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Deftly blending autobiography and history, James Green here reflects on thirty years as an activist, educator, and historian. He recounts how he became deeply immersed in political protest and in recovering and preserving the history of progressive social movements, and how the two are linked. His book, written in an engaging and accessible style, tells powerful stories of people in struggle, framed by the personal account of his own development. As a historian, Green gives voice to generations of Americans who banded together to fight for social justice. His subjects range from the martyrs of the Haymarket tragedy to the Bread and Roses strikers of 1912, from depression-era struggles for democracy to the civil rights crusaders, from recent Rainbow Coalition campaigns to the latest union organizing drives. As an activist, Green describes how his participation in the civil rights and labor movements of our own time has transformed his life, first as a student and radical scholar in the 1960s, then as a public historian and teacher of working-class students. He also describes his efforts to break free from academic confinement and “tell movement stories in public,” in an attempt to offer hope and counsel to those still fighting for equality and fairness. He concludes with a revealing look at how awareness of past social activism has contributed to the revival of the labor movement during the last ten years, an effort in which Green has been vigorously engaged.

As Shelton shows, many working- and middle-class whites sided with corporate interests in seeing themselves as society's only legitimate, productive members. This alliance increasingly argued that public employees and the urban poor took but did not give. Drawing on a wealth of research ranging from school board meetings to TV news reports, Shelton puts readers in the middle of fraught, intense strikes in Newark, St. Louis, and three other cities where these debates and shifting attitudes played out. He also demonstrates how the labor actions contributed to the growing public perception of unions as irrelevant or even detrimental to American prosperity. Foes of the labor movement, meanwhile, tapped into cultural and economic fears to undermine not just teacher unionism but the whole of liberalism.

Examining teachers' unions and public education from the bottom up, Lyons shows how the CTU and its members sought rigorous reforms. A combination of political action, public relations campaigns, and community alliances helped the CTU to achieve better salaries and benefits, increased school budgets, reformed curricula, and greater equality for women within the public education system. But its agenda was also constrained by internal divisions over race and gender and by ongoing external disputes with the school administration, politicians, and business and civic organizations.

Detailed and informed by rich interviews, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929-1970 tells the story of how committed union members effected changes to public education and to local politics that still benefit Chicago teachers, students, and the city today.

Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labor, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labor and race in the United States.

To capture the complexity of African Americans’ experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays’ subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s.

The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted on racial inequality, the “race question” would never be fully resolved.

Contributors: Eric Arnesen, Beth Tompkins Bates, Cynthia M. Blair, Tera W. Hunter, William Powell Jones, Brian Kelly, Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joseph A. McCartin, Steven A. Reich, Leslie A. Schwalm, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff

Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our discussions of worker rights.

Long before “Cesar Chávez” and “Chicano” became commonly known, the word “bracero” had established itself in the language of American politics. The Mexican Farm Labor Program—or bracero program as it came to be known—was from its inception in 1942 a highly controversial issue. At international, national, and subnational levels, it remained the focal point of an intense interest-group struggle. This struggle and its group combatants provide the central concern of this study.

In the early 1940’s agribusiness interests had sought to contract Mexican laborers (“braceros”) for work on United States farms. With the entry of the United States into World War II, legislation was passed for contracting braceros on a large scale. What was originally a wartime measure soon became an institution. During twenty-two years, 4.2 million braceros were contracted. The United States, at the insistence of the Mexican government, became a partner in the program, ensuring that the braceros were provided housing, set wages, and other benefits.

The program was, however, detrimental to one group in the United States: the native farmworker. Not only was the bracero provided guarantees that the native could not demand, but the bracero also got the native’s job.

During the late forties and fifties, organized labor gathered its forces in Congress to oppose the program. Finally, an administration favorable to the native farmworker threw its support behind the native laborer, and through the Department of labor measures were passed that made it less attractive to hire foreign labor.

In the end, the anti-bracero forces won out in Congress and defeated extension of the Mexican Farm Labor program. At the same time, the United States government, by setting the working standards for foreign workers, brought about an improvement in the working conditions and wages of native farm laborers.

Besides the conflicts between domestic interests, Craig examines the international conflicts and issues involved, as well as the international agreements that were the basis of bracero contracting. He discusses with perception the program’s immediate and long-range effects on Mexico. His study analyzes and clarifies one of the most controversial domestic and international programs of the twentieth century.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

The Digital Factory reveals the hidden human labor that supports today’s digital capitalism.
 
The workers of today’s digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor.

The workers of today’s digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today’s digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.

A visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice.

Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy.

A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Schatz argues that the Labor Board vets, who saw themselves as disinterested technocrats, were in truth utopian reformers aiming to transform the world. Beginning in the 1970s stagflation era, they faced unforeseen opposition, and the cooperative relationships they had fostered withered. Yet their protégé George Shultz used mediation techniques learned from his mentors to assist in the integration of Southern public schools, institute affirmative action in industry, and conduct Cold War negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Oral histories of many of the last generation of Lowell, MA, textile mill workers preceded by two introductory sections. The first presents the historic setting of economic development and subsequent decline of the textile industry in Lowell. The second is a brief explanation of the production process wherein the last generation of mill workers expended so many of their skills and so much of their energy.

Pehl embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As he shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture's secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late Thirties on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, Pehl shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city.

An ambitiously inclusive contribution to a burgeoning field, The Making of Working-Class Religion breaks new ground in the study of solidarity and the sacred in the American heartland.

It is a powerful story: the relationship between the 1960s New Left and organized labor was summed up by hardhats confronting students and others over US involvement in Vietnam. But the real story goes beyond the "Love It or Leave It" signs and melees involving blue-collar types attacking protesters. 

Peter B. Levy challenges these images by exploring the complex relationship between the two groups. Early in the 1960s, the New Left and labor had cooperated to fight for civil rights and anti-poverty programs. But diverging opinions on the Vietnam War created a schism that divided these one-time allies. Levy shows how the war, combined with the emergence of the black power movement and the blossoming of the counterculture, drove a permanent wedge between the two sides and produced the polarization that remains to this day.

Women workers and the revolutionary origins of the modern welfare state

In May 1790, the French National Assembly created spinning workshops (ateliers de filature) for thousands of unemployed women in Paris. These ateliers disclose new aspects of the process which transformed Old Regime charity into revolutionary welfare initiatives characterized by secularization, centralization, and entitlements based on citizenship. This study is the first to examine women and the welfare state in its formative period at a time when modern concepts of human rights were elaborated.

In The Origins of the Welfare State, Lisa DiCaprio reveals how the women working in the ateliers, municipal welfare officials, and the national government vied to define the meaning of revolutionary welfare throughout the Revolution. Presenting demands for improved wages and working conditions to a wide array of revolutionary officials, the women workers exercised their rights as "passive citizens" capaciously and shaped the meanings of work, welfare, and citizenship. Looking backward to the Old Regime and forward to the nineteenth century, this study explores the interventionist spirit that characterized liberalism in the eighteenth century and serves as a bridge to the history of entitlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler edit a collection that examines the effects of the pandemic on workers. Sections of the book focus on specific impacts and government efforts to restructure the economy; the dramatic effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry; educators’ response on behalf of themselves and their students; frontline healthcare workers; and the innovative forms of labor organizing that emerged during and after COVID.

Contributors: Carlos Aramayo, Kathleen Brown, Sandrine Etienne, Ismael García-Colón, Puya Gerami, Maura Hagan, Connor Harney, Devan Hawkins, Leigh Howard, Marian Moser Jones, Doris Joy, Nick Juravich, Eric Larson, Kathryn M. Meyer, Samir Sonti, Steve Striffler, Lia Warner, Andrew B. Wolf, and Jennifer Zelnick