A career-spanning collection of writings by the legendary labor historian

One of American labor history's most prominent scholars, Melvyn Dubofsky curated an accessible style and historical reach that have long marked his work as required reading for students and scholars. 

This collection juxtaposes Dubofsky's early writings with scholarship from the 1990s. Selections include work on western working-class radicalism, U.S. labor history in transnational and comparative settings, and the impact of technological change on American worker’s movements. Throughout, the writings provide an invaluable eyewitness perspective on the academic and political climate of the 1960s and 1970s while tracing the development of labor history as a discipline. 

An exploration of important themes in labor history, Hard Work combines essential scholarship with the story of how past and present interact in the work of historians.

Harvesting Coffee, Bargaining Wages offers an insightful scrutiny of rural market behavior and a convincing explanation of why farmers fail sometimes to manage their laborers in ways predicted by market models--and how power imbalances and social conditions can impair the ability of laborers to attain a fair market contract during lax labor market periods. This empirical study, based on interviews with both farmers and laborers, covers a fifteen-year period characterized by the modernization of production. Ortiz compares three localized coffee labor markets, expanding the analysis by contrasting the strategies used by the coffee farmers in her study areas with those that farmers in other parts of the world adopt in order to cope with similar problems. Her data challenge prevalent generalizations about the consequences of agricultural modernization on laboring families by showing that management practices and contractual arrangements are ultimately molded by local conditions--cultural perceptions of a fair exchange, familial obligations and roles, availability of housing, bargaining power in the home and in the market, kin networks, and information flows--in interaction with national and global influences. Harvesting Coffee, Bargaining Wages will be of primary interest to anthropologists and sociologists, geographers, political scientists interested in explicit and implicit contract formats, and economists intrigued by the possibility of integrating social variables as contextual aspects of management strategies. Sutti Ortiz is Associate Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Boston University.

The majority of Americans receive their health insurance for themselves and their families through their job. The employee pays a portion of the premium but the employer chooses the type and amount of coverage offered as well as administers the plan. This book addresses the question: Who really pays for employer-arranged health insurance? Are premiums paid from company profits or do employees bear the cost through lower wages? Pauly suggests that this confusion has complicated the debate on public policy and needs to be alleviated. This work first shows how views taken by business and political leaders during the Clinton health reform proposal debate were affected by this confusion and did not follow the economic view. It then provides a novel, intuitive, but comprehensive outline of the economic theory that bears on this question. Empirical evidence consistent with the economic view is summarized, and the implications of the view for some important issues in health policy and in practical health benefits management are discussed in detail. Health Benefits at Work explores the political economy of health policy when the stakeholders have an uncertain and possibly incorrect understanding of their actual interests. For the benefits specialist, it provides an accessible treatment of the complex and often counterintuitive economics of health benefits. This will appeal to the health policy community as well as economists and anyone concerned with issues surrounding health insurance in employment settings. "This book is refreshing . . . clean and intuitive; the logic devastating." --Michael A. Morrissey

In 1982, 20,000 Chinese-American garment workers—most of them women—went on strike in New York City. Every Chinese garment industry employer in the city soon signed a union contract. The successful action reflected the ways women's changing positions within their families and within the workplace galvanized them to stand up for themselves. 

Xiaolan Bao's now-classic study penetrates to the heart of Chinese American society to explain how this militancy and organized protest, seemingly so at odds with traditional Chinese female behavior, came about. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Bao blends the poignant personal stories of Chinese immigrant workers with the interwoven history of the garment industry and the city's Chinese community. Bao shows how the high rate of married women employed outside the home profoundly transformed family culture and with it the image and empowerment of Chinese American women. At the same time, she offers a complex and subtle discussion of the interplay of ethnic and class factors within New York's garment industry. 

Passionately told and prodigiously documented, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky examines the journey of a community's women through an era of change in the home, on the shop floor, and walking the picket line.

To mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical on human work, published in 1981, a group of globally-recognized scholars presents the critical aspects of this document and its purpose. These original essays revisit John Paul II's approach to work in post-modern society and reconnect the dignity of the working person to a pursuit of holiness. These authors convey that only when it is truly Christian can humanism accomplish the lofty ideals it indicates.
This book is a timely contribution to the field of scholarship that focuses on Catholic Social Thought and is ideally suited for graduate studies and the reader interested in more serious questions in Christian theology. 

