front cover of Race and Labor in Western Copper
Race and Labor in Western Copper
The Fight for Equality, 1896-1918
Philip J. Mellinger
University of Arizona Press, 1995
This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners.

Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose.

They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists.

Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.
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Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta
Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre
Michael Pierce
University of Arkansas Press, 2022
Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.
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Race on the Line
Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980
Venus Green
Duke University Press, 2001
Race on the Line is the first book to address the convergence of race, gender, and technology in the telephone industry. Venus Green—a former Bell System employee and current labor historian—presents a hundred year history of telephone operators and their work processes, from the invention of the telephone in 1876 to the period immediately before the break-up of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1984. Green shows how, as technology changed from a manual process to a computerized one, sexual and racial stereotypes enabled management to manipulate both the workers and the workplace.
More than a simple story of the impact of technology, Race on the Line combines oral history, personal experience, and archival research to weave a complicated history of how skill is constructed and how its meanings change within a rapidly expanding industry. Green discusses how women faced an environment where male union leaders displayed economic as well as gender biases and where racism served as a persistent system of division. Separated into chronological sections, the study moves from the early years when the Bell company gave both male and female workers opportunities to advance; to the era of the “white lady” image of the company, when African American women were excluded from the industry and feminist working-class consciousness among white women was consequently inhibited; to the computer era, a time when black women had waged a successful struggle to integrate the telephone operating system but faced technological displacement and unrewarding work.
An important study of working-class American women during the twentieth century, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly students and scholars with interest in women’s history, labor history, African American history, the history of technology, and business history.
[more]

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The Radiant Past
Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism
Michael Burawoy and János Lukács
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system?

Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism.

"A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review

"A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology

"Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology
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Rainbow at Midnight
LABOR AND CULTURE IN THE 1940S
George Lipsitz
University of Illinois Press, 1994
Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.
 
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Rebel Imaginaries
Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression-Era California
Elizabeth E. Sine
Duke University Press, 2021
During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.
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Rebuilding Pulp And Paper Workers Union
1933-1941
Robert H. Zieger
University of Tennessee Press, 1984
This study of the pulp and paper workers' union helps explain the AFL's often limited response to worker militancy in the 1930s as well as the more institutionalized moderation that emerged from the labor upsurge. Zieger sympathetically explains the union's limited goals but steady achievements—i.e., raising wages, narrowing differentials, and organizing blacks, women, and ethnically diverse workers—without resorting to strikes.
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Reclaiming the Discarded
Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump
Kathleen M. Millar
Duke University Press, 2018
In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.
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Red Chicago
American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35
Randi Storch
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities and industries in which they lived and worked.

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Reducing Workweeks
Fred Best, foreword by Herbert J. Gans
Temple University Press, 1988

International competition and variable economic conditions have brought the threat of layoffs to the doorsteps of workers and managers in all sectors of our economy. One response to this problem is Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing. This new and promising program reduces the human and economic costs of layoffs by providing partial unemployment benefits to employees who have their workweeks reduced as an alternative to layoffs. Fred Best provides a balanced and thorough assessment of this policy in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing maintains the income and fringe benefits of all workers at near full-time levels, enabling firms to maintain the skills and working relations of their employees and preventing undue hardships among those who would otherwise lose their jobs.

Best summarizes the history and effectiveness of these programs in terms of their economic and human impacts on employers, employees, government, and the economy. He presents key insights on how worktime and worker management cooperation can become powerful tools for combating joblessness and increasing economic performance. This definitive account of an important experiment in work hours will be of critical importance to managers, workers, policymakers, economists, and those concerned with employment issues.



In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.

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Remembering Lattimer
Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country
Paul A. Shackel
University of Illinois Press, 2018
On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history.

Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today.

Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

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Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine
The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike
by Leigh Campbell-Hale
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Mining the American West

Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine examines the causes, context, and legacies of the 1927 Columbine Massacre in relation to the history of labor organizing and coal mining in both Colorado and the United States. While historians have written prolifically about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, there has been a lack of attention to the violent event remembered now as the Columbine Massacre in which police shot and killed six striking coal miners and wounded sixty more protestors during the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike, even though its aftermath exerted far more influence upon subsequent national labor policies.
 
