front cover of Activist Media
Activist Media
Documenting Movements and Networked Solidarity
Gino Canella
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Now more than ever, activists are using media to document injustice and promote social and political change. Yet with so many media platforms available, activists sometimes fail to have a coherent media and communication strategy.
 
Drawing from his experiences as a documentary filmmaker with Black Lives Matter 5280 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105 in Denver, Colorado, Gino Canella argues that activist media create opportunities for activists to navigate conflict and embrace their political and ideological differences. Canella details how activist media practices—interviewing organizers, script writing, video editing, posting on social media, and hosting community screenings—foster solidarity among grassroots organizers.
 
Informed by media theory, this book explores how activists are using media to mobilize supporters, communicate their values, and reject anti-union rhetoric. Furthermore, it demonstrates how collaborative media projects can help activists build broad-based coalitions and amplify their vision for a more equitable and just society.
 
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African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry
Joe William Trotter
West Virginia University Press, 2024

Essays by the foremost labor historian of the Black experience in the Appalachian coalfields.

This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia’s Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region’s Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.

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AFSCME's Philadelphia Story
Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century
Francis Ryan
Temple University Press, 2011

AFSCME's Philadelphia Story provides the most comprehensive account of the early years of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which is one of the nation’s largest and most politically powerful unions in the AFL-CIO. Author Francis Ryan details the emergence of the Quaker City's interracial union, charting its beginnings in the political patronage system of one of the nation's most notorious political machines to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ryan provides new insight into the working class origins of African American political power in the late twentieth century as well as a thorough overview of the role the municipal state played in the urban economy of one of the nation's largest cities.

Ryan describes the work processes and how they changed, and uses workers' testimonies to ground the detailed accounts of issues and negotiations. Beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 2000s, Ryan's study offers a long-term analysis of the growth of a single union in a major American city.

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After Coal
Stories of Survival in Appalachia and Wales
Tom Hansell
West Virginia University Press, 2018

What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do communities and cultures survive?

Central Appalachia and south Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal’s decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labor unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy. It tells the story of four decades of exchange between two mining communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and profiles individuals and organizations that are undertaking the critical work of regeneration.

The stories in this book are told through interviews and photographs collected during the making of After Coal, a documentary film produced by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University and directed by Tom Hansell. Considering resonances between Appalachia and Wales in the realms of labor, environment, and movements for social justice, the book approaches the transition from coal as an opportunity for marginalized people around the world to work toward safer and more egalitarian futures.

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Against Labor
How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism
Edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Against Labor highlights the tenacious efforts by employers to organize themselves as a class to contest labor. Ranging across a spectrum of understudied issues, essayists explore employer anti-labor strategies and offer incisive portraits of people and organizations that aggressively opposed unions. Other contributors examine the anti-labor movement against a backdrop of larger forces, such as the intersection of race and ethnicity with anti-labor activity, and anti-unionism in the context of neoliberalism. Timely and revealing, Against Labor deepens our understanding of management history and employer activism and their metamorphic effects on workplace and society. Contributors: Michael Dennis, Elizabeth Esch, Rosemary Feurer, Dolores E. Janiewski, Thomas A. Klug, Chad Pearson, Peter Rachleff, David Roediger, Howard Stanger, and Robert Woodrum.
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Against the Law
Paul F. Campos, Pierre Schlag, and Steven D. Smith
Duke University Press, 1996
A fundamental critique of American law and legal thought, Against the Law consists of a series of essays written from three different perspectives that coalesce into a deep criticism of contemporary legal culture. Paul F. Campos, Pierre Schlag, and Steven D. Smith challenge the conventional representations of the legal system that are articulated and defended by American legal scholars. Unorthodox, irreverent, and provocative, Against the Law demonstrates that for many in the legal community, law has become a kind of substitute religion—an essentially idolatrous practice composed of systematic self-misrepresentation and self-deception.
Linked by a persistent inquiry into the nature and identity of “the law,” these essays are informed by the conviction that the conventional representations of law, both in law schools and the courts, cannot be taken at face value—that the law, as commonly conceived, makes no sense. The authors argue that the relentlessly normative prescriptions of American legal thinkers are frequently futile and, indeed, often pernicious. They also argue that the failure to recognize the role that authorship must play in the production of legal thought plagues both the teaching and the practice of American law. Ranging from the institutional to the psychological and metaphysical deficiencies of the American legal system, the depth of criticism offered by Against the Law is unprecedented.
In a departure from the nearly universal legitimating and reformist tendencies of American legal thought, this book will be of interest not only to the legal academics under attack in the book, but also to sociologists, historians, and social theorists. More particularly, it will engage all the American lawyers who suspect that there is something very wrong with the nature and direction of their profession, law students who anticipate becoming part of that profession, and those readers concerned with the status of the American legal system.
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Age Discrimination in the American Workplace
Old at a Young Age
Gregory, Raymond F
Rutgers University Press, 2001

