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This chapter examines the rise and fall of the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations (Dunlop Commission) in the early 1990s. It uses the events surrounding the Commission to provide an insight into the dynamics of the struggle over federal labor law reform. The inability of the Dunlop Commission to get labor and management representatives to agree on proposals for labor law reform demonstrated, yet again, that employer opposition is the greatest obstacle to the protection of organizing rights and modernization of labor law. For the nation's major management associations, labor law reform is a life and death issue, and nothing is more important to them than defeating revisions to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) intended to strengthen organizing rights. The failure of labor law reform in the 1990s also demonstrated that the labor movement would never win reform by means of an “inside the beltway” legislative campaign – designed to push reform through the US Senate – because the principal employer organizations would always exercise more influence in Congress. Instead, unions must engage with public opinion, and convince union and nonunion members about the importance of reform. Thus far, however, they lack an effective language with which to do this.

While Hemingway noted that all stories end in death, this story begins with a death in the family. I recount my mother's (Ma's) death from a sociological point of view, making use of an autoethnographic perspective. Such a perspective encourages a frank portrayal of my involvement in the story as well as more detached reflection of various behaviors (enacted by Ma, her children, her grandchildren, and her friends). I also focus on Ma as a child of the Depression, a young adult during World War II, and a casualty of a middle class lifestyle. Her death, while unwanted, allowed her to create and construct authentic encounters with her children, grandchildren, and friends – encounters that she had avoided while living the middle class life. Her story allows me to reflect on her death as encouraging an authentic understanding of my emotions.

The campaign for striker replacement legislation, which began in the late 1980s and had effectively ended by the mid-1990s, was the most important political battle over labor legislation since the defeat of the Labor Law Reform Bill in 1978. Striker replacement was the AFL-CIO’s top legislative priority in the early 1990s and, coming quickly after the passage of NAFTA, which labor had opposed, the defeat of its campaign solidified organized labor’s reputation for failure in legislative battles. As yet, however, the political campaign for striker replacement legislation has attracted surprisingly little attention from industrial relations scholars.

Million Dollar Baby displays a contrived, provocative, and dramatic sequence of events that culminates in the death of a paralyzed woman, Maggie (played by Hilary Swank), a boxer by trade, who became a quadriplegic after her opponent “cold-cocked” her during a championship fight. The cheap shot caused her to fall on her wooden stool and break her neck. She calls upon her trainer, Frankie (played by Clint Eastwood), to kill her through an injection of adrenaline. Maggie claims that she has already died in that she can never be a boxer, which represents the only self she knows and loves. Ignoring Frankie's efforts to dissuade her, Maggie evokes a story from their shared past. The story, first told in a diner in which Maggie and Frankie had stopped to eat, described her own father's decision to kill the family dog. She iterates the story from her hospital bed and begs Frankie to do what her dad (to whom Maggie refers as “daddy”) did to the dog. In effect, she asks Frankie to assist her suicide, as she defines herself as useless beyond any reason to live.

The primary explanation for the marked rise in real wages in both England and Flanders, from the later fourteenth to mid fifteenth centuries, was a combination of institutional wage stickiness and deflation. In both countries, nominal wages had indeed risen after the Black Death (1348), but so had the cost of living, with a rampant inflation that lasted until the late 1370s in England and the late 1380s in Flanders. Thereafter, consumer prices fell sharply but money wages did not - or, in Flanders, not as much as did consumer prices. The other thesis of this paper is that these later medieval price movements were fundamentally monetary in nature.