RIGHT-TO-WORK: HOW WORLD WAR II AGRICULTURAL POLICY SHAPED 20TH CENTURY LABOR HISTORY

This dissertation examines early right-to-work (RTW) legislation in the United States South and, in particular, its origins in the WWII-era Southern agricultural economy. RTW laws, which ban union security agreements requiring all workers covered by a union contract to join or contribute to the cost of that union, have been proven to limit workers’ ability to collectively advocate for better wages, dictate working conditions, and influence electoral politics. While the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 enshrined states’ ability to pass RTW laws banning union securing agreements, two states, Arkansas and Florida, passed RTW legislation three years prior in 1944. This dissertation argues that, despite the exclusion of agricultural workers from New Deal federal labor law, the first successful RTW campaigns were executed by farm employers (specifically, the American Farm Bureau Federation) in response to farmworker organizing during the Second World War. Specifically, these campaigns responded to farmworkers and farm union leaders using the domestic context of WWII—in particular the high demand for farm labor, the industrialization of farm work, and the federal government’s involvement in the coordination, organization, and compensation of farmworkers through the wartime Farm Labor Program—in order to gain labor organizing protections for farmworkers, including union security. Existing historical literature on RTW has focused on the spread of RTW laws in the industrializing southwest “Sunbelt” region of the country in the post-war period after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. This dissertation returns to RTW’s origins, demonstrating how the movement’s early agrarian, Southern orchestrators did not just undercut the possibility that farmworkers would finally join the broader labor movement. They also went on to share their experiences and insights with both federal lawmakers and anti-union actors across the country, in turn shaping and enabling a movement that altered twentieth century labor relations and union organizing for all workers.