The 1894 Pullman strike and the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters played major roles in the century-long development of union organizing and labor-management relations in the Pullman Company. Susan Eleanor Hirsch connects the stories of Pullman car builders and porters to answer critical questions like: what created job segregation by race and gender? What role did such segregation play in shaping the labor movement?
Hirsch illuminates the relationship between labor organizing and the racial and sexual discrimination practiced by both employers and unions. Because the Pullman Company ran the sleeping-car service for American railroads and was a major manufacturer of railcars, its workers were involved in virtually every wave of union organizing from the 1890s to the 1940s.
In exploring the years of struggle by the men and women of the Pullman Company, After the Strike reveals the factors that determined the limited success and narrow vision of most American unions.
In The Age of Experiences, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt examines how the advance of happiness science is impacting the economy, making possible new experience-products that really make people happy and help forward-looking businesses expand and develop new technologies. In today’s marketplace there is less interest in goods and services and more interest in buying and selling personal improvements and experiences. Hunnicutt traces how this historical shift in consumption to the “softer” technologies of happiness represents not only a change in the modern understanding of progress, but also a practical, economic transformation, profoundly shaping our work and the ordering of our life goals.
Based on incisive historical research, Hunnicutt demonstrates that we have begun to turn from material wealth to focus on the enrichment of our personal and social lives. The Age of Experiences shows how industry, technology, and the general public are just beginning to realize the potential of the new economy. Exploring the broader implications of this historical shift, Hunnicutt concludes that the new demand for experiences will result in the reduction of work time, the growth of jobs, and the regeneration of virtue—altogether an increasingly healthy public life.
At the turn of the century, Colorado's Cripple Creek District captured the national imagination with the extraordinary wealth of its gold mines and the unquestionable strength of the militant Western Federation of Miners.
Elizabeth Jameson tells the entertaining story of Cripple Creek, the scene in 1894 of one of radical labor's most stunning victories and, in 1903 and 1904, of one of its most crushing defeats. Jameson draws on working-class oral histories, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press published by 34 of the local labor unions, and the 1900 manuscript census. She connects unions with lodges and fraternal associations, ethnic identity, families, households, and partisan politics. Through these ties, she probes the differences in age, skill, gender, marital status, and ethnicity that strained working-class unity and contributed to the fall of labor in Cripple Creek.
Jameson's book will be required reading for western, ethnic, and working-class historians seeking an alternative interpretation of western mining struggles that emphasizes class, gender, and multiple sources of social identity.
Although the vast majority of laboring peoples in Peru were indigenous, in the minds of social reformers indigeneity was not commensurable with labor: Indians could not be workers and were therefore excluded from the labor policies enacted in the 1920s and 1930s and, more generally, from elite conceptions of industrial progress. Drinot shows how the incommensurability of indigeneity with labor was expressed in the 1920 constitution, in specific labor policies, and in the activities of state agencies created to oversee collective bargaining and provide workers with affordable housing, inexpensive food, and social insurance. He argues that the racialized assumptions of the modernizing Peruvian state are reflected in the enduring inequalities of present-day Peru.
Laurie Mercier's look at "community unionism" examines the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism fostered by residents in Anaconda, Montana, home to the world's largest copper smelter and the namesake of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.
Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid commentary of the locals ("the company furnished three pair of leather gloves . . . and all the arsenic [dust] you could eat"). During five decades of devoted unionism, locals embraced an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards for working people as the best defense against communism. Mercier also explores how gender limits on women's political, economic, and social roles shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles, and traces how union rivalries, environmental concerns, and the 1980 closing of the Anaconda smelter transformed the town.
A fascinating portrait of how community molds working class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working class culture and collective action.
• Choice 1988 Outstanding Academic Book
• Named one of the Best Business Books of 1988 by USA Today
A veteran reporter of American labor analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. John Hoerr’s account of these events stretches from the industrywide barganing failures of 1982 to the crippling work stoppage at USX (U.S. Steel) in 1986-87. He interviewed scores of steelworkers, company managers at all levels, and union officials, and was present at many of the crucial events he describes. Using historical flashbacks to the origins of the steel industry, particularly in the Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania, he shows how an obsolete and adversarial relationship between management and labor made it impossible for the industry to adapt to shattering changes in the global economy.
"In a much-needed intervention, Ric McIntyre recasts the debate about globalization and labor rights and speeds us to the heart of the matter: the battle between transnational corporations who distance themselves from responsibility for the fate of workers, and labor activists who seek to reestablish bonds of accountability and moral obligation. The stakes in this struggle are enormous, and Dr. McIntyre provides crucial insight into the economic and political dynamics that define it."
---Scott Nova, Executive Director, Worker Rights Consortium, Washington, DC
"This book presents an insightful, powerful corrective to the contemporary debate over worker rights. McIntyre identifies the limitations of thinking of worker rights as individualized human rights and challenges us instead to examine how rights are defined through conventional thinking and class interest. The product is rich and compelling: McIntyre's investigation demands of us that we be far more attentive to the contradictory effects of ‘rights talk.' I recommend this book enthusiastically to all those who advocate for a just economic order the world over."
---George DeMartino, Associate Professor of Political Economy, the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
"An important contribution to the interdisciplinary study of labor. McIntyre's book will challenge the debate over labor rights on all fronts."
---Michael Hillard, Professor of Economics, University of Southern Maine
"A timely examination of our modern 'sweating system' . . . essential reading for all workers who hope for greater dignity in the workplace and greater fairness in society."
---Janet Knoedler, Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University
"Ric McIntyre convincingly shows how local actions, regulations changes, and international norms can combine to establish collective rights for workers."
---Gilles Raveaud, Assistant Professor in Economics, University of Saint-Denis, France, and cofounder of the "post-autistic economics movement"
"An important, timely, and needed contribution to our understanding of worker rights."
---Patrick McHugh, Associate Professor of Management, George Washington University
"Workers of the world, unite!" Karl Marx's famous call to action still promises an effective means of winning human rights in the modern global economy, according to economist Richard P. McIntyre. Currently, the human rights movement insists upon a person's right to life, freedom, and material necessities. In democratic, industrial nations such as the United States, the movement focuses more specifically on a person's civil rights and equal opportunity.
The movement's victories since WWII have come at a cost, however. The emphasis on individual rights erodes collective rights---the rights that disadvantaged peoples need to assert their most basic human rights. This is particularly true for workers, McIntyre argues. By reintroducing Marxian and Institutional analysis, he reveals the class relations and power structures that determine the position of workers in the global economy. The best hope for achieving workers' rights, he concludes, lies in grassroots labor organizations that claim the right of association and collective bargaining.
At last, an economist offers a vision for human rights that takes both moral questions and class relations seriously.
Richard P. McIntyre is Director of the University Honors Program and Professor of Economics at the University of Rhode Island.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press