Giulio Maspero, "The Bible and the Fathers of the Church on Work"
Patricia Ranft, "Work Theology in the High Middle Ages"
Angela Franks, "John Paul II's Metaphysics of Labor"
Deborah Savage, "Confronting a Technocratic Future: Women's Work and the Church's Social Vision"
Martin Schlag, "Contemplation at Work: A Theological Conversation Between John Paul II and Josemaría Escrivá"
Richard Turnbull, "Laborem Exercens: A Protestant Appreciation"
Michael Naughton, "Good Work: Insights from the Subjective Dimension of Work"
Christopher Michaelson, "Subjects and Objects in Meaningful Work"
Javier Ignacio Pinto Garay and Alvaro Pezoa Bissieres, "The Worker and the Transistor: The Dignity of Work and Business Ethics in Global Corporate Practices"
Gonzalo Flores-Castro Lingán, "The Real Work: Making the Encyclical Laborem Exercens Operational"
Geoffrey C. Friesen, "Laborem Exercens and the Subjective Dimension of Work in Economics and Finance" 

Hollywood Unions is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and makeup artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annual awards celebrations, but the unions’ actual importance is in bargaining with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on behalf of 331,000 workers in the motion picture and television industry. The Hollywood unions are not neutral institutions but rather have long histories of jurisdictional battles, competitions with rival unions, and industry-altering strikes. They have supported the industry’s workers through the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, runaway production, fights for gender parity, the digital revolution, and a global pandemic. The history of these unions has contributed to making media work sustainable in the long term and helped shape the conditions and production cultures of Hollywood.

A critical, revelatory examination of teachers unions' rise and influence in American politics.

As most American labor organizations struggle for survival and relevance in the twenty-first century, teachers unions appear to be an exception. Despite being all but nonexistent until the 1960s, these unions are maintaining members, assets—and political influence. As the COVID-19 epidemic has illustrated, today’s teachers unions are something greater than mere labor organizations: they are primary influencers of American education policy. How Policies Make Interest Groups examines the rise of these unions to their current place of influence in American politics.  
 
Michael Hartney details how state and local governments adopted a new system of labor relations that subsidized—and in turn, strengthened—the power of teachers unions as interest groups in American politics. In doing so, governments created a force in American politics: an entrenched, subsidized machine for membership recruitment, political fundraising, and electoral mobilization efforts that have informed elections and policymaking ever since. Backed by original quantitative research from across the American educational landscape, Hartney shows how American education policymaking and labor relations have combined to create some of the very voter blocs to which it currently answers. How Policies Make Interest Groups is trenchant, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why some voices in American politics mean more than others. 

Acclaimed author and translator Sophus Helle considers an ancient creation story with themes of humanity, class warfare, and catastrophic climate change.
 
The Babylonian poem Atra-hasis is a forgotten masterpiece of political thought. Written in Akkadian in what is now southern Iraq during the early second millennium BCE, Atra-hasis gives us a glimpse of how ancient poets understood the society growing around them. This radical history of the world told from the perspective of the mother goddess conveys the complexity and contradictions that lie at the heart of the human experience. Atra-hasis tells how humanity was created as part of a bargain to resolve the world’s first labor strike, in which the lower gods rebelled against the excessive work imposed on them by the higher gods. It depicts humans as workers endowed with defiant intelligence. They multiply and become too loud, so the gods decide to quiet them with a cataclysmic flood.
 
Looking to Atra-hasis, Sophus Helle reveals an ancient story with reflections on power and history that invite comparison to topics of contemporary relevance, including labor, inequality, climate change, artificial intelligence, threats to democracy, disability, care work, sexual consent, and more. Helle considers Atra-hasis as a foundational document of “pasthumanism,” a term he uses to describe the study of how cultural conceptions of humanity have changed across centuries. He argues that ancient and non-Western texts remind us that cultural assumptions we now take for granted are neither natural nor necessary.
 

Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues.

The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.