Modern American History, on behalf of the prize committee Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Andrew Preston, Shaul Mitelpunkt, and Axel Schäfer, is delighted to award the second annual Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips Essay Prize to John Miles Branch, the author of "Union Exemption: Nonprofit Work and the Boundaries of the Commercial Economy, 1951-1976." This richly researched and engaging essay explores nonprofit organizations during the period between the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the mid-1970s. These employers, including hospitals, nursing homes, childcare centers, and private schools, were not only exempt from taxation but also from collective bargaining obligations under the National Labor Relations Act. In this compelling and thoroughly researched essay, the author tackles the issue of unionization and labor rights in the nonprofit sector, a work environment associated with “caring labor” (p. 6) that was largely excluded from the regulations and protections of the New Deal state similar to agricultural and domestic labor. Not until 1976 did Congress remove union exemptions for nonprofits and place them under the purview of the National Labor Relations Board.  

What makes the essay compelling is that it treats the issue of exemption not primarily as an administrative change in labor law. Rather, the author embeds this change in the larger story of the transformation of the political economy. This includes the shift from industrial to service-sector employment, the changing relationship between nonprofits and the state, the growing economic significance of nonprofits, processes of professionalization and commercialization, and developments in economic thought. This impressively researched essay constitutes a significant contribution to the way in which a capitalist society simultaneously valorizes and sidelines nonprofit labor.

John Miles Branch is a PhD candidate in U.S. history at Northwestern University. His research is focused on nonprofits and philanthropy, and his dissertation analyzes the growing prominence of the nonprofit sector in the American economy during the second half of the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in the histories of labor and management at nonprofit organizations; nonprofits’ roles in the political economy of public goods and services; and the place of the nonprofit sector in the history of economic thought.

Runner-Up

The prize committee also selected "Oil, Empire, and Anti-Colonial Environmentalism: A Tale of Two Superports" by Dante LaRiccia as Runner-Up. This article examines the struggle between competing 1970s constituencies surrounding the aborted effort to establish superports in two different ends of the American empire: Puerto-Rico and Palau. Adopting a sophisticated frame that pulls the two colonies into our understanding of U.S. environmental history, the article reveals how activists mobilized anti-colonial arguments to resist the establishment of the superports by campaigning both through U.S channels of federal protection and public opinion, and through claims made in the United Nations. Dante LaRiccia is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale.