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171 books match the query 'Labor unions' and 4 start with m

cover of Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism

Making the World Safe for Workers

Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism

Elizabeth McKillen

University of Illinois Press, 2018

 
In this intellectually ambitious study, Elizabeth McKillen explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's administration. McKillen highlights the major fault lines and conflicts that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. As McKillen shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.

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cover of Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary

Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary

Robert F. Burk

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Marvin Miller changed major league baseball and the business of sports. Drawing on research and interviews with Miller and others, Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary offers the first biography covering the pivotal labor leader's entire life and career. Baseball historian Robert F. Burk follows the formative encounters with Depression-era hard times, racial and religious bigotry, and bare-knuckle Washington and labor politics that prepared Miller for his biggest professional challenge--running the moribund Major League Baseball Players Association.

Educating and uniting the players as a workforce, Miller embarked on a long campaign to win the concessions that defined his legacy: decent workplace conditions, a pension system, outside mediation of player grievances and salary disputes, a system of profit sharing, and the long-sought dismantling of the reserve clause that opened the door to free agency. Through it all, allies and adversaries alike praised Miller's hardnosed attitude, work ethic, and honesty.

Comprehensive and illuminating, Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary tells the inside story of a time of change in sports and labor relations, and of the contentious process that gave athletes in baseball and across the sporting world a powerful voice in their own games.

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cover of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History

Men, Mobs, and Law

Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History

Rebecca N. Hill

Duke University Press, 2008

In Men, Mobs, and Law, Rebecca N. Hill compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Arguing that these forms of protest are related and have substantially influenced one another, Hill points out that both worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force of terror, and by creating a heroic identity for their movements. Each has played a major role in the history of radical politics in the United States. Hill illuminates that history by considering the narratives produced during the abolitionist John Brown’s trials and execution, analyzing the defense of the Chicago anarchists of the Haymarket affair, and comparing Ida B. Wells’s and the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaigns to the Industrial Workers of the World’s early-twentieth-century defense campaigns. She also considers conflicts within the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, chronicles the history of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, and explores the Black Panther Party’s defense of George Jackson.

As Hill explains, labor defense activists first drew on populist logic, opposing the masses to the state in their campaigns, while anti-lynching activists went in the opposite direction, castigating “the mob” and appealing to the law. Showing that this difference stems from the different positions of whites and Blacks in the American legal system, Hill’s comparison of anti-lynching organizing and radical labor defenses reveals the conflicts and intersections between antiracist struggle and socialism in the United States.

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cover of Miguel Mármol

Miguel Mármol

Roque Dalton

Northwestern University Press, 1995

Miguel Mármol is the testimony of a revolutionary, as recorded by Salvadoran writer, Roque Dalton, which documents the historical and political events of El Salvador through the first decades of the 20th century. This Latin American classic describes the growth and development of the workers' movement and the communist party in El Salvador and Guatemala, and contains Mármol's impressions of post-revolutionary Russia in the twenties, describing in vivid detail the brutality and repression of the Martínez dictatorship and the reemergence of the workers' movement after Martínez was ousted. It also gives a broad and clear picture of the lives of the ordinary peasant and worker in Central America, their sufferings, their hopes and their struggles.
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