From Blackjacks to Briefcases

From Blackjacks to Briefcases PDF Author: Robert Michael Smith
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821414658
Category : Strikebreakers
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that. By digging through subpoenaed documents of strike-bound companies, their mercenaries, and the testimony of executive officers and rank-and-file strikebreakers, Robert Smith examines the inner workings of the antiunion industry. In a clear and lively style, he brings to life the violent armed guards employed on the picket line or in the coal camps; the ruffians who filled the armies marshaled by the “King of the Strikebreakers,” Pearl Bergoff; the labor spies who wrecked countless unions; and, after the Wagner Act, those who manipulated national labor law to serve their clients. In From Blackjacks to Briefcases, Smith follows the history of this ongoing struggle and tells a compelling story that parallels the history of the United States over the last century and a half.

From Blackjacks to Briefcases

From Blackjacks to Briefcases PDF Author: Robert Michael Smith
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821414658
Category : Strikebreakers
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that. By digging through subpoenaed documents of strike-bound companies, their mercenaries, and the testimony of executive officers and rank-and-file strikebreakers, Robert Smith examines the inner workings of the antiunion industry. In a clear and lively style, he brings to life the violent armed guards employed on the picket line or in the coal camps; the ruffians who filled the armies marshaled by the “King of the Strikebreakers,” Pearl Bergoff; the labor spies who wrecked countless unions; and, after the Wagner Act, those who manipulated national labor law to serve their clients. In From Blackjacks to Briefcases, Smith follows the history of this ongoing struggle and tells a compelling story that parallels the history of the United States over the last century and a half.

Saps, Blackjacks and Slungshots: A History of Forgotten Weapons

Saps, Blackjacks and Slungshots: A History of Forgotten Weapons PDF Author: Robert Escobar
Publisher: Catoblepas Press
ISBN: 1619848759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description


Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History

Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History PDF Author: Eric Arnesen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135883629
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1734

Get Book Here

Book Description
A RUSA 2007 Outstanding Reference Title The Encyclopedia of US Labor and Working-Class History provides sweeping coverage of US labor history. Containing over 650 entries, the Encyclopedia encompasses labor history from the colonial era to the present. Articles focus on states, regions, periods, economic sectors and occupations, race-relations, ethnicity, and religion, concepts and developments in labor economics, environmentalism, globalization, legal history, trade unions, strikes, organizations, individuals, management relations, and government agencies and commissions. Articles cover such issues as immigration and migratory labor, women and labor, labor in every war effort, slavery and the slave-trade, union-resistance by corporations such as Wal-Mart, and the history of cronyism and corruption, and the mafia within elements of labor history. Labor history is also considered in its representation in film, music, literature, and education. Important articles cover the perception of working-class culture, such as the surge in sympathy for the working class following September 11, 2001. Written as an objective social history, the Encyclopedia encapsulates the rise and decline, and continuous change of US labor history into the twenty-first century.

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations PDF Author: Daniel S. Margolies
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338710
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the late nineteenth century the United States oversaw a great increase in extraterritorial claims, boundary disputes, extradition controversies, and transborder abduction and interdiction. In this sweeping history of the underpinnings of American empire, Daniel S. Margolies offers a new frame of analysis for historians to understand how novel assertions of legal spatiality and extraterritoriality were deployed in U.S. foreign relations during an era of increased national ambitions and global connectedness. Whether it was in the Mexican borderlands or in other hot spots around the globe, Margolies shows that American policy responded to disputes over jurisdiction by defining the space of law on the basis of a strident unilateralism. Especially significant and contested were extradition regimes and the exceptions carved within them. Extradition of fugitives reflected critical questions of sovereignty and the role of the state in foreign affair during the run-up to overseas empire in 1898. Using extradition as a critical lens, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations examines the rich embeddedness of questions of sovereignty, territoriality, legal spatiality, and citizenship and shows that U.S. hegemonic power was constructed in significant part in the spaces of law, not simply through war or trade.