This volume is a comparative biography of three key participants before, during, and after the strike: A. S. Embree, the IWW strike leader; Josephine Roche, the owner of the coal mine property where the Columbine Massacre took place; and Powers Hapgood, who came to work for Roche four months after she signed the 1928 United Mine Worker’s contract. The author demonstrates the significance of this event to national debates about labor during the period, as well as changes and continuities in labor history starting in the progressive era and continuing with 1930s New Deal labor policies and through the 1980s.
 
This examination of the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike reorients understandings of labor history from the 1920s through the 1960s and the construction of public memory—and forgetting—surrounding those events. Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine appeals to academic and general readers interested in Colorado history, labor history, mining history, gender studies, memory, and historiography.
 
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The Rent of Form
Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age
Pedro Fiori Arantes
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A critique of prominent architects’ approach to digitally driven design and labor practices over the past two decades


With the advent of revolutionary digital design and production technologies, contemporary architects and their clients developed a taste for dramatic, unconventional forms. Seeking to amaze their audiences and promote their global brands, “starchitects” like Herzog & de Meuron and Frank Gehry have reaped substantial rewards through the pursuit of spectacle enabled by these new technologies. This process reached a climax in projects like Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and the “Bilbao effect,” in which spectacular architectural designs became increasingly sought by municipal and institutional clients for their perceived capacity to enhance property values, which author Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the “rent of form.”

Analyzing many major international architectural projects of the past twenty years, Arantes provides an in-depth account of how this “architecture of exception” has come to dominate today’s industry. Articulating an original, compelling critique of the capital and labor practices that enable many contemporary projects, Arantes explains how circulation (via image culture), consumption (particularly through tourism), the division of labor, and the distribution of wealth came to fix a certain notion of starchitecture at the center of the industry.

Significantly, Arantes’s viewpoint is not that of Euro-American capitalism. Writing from the Global South, this Brazilian theorist offers a fresh perspective that advances ideas less commonly circulated in dominant, English-language academic and popular discourse. Asking key questions about the prevailing logics of finance capital, and revealing inconvenient truths about the changing labor of design and the treatment of construction workers around the world, The Rent of Form delivers a much-needed reevaluation of the astonishing buildings that have increasingly come to define world cities.

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Resisting Work
The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents
Peter Fleming
Temple University Press, 2015

A job is no longer something we "do," but instead something we "are." As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. 

 

In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power-biopower-where "life itself" is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes--from our consumer tastes, "downtime," and sexuality--into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor.  

 

Fleming then suggests that the corporation turns to communal life-what he calls "the common"-in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture.  Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.

