Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives.

Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize in United States History

During the nineteenth century, American and foreign travelers often found New Orleans a delightful, exotic stop on their journeys. Few failed to marvel at the riverfront, the center of the city's economic activity. But historical memory overlooks the immigrants and Black migrants who served in the riverfront's army of laborers and provided the essential human power that kept the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing. Eric Arnesen examines the diverse group of 10,000 to 15,000 cotton screwmen, longshoremen, cotton and round freight teamsters, cotton yardmen, railroad freight handlers, and Mississippi River roustabouts that formed the backbone of the Crescent City's trade and economic life.

From the start, New York’s organized hotel workers experimented with and adapted how they organized and governed members and related to other labor unions. Richman follows union fortunes from early IWW activity through the Communist-led affiliates of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s and 1930s, the shaping of breakthrough negotiating strategies, and the postwar era. As Richman shows, workers adopted a radicalism and militancy seldom associated with an AFL organization while openly negotiating the Communist Party’s power and influence within the union, until the Party’s eclipse in the 1950s.

An inspiring story of action and perseverance, We Always Had a Union profiles a foundational American labor union and offers lessons for today’s workers and organizers.

Contains the Bryant Spann Memorial Prize in Literature for 1997, an award-winning essay, "The Very Last Hurrah" by Eric Leif Davin

This collection of articles delves into the little-known community-based unionism of the 1930s. Worlds apart from bureaucratic business unions like the AFL-CIO, these organizations emerged from workers involved in many kinds of labor, from African American nutpickers in St. Louis to chemical and rubber workers in Akron, and from bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta. 

The contributors draw on eyewitness interviews, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to describe experimental forms of worker activism during the period. This alternative unionism was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders!" resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, though often overlooked by historians, has much to teach us about union organizing today. 

Contributors: John Borsos, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Rosemary Feurer, Janet Irons, Michael Kozura, Mark D. Naison, Peter Rachleff, and Stan Weir

From workers’ wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post–World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in ten, and just one in twenty in the private sector—the lowest in a century. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have attempted to explain the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do lays bare the broad repercussions of labor’s collapse for the American economy and polity.

Organized labor was not just a minor player during the “golden age” of welfare capitalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. Rather, for generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America’s expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class.

What Unions No Longer Do shows in detail the consequences of labor’s decline: curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants’ economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, and the result is a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.

For more than twenty years, Robert Bruno has taught labor history and labor studies to union members from a wide range of occupations and demographic groups. In the class, he asked his students to finish the question “Work is—?” in six words or less. The thousands of responses he collected provide some of the rich source material behind What Work Is. Bruno draws on the thoughts and feelings experienced by workers in the present day to analyze how we might design a future of work. He breaks down perceptions of work into five categories: work and time; the space workers occupy; the impact of work on our lives; the sense of purpose that motivates workers; and the people we work for, in all senses of the term.

Far-seeing and sympathetic, What Work Is merges personal experiences with research, poetry, and other diverse sources to illuminate workers’ lives in the present and envision what work could be in the future.

What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries—like manufacturing, construction, printing—as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive—jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people’s full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement.

What Workers Say takes its cue from Studs Terkel’s Working, as Iversen interviewed more than 1,200 workers to present stories about their labor market jobs since 1980. She puts a human face on the experiences of a broad range of workers indicating what their jobs were and are truly like. Iversen reveals how transformations in the political economy of waged work have shrunk or eliminated opportunity for workers, families, communities, and productivity. What Workers Say also offers an innovative proposal for compensated civil labor that could enable workers, their communities, labor market organizations, and the national infrastructure to actually flourish.

A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism.

Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon

Depression-era Harlan County, Kentucky, was the site of one of the most bitter and protracted labor disputes in American history. The decade-long conflict between miners and the coal operators who adamantly resisted unionization has been immortalized in folksong by Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, contemplated in prose by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and long been obscured by popular myths and legends.

John W. Hevener separates the fact from the legend in his Weatherford Award-winning investigation of Harlan's civil strife, now available for the first time in paperback. In Which Side Are You On? Hevener attributes the violence–-including the deaths of thirteen union miners–-to more than just labor conflict, viewing Harlan's troubles as sectional economic conflict stemming from the county's rapid industrialization and social disorganization in the preceding decade.

Detailing the dimensions of unionization and the balance of power spawned by New Deal labor policy after government intervention, Which Side Are You On? is the definitive analysis of Harlan's bloody decade and a seminal contribution to American labor history.

The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor.

The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

In the United States, a strong work ethic has long been upheld as a necessity, and tributes to motivation abound—from the motivational posters that line the walls of the workplace to the self-help gurus who draw in millions of viewers online. Americans are repeatedly told they can achieve financial success and personal well-being by adopting a motivated attitude toward work. But where did this obsession come from? And whose interests does it serve?

Work Better, Live Better traces the rise of motivational rhetoric in the workplace across the expanse of two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Beginning in the early twentieth century, managers recognized that force and coercion—the traditional tools of workplace discipline—inflamed industrial tensions, so they sought more subtle means of enlisting workers' cooperation. David Gray demonstrates how this “motivational project” became a highly orchestrated affair as managers and their allies deployed films, posters, and other media, and drew on the ideas of industrial psychologists and advertising specialists to advance their quests for power at the expense of worker and union interests.

Why have some working women succeeded at organizing in spite of obstacles to labor activity? Under what circumstances were they able to form alliances with male workers? 

Carole Turbin explores these and other questions by examining the case of Troy, New York. In the 1860s, Troy produced nearly all the nation's detachable shirt collars and cuffs. The city's collar laundresses were largely Irish immigrants. Their union was officially the nation's first women's labor organization, and one of the best organized. Turbin provides a new perspective on gender and shows that women's family ties are not necessarily a conservative influence but may encourage women's and men's collective action.

An unheralded union battle offers new insight into identity politics.

In 1991, Columbia University’s one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union-two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women-was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of identity politics in labor movements.