Nearly every middle-aged and older worker, at some time during his or her career, will suffer age discrimination in the workplace. Employers too often use early-retirement plans, restructurings, and downsizings to dismiss older workers. Many of these individuals are unwillingly ushered into earlier-than-planned retirements, are denied promotions, or are terminated. The baby-boomer generation now accounts for just under 50 percent of the entire workforce. A vast army of workers now stands ready to contest employer acts of age discrimination.

Attorney Raymond Gregory addresses himself to the millions of workers who think they might be facing age discrimination and traces the history of the federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He explains how the law works and presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that workers have challenged their employers. The cases help to illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences and many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated all legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

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Air Transport Labor Relations
Robert W. Kaps
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Robert W. Kaps examines air transport labor law in the United States as well as the underlying legislative and policy directives established by the federal government. The body of legislation governing labor relations in the private sector of the U.S. economy consists of two separate and distinct acts: the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which governs labor relations in the railroad and airline industries, and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which governs labor relations in all other industrial sectors.

Although the NLRA closely follows the pattern established by the RLA, Kaps notes that the two laws are distinguishable in several important areas. Labor contracts negotiated under the RLA continue in perpetuity, for example, whereas all other labor contracts expire at a specified date. Other important areas of difference relate to the collective bargaining process itself, the procedures for the arbitration of disputes and grievances, and the spheres of authority and jurisdiction to consider such matters as unfair labor practices.

Congress established a special labor law for railroad and airline workers for several reasons. Because of transportation’s critical importance to the economy, an essential goal of public policy has been to ensure that both passenger and freight transportation services continue without interruption. Production can cease—at least temporarily—in most other industries without causing significant harm to the economy. When transportation stops, however, production stops. Thus Congress saw fit to enact a statute that contained provisions to ensure that labor strife would not halt rail services. Primarily because of the importance of air mail transportation, the Railway Labor Act of 1926 was extended to the airline industry in 1936.

The first section of this book introduces labor policy and presents a history of the labor movement in the United States. Discussing early labor legislation, Kaps focuses on unfair labor practices and subsequent major labor statutes.

The second section provides readers with a comparison of labor provisions that apply to the railroad and airline industries as well as to the remainder of the economy.

The final section centers on the evolution of labor in the airline industry. The author pays particular attention to recent events affecting labor in commercial aviation, particularly the effect of airline deregulation on airline labor.

  
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Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights
Daniel J. Galvin
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers’ rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments. With nuance and insight, Galvin explains how alt-labor groups are finding creative ways to help their members while navigating the many organizational challenges and structural constraints they face in this new context.

Alt-labor groups have long offered their members services and organizing opportunities to contest their unfair treatment on the job. But many groups have grown frustrated by the limited impact of these traditional strategies and have turned to public policy to scale up their work. They have successfully led campaigns to combat wage theft, raise the minimum wage, improve working conditions, strengthen immigrants’ rights, and more. These successes present something of a puzzle: relative to their larger, wealthier, and better-connected opponents, alt-labor groups are small, poor, and weak. Their members are primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color who are often socially, economically, and politically marginalized. With few exceptions, the groups lack large dues-paying memberships and are dependent on philanthropic foundations and other unpredictable sources of funding. How, given their myriad challenges, have alt-labor groups managed to make gains for their members?

Galvin reveals that alt-labor groups are leveraging their deep roots in local communities, their unique position in the labor movement, and the flexibility of their organizational forms to build their collective power and extend their reach. A growing number of groups have also become more politically engaged and have set out to alter their political environments by cultivating more engaged citizens, influencing candidate selection processes, and expanding government capacities. These efforts seek to enhance alt-labor groups’ probabilities of success in the near term while incrementally shifting the balance of power over the long term.

Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights comprehensively details alt-labor’s turn to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups now face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement.
 
