(From the text) "More generally, business owners are used to being in charge, and they don't want to be hassled by people they have come to think of as mere employees, not as breadwinners for their families or citizens of the same city and country."

Uh, how about switching that around and presenting the employees as the greedy ones benefiting from the capital investments of the business owners to become breadwinners in the first place? [eyes rolling]

"But industrial development in the early nineteenth century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status."

Automation is always a threat to labor. That's not the employers' faults, however. Workers don't have a right to a job at a specific wage. What you do have a right to do is go your own way and out-compete. Or change your line of work.

"However, the new labor leaders did speak out against increasingly frequent claims by publicists of the day (building on the ideas of Adam Smith) that the new economic conditions were simply due to abstract and neutral economic laws, which of course became a familiar refrain for employers and all those social scientists who think that it's all about free markets and not at all about power..."

Economic laws are as neutral as they can be. It's called Reality and there's nothing you can do about it - except complain and lose your job. Should employers be fair to their employees? It's in their interest so YES. But who has the most to lose? The worker who loses a job or the employer who loses all their capital AND their job?

"Instead, the concept of collective bargaining is the outcome of a power struggle that reflects the underlying balance of power in favor of the corporations."

At least the author admits his own bias...

"Furthermore, the federal government had to take over the railroads in 1917 because their owners could not make deliveries in a timely and efficient way, thereby hampering the war effort."

Yeah, right. I'm going to bet there was something else going on here and it had to do with government bureaucracy...

"However, there was concern on the part of Southern Democrats about the possible inclusion of agriculture as an "industry," because they did not want to provide any encouragement toward unionization on the part of what was at the time a completely subjugated, and overwhelmingly African American, workforce."

What? Democrats were taking advantage of blacks even in the 1930's? Say it ain't so! (It was so.)

"It also seemed possible that the employers in those industries had reason to hope that bargains with unions might help put an end to destructive competition through cuts in wages and prices..."

Not sure who's arguing this but one of the two is delusional. Neither is looking at the market conditions - including technology - but are relying on historical precedent as an excuse to do nothing. That's not how to run a successful business.

Question to the author: what is an "ultraconservative." (This word gets used extensively when talking about political wrangling in the 1930's, but it references Democrats which even twenty years earlier had turned towards Progressivism under Woodrow Wilson.)

"The only solace for organized labor was that it fended off repeated efforts by the conservative coalition to eliminate the Davis-Bacon Act and restrict union involvement in politics..."

This author needs to do more history on the Davis-Bacon Act and its damaging effects. First, the Act was created solely to allow unionized whites to maintain government contracts for roads in the face of black-owned entrepreneurship. Second, it has been primarily responsible for the high costs of transportation here in the United States where a typical Federal construction project pays labor at a minimum of $35/hr while a commensurate state project typically starts at $13/hr.

Final note: look at that last graph noting public sector union growth/size. Of all the evils in this world next to socialism, public sector unions are definitely top five for me.