| Abstract: | Recently historians have produced several important synthetic works explaining the decline of labour. Much of the scholarship advancing or supporting declension narratives of US labour are national studies grounded in political and urban history. In declension narratives, national business, political and labour leaders emerge as the primary actors, while pushing rank-and-file workers to the side. Declension narratives also neglect serious analyses of race and class formation, gender, radicalism and workers’ agency. This article argues for an approach that integrates more social history concerns into twentieth-century US labour history without forsaking the most illuminating contributions of declension narratives. Such a model illuminates and interrogates workers’ agency in response to political and economic transformations after 1945. An approach integrating social history would contextualize the construction of solidarity and identity formation in political and economic transformations such as deindustrialization, the rise of the retail and also the service economy. Rather than explain the history of US labour from a national perspective, the approach would also feature local studies. This article suggests that, by incorporating some or all of the aforementioned points, scholars of US labour history could deepen or challenge declension narratives that either marginalize workers or reduce them to passive victims. |