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Resource Allocation in Higher Education
William F. Massy, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Resource Allocation in Higher Education describes how colleges, universities, and government agencies can use budgeting processes to improve program planning and productivity. Drawn from the contributors' direct experiences as well as research findings, it blends conceptual foundations with practical insights. Many resource allocation processes in higher education need reform, and this volume will stimulate and assist that effort.
Beginning with the economic theory of nonprofits, the essays examine current budgeting systems in both theoretical and practical terms. Resource allocation systems from other domains such as health care are explored for relevant insights. Throughout, decentralization remains a major theme. Topics range from the eminently practical--how to establish a global accounting system or choose an endowment spending rate--to the more abstract--the theory of how various nonprofit enterprises balance academic values against market pressures. The volume ends by proposing value responsibility budgeting, which offers institutions a potentially better way of pursuing their academic values while remaining responsive to market pressures.
Those within higher education institutions who are responsible for resource allocation, such as provosts, chief financial officers, or budget directors, will find much that speaks to them. While mostly in the domain of higher education economics, management, and planning, the essays are written for any serious reader concerned with the problem of reform in higher education.
William F. Massy is Professor of Education and Business Administration at Stanford University.
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Rethinking Workplace Regulation
Beyond the Standard Contract of Employment
Katherine V.W. Stone
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
During the middle third of the 20th century, workers in most industrialized countries secured a substantial measure of job security, whether through legislation, contract or social practice. This “standard employment contract,” as it was known, became the foundation of an impressive array of rights and entitlements, including social insurance and pensions, protection against unsociable working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. Recent changes in technology and the global economy, however, have dramatically eroded this traditional form of employment. Employers now value flexibility over stability, and increasingly hire employees for short-term or temporary work. Many countries have also repealed labor laws, relaxed employee protections, and reduced state-provided benefits. As the old system of worker protection declines, how can labor regulation be improved to protect workers? In Rethinking Workplace Regulation, nineteen leading scholars from ten countries and half a dozen disciplines present a sweeping tour of the latest policy experiments across the world that attempt to balance worker security and the new flexible employment paradigm. Edited by noted socio-legal scholars Katherine V.W. Stone and Harry Arthurs, Rethinking Workplace Regulation presents case studies on new forms of dispute resolution, job training programs, social insurance and collective representation that could serve as policy models in the contemporary industrialized world. The volume leads with an intriguing set of essays on legal attempts to update the employment contract. For example, Bruno Caruso reports on efforts in the European Union to “constitutionalize” employment and other contracts to better preserve protective principles for workers and to extend their legal impact. The volume then turns to the field of labor relations, where promising regulatory strategies have emerged. Sociologist Jelle Visser offers a fresh assessment of the Dutch version of the ‘flexicurity’ model, which attempts to balance the rise in nonstandard employment with improved social protection by indexing the minimum wage and strengthening rights of access to health insurance, pensions, and training. Sociologist Ida Regalia provides an engaging account of experimental local and regional “pacts” in Italy and France that allow several employers to share temporary workers, thereby providing workers job security within the group rather than with an individual firm. The volume also illustrates the power of governments to influence labor market institutions. Legal scholars John Howe and Michael Rawling discuss Australia's innovative legislation on supply chains that holds companies at the top of the supply chain responsible for employment law violations of their subcontractors. Contributors also analyze ways in which more general social policy is being renegotiated in light of the changing nature of work. Kendra Strauss, a geographer, offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of pension systems and calls for a new model that offers “flexible pensions for flexible workers.” With its ambitious scope and broad inquiry, Rethinking Workplace Regulation illustrates the diverse innovations countries have developed to confront the policy challenges created by the changing nature of work. The experiments evaluated in this volume will provide inspiration and instruction for policymakers and advocates seeking to improve worker’s lives in this latest era of global capitalism.
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Revitalizing Federal Education Research and Development
Improving the R&D Centers, Regional Educational Laboratories, and the "New" OERI
Maris A. Vinovskis
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Over the past thirty years, the government has spent approximately $1.5 billion on the Regional Educational Laboratories and $1.1 billion on the Research and Development Centers. After this large investment, these two research facilities still have been unable to find the best way to effectively help at-risk children thrive in school. Many people are slowly realizing that, unfortunately, our sizable investment in educational research and development has not been sufficient to produce the kind of information that policymakers and educators must have if they hope to meet the needs of these at-risk children.
Maris A. Vinovskis uses the research he has done over the past decade, along with the findings of other policymakers, to argue that the American public school system needs to gain functional reform if research institutions are to conduct more effective studies for policymakers. He examines here both recent reform policies as well as the history behind educational reform.
Vinovskis's vigorous investigation of the process of educational research and development in the United States will be of particular interest to individuals whose careers depend on continued federal funding. This book will also appeal to educators, policymakers, and public policy analysts and will be of unequaled value in understanding the formulation of new educational policies in the twenty-first century.
Maris A. Vinovskis is active on Capitol Hill and lectures throughout the country at such prestigious institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Brookings Institution, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is Professor of History, University of Michigan.
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Rewarding Work
How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise, With a New Preface
Edmund S. Phelps
Harvard University Press, 1997
Since the 1970s a gulf has opened between the pay of low-paid workers and the pay of the middle class. No longer able to earn a decent wage in respectable work, many have left the labor force, and the job attachment of those remaining has weakened. For Edmund Phelps, this is a failure of political economy whose widespread effects are undermining the free-enterprise system. His solution is a graduated schedule of tax subsidies to enterprises for every low-wage worker they employ. As firms hire more of these workers, the labor market would tighten, driving up their pay levels as well as their employment.
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Right Across the World
The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response
John Feffer
Pluto Press, 2021

'John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London' - Mike Davis

In a post-Trump world, the right is still very much in power. Significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule. Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers. But religious, economic, social and environmental differences aside, there is one thing that unites them - their hatred of the liberal, globalized world. This unity is their strength, and through control of government, civil society and the digital world they are working together across borders to stamp out the left.

In comparison, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands - Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and Uruguay. So far they have been on the defensive, campaigning on local issues in their own countries. This narrow focus underestimates the resilience and global connectivity of the right. In this book, John Feffer speaks to the world’s leading activists to show how international leftist campaigns must come together if they are to combat the rising tide of the right.

A global Green New Deal, progressive trans-European movements, grassroots campaigning on international issues with new and improved language and storytelling are all needed if we are to pull the planet back from the edge of catastrophe. This book is both a warning and an inspiration to activists terrified by the strengthening wall of far-right power.

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"Rights, Not Roses"
Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80
Dennis A. Deslippe
University of Illinois Press, 2000

Educated, white collar professional women carried the most visible banners of feminism. But working class women were a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. Dennis A. Deslippe explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. 

Deslippe's account unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change. Through case studies of unions representing packinghouse and electrical workers, Deslippe explains why gender equality emerged as an issue in the 1960s and how the activities of wage-earning women in and outside of their unions shaped the content of the debate. He also traces the fault lines separating working-class women--who sought gender equality within the parameters of unionist principles such as seniority--from middle-class women--who sought an equal rights amendment that would guarantee an abstract equality for all women. 

Thoughtful and detailed, "Rights, Not Roses" offers a new look at the complexities of working-class feminism.

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The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas
James D. Ross
University of Tennessee Press, 2018

Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union’s rank and file.

Drawing on a rich trove of letters that STFU members wrote to union leaders, government officials, and others, Ross shows that internal divisions were just as significant—if not more so—as outside causes in the union’s ultimate failure. Most important, the STFU’s fatal flaw was the yawning gap between the worldviews of its leadership and those of its members. Ross describes how, early on, STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell promoted the union as one involving many voices—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord—but later pushed a more simplified narrative of a few people doing most of the union’s work. Struck by this significant change, Ross explores what the actual goals of the rank and file were and what union membership meant to them. “While the white leaders may have expressed a commitment to racial justice, white members often did not,” he writes. “While the union’s socialist and communist leaders may have hoped for cooperative land ownership, the members often did not.” Above all, the poor farmers who made up the membership wanted their immediate needs for food and shelter met, and they wanted to own their own land and thus determine their own futures. Moreover, while the leadership often took its inspiration from Marx, the membership’s worldview was shaped by fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christianity.

In portraying such tensions and how they factored into the union’s implosion, Ross not only offers a more nuanced view of the STFU, he also makes a powerful new contribution to our understanding of the Depression-era South.

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The Rise of the Chicago Police Department
Class and Conflict, 1850-1894
Sam Mitrani
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Class turmoil, labor, and law and order in Chicago

In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.

Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

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The River Ran Red
David P. Demarest
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
The violence that erupted at Carnegie Steel's giant Homestead mill near Pittsburgh on July 6. 1892, caused a congressional investigation and trials for treason, motivated a nearly successful assassination attempt on Frick, contributed to the defeat of President Benjamin Harrison for a second term, and changed the course of the American labor movement.

"The River Ran Red" commemorates the one-hundredth anniversary of the Homestead strike of 1892. Instead of retelling the story of the strike, it recreates the events of that summer in excerpts from contemporary newspapers and magazines, reproductions of pen-and-ink sketches and photographs made on the scene, passages from the congressional investigation that resulted from the strike, first-hand accounts by observers and participants, and poems, songs, and sermons from across the country. Contributions by outstanding scholars provide the context for understanding the social and cultural aspects of the strike, as well as its violence.

