Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal. By David Brian Robertson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper

This important new study argues that American labor markets have been and are governed by employers to a degree unique among Western capitalist democracies; that this pattern of governance is the outcome of crucial struggles among unions, employers, and middle-class labor reformers from the Civil War to the New Deal; and that American political institutions strongly shaped the struggles and their outcome. In the nineteenth century, all Western countries largely protected employer control of hiring, firing, wages, hours, and working conditions, but in the twentieth century nations other than the United States began to curb employer prerogatives and extend worker protection in the form of labor regulations, trade union and collective bargaining laws, public management of labor supply and demand, and work insurance (the four major types of policy in Robertson's framework). In the United States, fewer such protections were established, and the fragmented federal and state labor policies that were enacted were often undermined by lax enforcement or court rulings. On the eve of the New Deal, Robertson shows, U.S. employers had a degree of autonomy in labor markets unparalleled in European and other industrialized countries.