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Ambassadors of the Working Class
Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas
Ernesto Semán
Duke University Press, 2017
In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin America turned the region into a Cold War battlefield for the hearts of the working classes. In this context, Ernesto Semán reveals, for example, how the attachés' brand of transnational populism offered Fidel Castro and Che Guevara their last chance at mass politics before their embrace of revolutionary violence. Fiercely opposed by Washington, the attachés’ project foundered, but not before US policymakers used their opposition to Peronism to rehearse arguments against the New Deal's legacies.
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American City
A Rank and File History of Minneapolis
Charles Rumford Walker
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In the spring of 1934, a small group of militant union organizers led Minneapolis truckers on a series of strikes that sought to break the city's antiunion grip. The striking truckers, in protest of scab workers, took to the streets of the city's warehouse district where they faced violent opposition from the police and members of the Citizen's Alliance, a group representing Minneapolis's business community. The conflict exploded when police fired on the unarmed strikers, killing four and injuring countless others. The events surrounding Bloody Friday shifted the balance of power between labor and business in Minneapolis and proved to be a significant victory for the labor movement nationwide, contributing to the ratification of the landmark National Labor Relations Act. When first published in 1937, Charles Rumford Walker's American City was praised as an evenhanded portrayal of the truckers' strike. Focusing on the personal experiences of the participants, Walker recounts the interests, motives, and passions on both sides of the conflict, capturing the heated emotions of those involved. He offers a vivid account of a period that transformed Minneapolis and forged the way for workers' rights nationwide.
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An American in Hitler's Berlin
Abraham Plotkin's Diary, 1932-33
Abraham Plotkin; Edited & with an introduction by Catherine Collomp & Bruno Grop
University of Illinois Press, 2007
This is the first published edition of the diary of Abraham Plotkin, an American labor leader of immigrant Jewish origin who lived in Berlin between November 1932 and May 1933. A firsthand account of the Weimar Republic's final months and the early rise of Nazi power in Germany, Plotkin's diary focuses on the German working class, the labor movement, and the plight of German Jews. Plotkin investigated Berlin's social conditions with the help of German Social-Democratic leaders whose analyses of the situation he records alongside his own.

Compared to the writings of other American observers of the Third Reich, Plotkin's diary is unique in style, scope, themes, and time span. Most accounts of Hitler's rise to power emphasize political institutions by focusing on the Nazi party's clashes with other political forces. In contrast, Plotkin is especially attentive to socioeconomic factors, providing an alternative view from the left that stems from his access to key German labor and socialist leaders. Chronologically, the diary reports on the moment when Hitler's seizure of power was not yet inevitable and when leaders on the left still believed in a different outcome of the crisis, but it also includes Plotkin's account of the complete destruction of German labor in May 1933.

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American Labor and the Cold War
Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture
Cherny, Robert
Rutgers University Press, 2004

The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalleled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. Fourteen million strong in 1946, unions represented thirty five percent of non-agricultural workers. Why then did the gains made between the 1930s and the end of the war produce so few results by the 1960s?

This collection addresses the history of labor in the postwar years by exploring the impact of the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union on American workers and labor unions. The essays focus on the actual behavior of Americans in their diverse workplaces and communities during the Cold War. Where previous scholarship on labor and the Cold War has overemphasized the importance of the Communist Party, the automobile industry, and Hollywood, this book focuses on politically moderate, conservative workers and union leaders, the medium-sized cities that housed the majority of the population, and the Roman Catholic Church. These are all original essays that draw upon extensive archival research and some upon oral history sources.

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front cover of American Labor in the Southwest
American Labor in the Southwest
The First One Hundred Years
Edited by James C. Foster
University of Arizona Press, 1982
A collection of outstanding contributions on…
 
The Western Federation of Miners
James C. Foster, D. H. Dinwoodie
 
The Industrial Workers of the World
Earl Bruce White, James Byrkit
 
The Rise of Unionized Farm Workers
H. L. Mitchell, Edward D. Beechert, Art Carstens
 
Mexican Labor, North and South of the Border
John M. Hart, Rodney Anderson, David Maciel
 
Labor and Politics
Paul Mandel, George N. Green, Charles O. Rice
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The American Newsroom
A History, 1920-1960
Will Mari
University of Missouri Press, 2021
The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In this holistic history, Will Mari tells that story from the 1920s through the 1960s, a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. During this time, the newsroom was more than a physical place—it symbolically represented all that was good and bad in journalism, from the shift from blue- to white-collar work to the flexing of journalism’s power as a watchdog on government and an advocate for social reform. Told from an empathetic, omnivorous, ground-up point of view, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920–1960 uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.
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American Unemployment
Past, Present, and Future
Frank Stricker
University of Illinois Press, 2020
The history of unemployment and concepts surrounding it remain a mystery to many Americans. Frank Stricker believes we need to understand this essential thread in our shared past. American Unemployment is an introduction for everyone that takes aim at misinformation, willful deceptions, and popular myths to set the record straight:
  • Workers do not normally choose to be unemployed.
  • In our current system, persistent unemployment is not an aberration. It is much more common than full employment, and the outcome of elite policy choices.
  • Labor surpluses propped up by flawed unemployment numbers have helped to keep real wages stagnant for more than forty years.
  • Prior to the New Deal and the era of big government, laissez-faire policies repeatedly led to depressions with heavy, even catastrophic, job losses.
  • Undercounting the unemployed sabotages the creation of government job programs that can lead to more high-paying jobs and full employment.
Written for non-economists, American Unemployment is a history and primer on vital economic topics that also provides a roadmap to better jobs and economic security.
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The Anthropology of Labor Unions
E. Paul Durrenberger
University Press of Colorado, 2010
The Anthropology of Labor Unions presents ethnographic data and analysis in eight case studies from several very diverse industries. It covers a wide range of topics, from the role of women and community in strikes to the importance of place in organization, and addresses global concerns with studies from Mexico and Malawu.