"The River Ran Red" is the collaboration of a team of writers, archivists, and historians, including Joseph Frazier Wall, who writes of the role of Andrew Carnegie at Homestead, and David Montgomery, who considers the significance of the Homestead Strike for the present. The book is both readable and richly illustrated. It recalls public and personal reactions to an event in our history who's reverberations can still be felt today.
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The Roaring Nineties
Can Full Employment Be Sustained?
Alan B. Krueger
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
The positive social benefits of low unemployment are many—it helps to reduce poverty and crime and fosters more stable families and communities. Yet conventional wisdom—born of the stagflation of the 1970s—holds that sustained low unemployment rates run the risk of triggering inflation. The last five years of the 1990s—in which unemployment plummeted and inflation remained low—called this conventional wisdom into question. The Roaring Nineties provides a thorough review of the exceptional economic performance of the late 1990s and asks whether it was due to a lucky combination of economic circumstances or whether the new economy has somehow wrought a lasting change in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Led by distinguished economists Alan Krueger and Robert Solow, a roster of twenty-six respected economic experts analyzes the micro- and macroeconomic factors that led to the unexpected coupling of low unemployment and low inflation. The more macroeconomically oriented chapters clearly point to a reduction in the inflation-safe rate of unemployment. Laurence Ball and Robert Moffitt see the slow adjustment of workers' wage aspirations in the wake of rising productivity as a key factor in keeping inflation at bay. And Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen credit sound monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board with making the best of fortunate circumstances, such as lower energy costs, a strong dollar, and a booming stock market. Other chapters in The Roaring Nineties examine how the interaction between macroeconomic and labor market conditions helped sustain high employment growth and low inflation. Giuseppe Bertola, Francine Blau, and Lawrence M. Kahn demonstrate how greater flexibility in the U.S. labor market generated more jobs in this country than in Europe, but at the expense of greater earnings inequality. David Ellwood examines the burgeoning shortage of skilled workers, and suggests policies—such as tax credits for businesses that provide on-the-job-training—to address the problem. And James Hines, Hilary Hoynes, and Alan Krueger elaborate the benefits of sustained low unemployment, including budget surpluses that can finance public infrastructure and social welfare benefits—a perspective often lost in the concern over higher inflation rates. While none of these analyses promise that the good times of the 1990s will last forever, The Roaring Nineties provides a unique analysis of recent economic history, demonstrating how the nation capitalized on a lucky confluence of economic factors, helping to create the longest peacetime boom in American history. Copublished with The Century Foundation
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Rocking the Boat
Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975
O'Farrell, Brigid
Rutgers University Press, 1996

Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These women tell powerful stories that highlight and detail women's many roles as workers, trade unionists, and family members. They all faced difficulties in their personal lives, overcame challenges in their unions, and individually and collectively helped improve women's everyday working lives.

Maida Springer-Kemp came from New York City's Harlem, Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to represent the AFL-CIO in Africa. In Chicago, Alice Peurala fought for her job in the steel mill and her place in the steel workers' union. Jessie De La Cruz organized farm workers in California. Esther Peterson, organizer, educator, and lobbyist, became an advisor to four U.S. presidents. In chapters based on oral history interviews, these women and others provide new perspectives and practical advice for today's working women. They share an idealistic and practical commitment to the labor movement. As Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers and a founding member of the National Organization of Women said, "You have to take a look at how to rock the boat. You don't want to spill yourself out if you can avoid it, but sometimes you have to rock the boat." From these women we, too, learn how to rock the boat.

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Root-Cause Regulation
Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank
Harvard University Press, 2018

Work is now more deadly than war, killing approximately 2.3 million people a year worldwide. The United States, with its complex regulatory system, has one of the highest rates of occupational fatality in the developed world, and deteriorating working conditions more generally. Why, after a century of reform, are U.S. workers growing less safe and secure? Comparing U.S. regulatory practices to their European and Latin American counterparts, Root-Cause Regulation provides insight into the causes of this downward trend and ways to reverse it, offering lessons for rich and poor countries alike.

The United States assigns responsibility for wages and hours, collective bargaining, occupational safety, and the like to various regulatory agencies. In France, Spain, and their former colonies, a single agency regulates all firms. Drawing on history, sociology, and economics, Michael Piore and Andrew Schrank examine why these systems developed differently and how they have adapted to changing conditions over time. The U.S. model was designed for the inspection of mass production enterprises by inflexible specialists and is ill-suited to the decentralized and destabilized employment of today. In the Franco-Iberian system, by contrast, the holistic perspective of multitasking generalists illuminates the root causes of noncompliance—which often lie in outdated techniques and technologies—and offers flexibility to tailor enforcement to different firms and market conditions.

The organization of regulatory agencies thus represents a powerful tool. Getting it right, the authors argue, makes regulation not the job-killer of neoliberal theory but a generative force for both workers and employers.

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Roots of Resistance
A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras
Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda
University of Texas Press, 2021

Winner of the 2021 Sara A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)

A first-of-its-kind study of the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race, and place.

