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Organizing the Shipyards: Union Strategy in Three Northeast Ports, 1933-1945. By David Palmer. (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1998. xx, 264 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-2734-7.)
Organizing the Shipyards is an adept study of union formation and bureaucratization during the "glory days" of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As the first scholarly book on the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA), it also is one of the best accounts we have of the interior of 1930s shop-floor unionism.
Balance marks David Palmer's account and largely explains his success. Successful stories of unionization at New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey, and Federal Shipbuilding in the port of New York City are countered by the dissection of IUMSWA organizing difficulties in Bethlehem Steel Corporation's Fore River...