Union-organized workplaces consistently afford workers higher wages and better pensions, benefits, and health coverage than their nonunion counterparts. In addition, women and minorities who belong to unions are more likely to receive higher wages and benefits than their nonunion peers. Given the economic advantages of union membership, one might expect to see higher rates of organization across industries, but labor affiliation is at an all-time low. What accounts for this discrepancy?

The contributors in this volume provide a variety of perspectives on this paradox, including discussions of approaches to and findings on the histories, cultures, and practices of organized labor. They also address substantive issues such as race, class, gender, age, generation, ethnicity, health and safety concerns, corporate co-optation of unions, and the cultural context of union-management relationships.

The first to bring together anthropological case studies of labor unions, this volume will appeal to cultural anthropologists, social scientists, sociologists, and those interested in labor studies and labor movements.

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The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion
Tansy E.
Pluto Press, 2022

The award-winning classic on why we must revolutionise the fashion industry

*Selected by Emma Watson for her Ultimate Book List*

Fashion is political. From the red carpets of the Met Gala to online fast fashion, clothes tell a story of inequality, racism, and climate crisis. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, Tansy E. Hoskins unpicks the threads of capitalist industry to reveal the truth about our clothes.

Fashion brands entice us to consume more by manipulating us to feel ugly, poor and worthless, sentiments that line the pockets of billionaires exploiting colonial supply chains. Garment workers on poverty pay risk their lives in dangerous factories, animals are tortured, fossil fuels extracted and toxic chemicals spread just to keep this season's collections fresh.

We can do better than this. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion goes beyond ethical fashion and consumer responsibility showing that if we want to feel comfortable in our clothes, we need to reshape the system and ensure this is not our last season.

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Archie Green
The Making of a Working-Class Hero
Sean Burns
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero celebrates one of the most revered folklorists and labor historians of the twentieth century. Devoted to understanding the diverse cultural customs of working people, Archie Green (1917–2009) tirelessly documented these traditions and educated the public about the place of workers' culture and music in American life. Doggedly lobbying Congress for support of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976, Green helped establish the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, a significant collection of images, recordings, and written accounts that preserve the myriad cultural productions of Americans.
 
Capturing the many dimensions of Green's remarkably influential life and work, Sean Burns draws on extensive interviews with Green and his many collaborators to examine the intersections of radicalism, folklore, labor history, and worker culture with Green's work. Burns closely analyzes Green's political genealogy and activist trajectory while illustrating how he worked to open up an independent political space on the American Left that was defined by an unwavering commitment to cultural pluralism.
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Are Worker Rights Human Rights?
Richard P. McIntyre
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"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.

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Arms, Country, and Class
The Philadelphia Militia and the Lower Sort during the American Revolution
Steve Rosswurm
Rutgers University Press, 1989

In 1949 and 1950, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled many left-wing unions, representing 750,000 workers, because they were supposedly Communist-dominated. This collection of previously unpublished essays explores the history of those eleven left-led unions. Some essays consider specific aspects of several unions--the Longshoremen, the United Electricians (UE), the Fur Workers, and the Food and Tobacco Workers--while others take up the impact of the federal government's and the Catholic church's anticommunism upon the unions as a whole.

This collection also addresses central domestic issues of twentieth-century America: race and government policy in the shaping of trade unionism; the impact of anticommunism and the cold war on race relations and working conditions; and the short- and long-range impact of the expulsions upon the labor movement. With groundbreaking essays that also concern the post-World War II period, Southern workers and workers in non-basic industries, this book will appeal to students of radicalism, race relations, anticommunism, and labor history.

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The Assembly Line
Robert Linhart
University of Massachusetts Press, 1981
Firsthand accounts of the numbing experience of industrial work by Robert Linhart, one of the militant leftist intellectuals of 1968 France. Translated by Margaret Crosland.
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