Managing Industrial Decline

624 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The deep sociocultural divisions within the workforce were an asset to a management that, as Meyer shows, never conceded union recognition and fought UAW Local 248 at every step, using the tensions between batch and production workers as a lever against the UAW. Consequently, union security emerged as a persistent source of labor-management conflict and the main issue in several sharply fought strikes. Local 248 wanted a closed shop—mandatory union membership—to mitigate against the centripetal forces generated by internal differentiation among Allis-Chalmers employees. Management was equally opposed to union security, as it feared industrial unionists would be able to translate a firm base in the plant into an effective challenge to managerial authority. As long as Local 248 remained insecure, management could always count on conservative attitudes among its valuable skilled employees to blunt union militancy. During World War II, when the government forced AllisChalmers to implement limited forms of union security, Meyer sensitively shows how the union’s “dense shop steward and committee men system” (p. 105) did indeed undermine managerial authority. Meyer argues that it was management’s determination to uproot union power that lay behind the vociferous attacks on the allegedly Communist leaders of Local 248 immediately after World War II. He relentlessly describes the tawdry story of the virulent newspaper articles and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee carefully orchestrated by Allis-Chalmers officials, aided and abetted by UAW President Walter Reuther and conservative forces within the Wisconsin Congress of Industrial Organizations. These external pressures under­ mined a long strike—fought over union security—that began in 1946 and ended in the spring of 1947 with the grievance procedure weakened and the union’s institutional structure shattered. Dozens of militant unionists permanently lost theirjobs and were blacklisted from employ­ ment in the Milwaukee area. Several union officials served terms in prison for allegedly concealing membership in the Communist Party. In the end, Meyer emphasizes that it was the power of the state and of corporate capital that exploited division among batch- and mass-production workers so as to “unmake” militant unionism at Allis-Chalmers. Roger Horowitz Dr. Horowitz is associate director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. Managing Industrial Decline: Entrepreneurship in the British Coal Industry between the Wars. By Michael Dintenfass. Columbus: Ohio State Univer­ sity Press, 1992. Pp. xvii+290; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $69.50. The title of this book accurately conveys its theme: a case study of management performance in one of those “old industries” that contrib­ uted to Britain’s much-debated relative industrial decline. The volume TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 625 squares up to Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick’s 1986 work (The Decline of the British Economy [Oxford]), which damned Britain’s institu­ tional arrangements, and entrepreneurs and managers for failing to change those arrangements. Michael Dintenfass not only studies an industry neglected by the Elbaum-Lazonick contributors, he takes four representative cases to make exact company-level comparisons. The four companies operated in the Northeast of England and West Yorkshire and were chosen to reflect diverse geological conditions, firm sizes, ownership types, sources of management, and markets. In Northumberland, where bituminous coals were raised from relatively shallow depths and mostly dispatched to export markets, the Ashington Coal Company, founded in the 1840s by Quakers, employed nearly 9,000 workers in 1913. The Throckley Coal Company, much smaller, sent two-thirds of its coals to its owners’ steelworks on the Tyne. In West Yorkshire, where softer coals suitable for domestic burning lay at much greater depths than in the Northeast, Henry Briggs Son & Company employed 5,000 miners in 1914, was run by professionally trained engineers, and had operated a profit-sharing scheme since 1865. Waterloo Main, in the same field, was smaller, mined thinner seams, and was owned and run by a single family. How did the owners and managers of these firms perform in the volatile and shrinking markets of the 1920s and 1930s? Ashington remarkably increased its output by 37 percent in the years 1913-38 without increasing its labor force. Throckley

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