Corporate Governance, Employee Voice, and Work Organization

Corporate Governance, Employee Voice, and Work Organization PDF Author: Inge Lippert
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199681074
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Corporate Governance, Employee Voice, and Work Organization explores the dynamic relations between corporate governance, employee voice, and the organization of work in the automotive supply industry. It reports on research undertaken in three countries--Germany, Sweden, and the United States--that has sought to explore and compare historical patterns of the relationships between changing governance regimes, voice, and work at plant level in an era of financialization. It also explores the prospects for high-road, sustainable jobs in the sector. Three detailed case histories from each of the countries are presented which contrast companies facing three different levels of exposure to capital markets: companies relatively sheltered from stock markets; companies that are highly exposed to them; and thirdly companies owned by private equity firms. This design allows for analysis not just across different national contexts but also within them, and questions the usefulness of the 'varieties of capitalism' appraoch in understanding these differences. The cases show that governance compromises matter, that is, that recognising the role of employee voice in corporate governance regimes is essential in any comparative analysis and understanding of corporate governance.

The Six-Shooter State

The Six-Shooter State PDF Author: Jonathan Obert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316515141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Public and private forms of violence have co-evolved rather than competed in America's political development since the nineteenth century.

Invisible Hands

Invisible Hands PDF Author: Kim Phillips-Fein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393337669
Category : Conservatism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beginning in the mid-1930s, a handful of prominent American businessmen forged alliances with the aim of rescuing America from socialism and the "nanny state." This book reveals the story of a step-by-step campaign to promote an ideological revolution

Class and Power in the New Deal

Class and Power in the New Deal PDF Author: G. William Domhoff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Class and Power in the New Deal provides a new perspective on the origins and implementation of the three most important policies that emerged during the New Deal—the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act. It reveals how Northern corporate moderates, representing some of the largest fortunes and biggest companies of that era, proposed all three major initiatives and explores why there were no viable alternatives put forward by the opposition. More generally, this book analyzes the seeming paradox of policy support and political opposition. The authors seek to demonstrate the superiority of class dominance theory over other perspectives—historical institutionalism, Marxism, and protest-disruption theory—in explaining the origins and development of these three policy initiatives. Domhoff and Webber draw on extensive new archival research to develop a fresh interpretation of this seminal period of American government and social policy development.

Strikes Around the World, 1968-2005

Strikes Around the World, 1968-2005 PDF Author:
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9052602859
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
Are strikes going out of fashion or are they an inevitable feature of working life? This is a longstanding debate. The much-proclaimed withering away of the strike in the 1950s was quickly overturned by the resurgence of class conflict in the late 1960s and 1970s. The period since then has been characterized as one of labor quiescence. Commentators again predict the strikes demise, at least in the former heartlands of capitalism.Patterns of employment are constantly changing and strike activity reflects this. The continuing decline of manufacturing in mature industrialized economies is of major importance here (though the global relocation of manufacturing may lead to some relocation of strikes). Simultaneously, we see the growth of disputes in the service sector (the tertiarization of strikes). This is evident particularly in public services, including health care, social care and education, and is accompanied by a feminization of strikes, given the prevalence of women working there. This unique study draws on the experience of fifteen countries around the world: South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, United States, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Covering the high and low points of strike activity over the period 1968-2005, the study shows continuing evidence of the durability, adaptability and necessity of the strike.

Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890-1930

Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890-1930 PDF Author: Matteo Millan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100034245X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a comparative and transnational examination of the complex and multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation, from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. It retraces the formation of an extensive market for corporate policing, privately contracted security and yellow unionism, as well as processes of professionalisation in strikebreaking activities, labour espionage and surveillance. It reconstructs the diverse spectrum of right-wing patriotic leagues and vigilante corps which, in support or in competition with law enforcement agencies, sought to counter the dual dangers of industrial militancy and revolutionary situations. Although considerable research has been done on the rise of socialist parties and trade unions the repressive policies of their opponents have been generally left unexamined. This book fills this gap by reconstructing the methods and strategies used by state authorities and employers to counter outbreaks of labour militancy on a global scale. It adopts a long-term chronology that sheds light on the shocks and strains that marked industrial societies during their turbulent transition into mass politics from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. Offering a new angle of vision to examine the violent transition to mass politics in industrial societies, this is of great interest to scholars of policing, unionism and striking in the modern era.