Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to quite different ends: African Americans wanted access to unions, while right-to-work litigants wanted to be free of them. Although the civil rights movement went on to dismantle Jim Crow laws, and the right-to-work movement had the support of some of the nation’s most prominent politicians and opinion makers, their conflicting purposes sapped support for the workplace Constitution and ultimately led to its collapse.
The Workplace Constitution tells for the first time the story of anti–New Deal conservatives’ legal campaigns, recovers overlooked civil rights and labor advocacy, and moves constitutional history into little-explored venues such as administrative agencies. In recounting the civil rights and right-to-work movements’ surprising successes and explaining their ultimate failure, the book provides a fresh perspective on postwar conservatism and liberalism, emphasizing how law intertwined their fates and how that entanglement in turn shaped the law. Those interested in the history of the United States’ conservative, labor, and civil rights movements; its Constitution and political institutions; and the legal rights of its workers will find much of interest here. In the twenty-first century, the workplace Constitution has all but vanished. This book illuminates what has been gained and lost in its demise, both in the workplace and beyond.
Keywords
Constitutional law, administrative law, workplace rights, employment discrimination, jurisprudence, civil rights, legal history, labor history, political history, law and politics, labor relations, unions, litigation, right-to-work, regulation, state action doctrine, race, agencies, liberal, conservative
Publication Title
The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right
Repository Citation
Lee, Sophia Z., "Introduction to The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right" (2014). All Faculty Scholarship. 1502.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1502
Included in
Administrative Law Commons, African American Studies Commons, American Politics Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Labor and Employment Law Commons, Labor History Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Commons, Legal History Commons, Legislation Commons, Litigation Commons, Policy History, Theory, and Methods Commons, Political History Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, United States History Commons
Publication Citation
The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014).