and the Working Class, 1865–1887Epilogue: Neoliberalism in the RustbeltNotesReferencesIndex

Cedric de Leon's stunning new book, The Origins of the Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago, offers a powerful reinterpretation of race, class, and party in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.... The right to work, de Leon shows, was not a twentieth-century invention developed to dismantle long established New Deal accomplishments. On the contrary, right to work politics have much deeper and more interesting antecedents reaching back to the anti-slavery politics of the mid-nineteenth century.- Victoria Hattam (Perspectives on Politics) Political rhetoric is shaped by historical context. De Leon does an excellent job in using this point to help explain the historical foundations oftoday's antilabor political climate. This analysis refreshingly reorients ourattention from the macroforces shaping the industrial and now postindustrial landscape to the more microlevel, examining how what groups sayabout these issues influences what they will later do about them.- William A. Mirola (American Journal of Sociology) Refreshingly, Cedric de Leon's The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago is neither historically shallow nor politically imbalanced... de Leon has made an important contribution, one that all future scholars of anti-unionism must read.- Chad Pearson (Labour/Le Travail)