Book Reviews

The Once and Future Union: The Rise and Fall of the United Rubber Workers, 1935-1995. By Bruce M. Meyer. (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2002. xviii, 457 pp., photographs, index. Paper $27.95, ISBN 1-88483-685-2.)

Bruce M. Meyer's account of the "rise and fall" of the United Rubber Workers is a welcome addition to the region's historical literature. It provides a useful overview of an institution that was once thought to play a critical role in the region's economy and unquestionably did play a central role in the lives of many individuals. It rises above that level in portraying the last third of the union's history, the years from the mid-l970s to l995, when the URW became a symbol of industrial decline in Ohio and the Midwest. Yet because Meyer devotes approximately two thirds of the book to those years, he inadvertently creates the impression that the URW's "fall" was more important than either its "rise," in the l930s, or the long period, ranging from l940 to the 1970s, when it represented virtually all U.S. and Canadian tire workers and bargained aggressively to improve their wages and working conditions. 

Meyer is a traditionalist in portraying the URW largely through the personalities and conflicts of its top elected officials, especially its presidents. His most important contribution is to record the URW's internal political history, as an ever-changing group of union officers schemed to control the international union. With a few isolated exceptions, personal ambition and a desire for strong leadership (nearly always defined in terms of personal charisma and assertiveness) were the driving forces behind this competition. Still, the results were generally, perhaps surprisingly, positive: URW presidents were uniformly hard working, honest, and responsive to their members' concerns. Unlike the CEOs whose salaries and perks rise regardless of performance, URW officials were acutely aware that they had to produce in order to keep their jobs. Critics might complain that their preoccupation with immediate problems precluded any sustained consideration of long-term goals or broader strategies, but it is also true that more secure, better known union leaders such as Walter Reuther and Philip Murray did not devote much attention to strategic issues either. 

Assuming the relevance and value of Meyer's approach, the book's most notable shortcoming is its brief and cursory treatment of the first half of the URW's history. Meyer was able to draw on a relatively rich secondary literature for the l930s, but faced greater challenges in summarizing the following period, which has attracted far less attention. His unwillingness to dig deeper into the labor history of the l940s and l950s, the union's heyday, or even to explore the tumultuous URW factionalism of the late l940s, is a major disappointment. Since the activists of that era are rapidly disappearing, he might have called attention to the possibilities of that era before the mid-century history of the rubber industry and the URW is irretrievably lost.

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