On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement.

Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers' strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.

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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Changing Job Quality: Causes, Consequences, and Challenges
David R. Howell
Russell Sage Foundation, 2019
Over the last forty years, U.S. workers have faced stagnant or falling wages, growing wage inequality, and an increasing incidence of low and poverty-wage jobs. Young workers who lack advanced degrees and workers of color have been the hardest hit. In this issue of RSF, edited by economist David R. Howell and sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg, an interdisciplinary group of contributors analyze the state of job quality, especially for low-wage workers and those in nonstandard work arrangements. Howell and Kalleberg’s introductory article suggests that leading explanations for worsening job quality can be organized into three broad views of the labor market: a competitive market model; a contested markets model, where wage-setting takes place in firms that operate in imperfect markets and where employers have substantial bargaining power; and social-institutional approaches that underscore the importance of social, political, and structural forces.

As a result of technological changes and outsourcing, unpredictable and uncertain work schedules are now widespread. Contributors Cathy Yang Liu and Luísa Nazareno demonstrate that workers in nonstandard employment arrangements earn less and work fewer hours than full-time workers. Susan Lambert, Julia Henly, and Jaesung Kim demonstrate that in addition to the financial insecurity caused by precarious work schedules, those who experience shortfalls in hours are increasingly distrustful of societal institutions. Other contributors examine job quality for women and people of color. David S. Pedulla and Katariina Mueller-Gastell study the rates at which various groups of workers apply for nonstandard jobs, and find that black and Hispanic workers are overrepresented in such positions. Michael Schultz examines mobility out of low-wage work and finds that women and nonwhites are the most entrenched in such jobs. He shows that there is greater mobility out of low-wage work where unions foster the use of job ladders and pay scales.

The issue recommends a slate of policies for creating better jobs, including increasing the federal minimum wage; strengthening collective and individual bargaining, especially through unions; and widening access to health insurance, paid sick and family leave, and childcare. In the absence of family-friendly policies at the federal level, sociologists Rachel Dwyer and Erik Olin Wright propose investments in the “social and solidarity” economy, including NGOs, nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and worker cooperatives.

Given the centrality of work to human welfare, enhancing the quality of jobs is of urgent concern to workers, employers, and society at large. This issue of RSF helps us better understand the reasons for and consequences of declining job quality and suggests policies that would protect the most vulnerable workers.
 
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Improving Employment and Earnings in Twenty-First Century Labor Markets
Erica L. Groshen
Russell Sage Foundation, 2019
Modest real wage growth, rising wage inequality, and decreasing labor force participation among less-educated workers have been important labor market trends for several decades. Economists Erica Groshen and Harry Holzer, and a roster of labor market experts present new evidence on the prevalence, causes, and future of these challenges.

Contributors George Borjas and Richard Freeman analyze how the introduction of industrial robots and the influx of immigrants have affected jobs and earnings in the manufacturing industry. They find that the effects of robots are greater than those of immigrants in terms of depressing earnings and reducing employment, suggesting the need for policies that can help workers adjust to automation. Thomas Kochan and William Kimball note the lower density of unions and their declining impact on wages, even as surveys show strong worker preference for union representation and other forms of “voice” regarding wages, compensation, training, and other working conditions.

Informal work, which includes traditional activities like babysitting as well as newer ones like driving for an online platform, is an important means of helping families make ends meet. Katharine Abraham and Susan Houseman show that over a quarter of the workforce hold jobs aside from their main employment, and a higher share of less-educated, minority, low-income, and unemployed workers rely on informal work. Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger show a modest upward trend in the share of the U.S. workforce in alternative work arrangements over the last twenty years; they also demonstrate that current survey tools miss many instances of multiple job holding.

David Weil demonstrates how the rise of “the fissured workplace”--where businesses outsource key facets of their operations to staffing agencies and other third-party entities--contributes to wage inequality. Contracted workers have lower earnings and fewer opportunities for upward mobility. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not provide paid leave for new parents, and low-income families with children spend 30 percent or more of their incomes on childcare expenses. Elizabeth Doran, Ann Bartel, and Jane Waldfogel propose a payroll tax to support family-friendly policies, such as paid leave and child care, as well as modest employer mandates for scheduling control and flexibility.

Editors Groshen and Holzer provide evidence-based policy recommendations that include greater support for public higher education; adjusting federal wage and hour laws as well as those governing labor relations; limiting the effects of past incarceration on workers; and stronger youth employment programs and policies. American workers face many challenges, but there are many policies analyzed in this issue of RSF that hold promise for improving employment and earnings for American workers.
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: New Immigrant Labor Market Niches
Susan Eckstein
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
Today there are over 40 million immigrants living in the United States, most of whom come seeking work to improve their earnings and living conditions. Depending on their education and skills, their social networks, government regulations, and other factors, immigrant groups tend to concentrate in specific sectors of the labor market. The articles in this issue of RSF, edited by sociologist Susan Eckstein and economist Giovanni Peri, explore how new immigrant groups navigate the opportunities and constraints presented by various niches in the labor market and how they influence the economic and social fabric of American society.
 
Several articles survey the history of immigrant labor market niches and how they have affected local economies. Siobhan O’Keefe and Sarah Quincy investigate a labor niche—farming—created by Russian Jews in rural New Jersey in the nineteenth century that revitalized local markets and reduced the outmigration of natives from the area. Zai Liang and Bo Zhou study the occupational niches held by Chinese immigrants from the turn of the century to present day. They show that restaurants have historically provided, and continue to provide, a major source of employment for low-skilled Chinese immigrants and that these immigrants tend to use new job-finding services such as employment agencies and internet advertising. These services have also allowed Chinese-owned restaurants to expand into new geographical locations.
 
Other contributors analyze the divisions between high and low-skill labor market niches. In his ethnographic study of restaurants in Los Angeles, Eli Wilson finds that Mexican immigrants primarily work “back of the house” jobs performing low-wage manual labor with few opportunities for advancement, while English-speaking whites hold higher-paid “front of the house” jobs interacting with customers. However, bilingual second-generation Latinos are often able to bridge these two roles, increasing their chances for promotions and greater job responsibilities. Yasmin Ortiga explores the effects of programs designed to recruit middle-skill nurses from the Philippines. She finds that because the United States only accepts a certain number of nurses, these programs have contributed to an oversupply of trained nurses in the Philippines and increased joblessness and underemployment there.
 
Together, the studies in this issue contribute to a deeper understanding of how and why new immigrants gravitate to specific lines of work. They also reveal how these labor niches influence markets both within the United States and abroad.
 
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The U.S. Labor Market During and After the Great Recession
Arne L. Kalleberg
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
The Great Recession was the most disastrous economic upheaval in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Nearly nine million jobs were lost, median family incomes declined by about 8 percent, and the rate of long-term unemployment reached historic highs. Although the recession was officially declared over in June 2009, its effects on the labor market lingered long after. In this issue of RSF, edited by Arne L. Kalleberg and Till M. von Wachter, scholars analyze the longer-term impacts of the Great Recession on jobs, workers, and economic security.
 
Contributors explore a number of changes to the labor market and union density during and after the Great Recession. Jesse Rothstein investigates the factors contributing to persistently high unemployment and finds that reduced employer demand for workers was more important than labor mismatch—or unemployed workers lacking the appropriate skills for available jobs. Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce find increased hostility to unions among employers and steep job losses in traditionally unionized industries, both of which constricted organized labor during and after the Great Recession.
 
Other articles examine the effects of job loss on unemployed individuals’ mental health and family lives. Kelsey J. O’Connor finds that declining income and rising unemployment contributed to the lowest level of reported happiness in 2010, particularly for men, older people, and Hispanics. William Dickens and coauthors evaluate families’ ability to weather job losses during the Great Recession by relying on savings and find that most had insufficient wealth to buffer large earnings losses for more than a short period of time. Gokce Basbug and Ofer Sharone explore the extent to which the negative emotional toll of long-term unemployment is shaped by gender and marital status. They find that marriage tends to boost the well-being of both men and women during times of unemployment. Among married men, however, this benefit disappeared when controlling for household income, suggesting that the benefits of marriage are related more to additional income than to other forms of intangible or emotional support.
 
The duration and severity of the Great Recession sets it apart from earlier economic downturns and, as this issue shows, it has had long-term consequences for workers and their families.
 
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