More Perfect Unions

More Perfect Unions PDF Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674056256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being. Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong. Americans care deeply about marriages—their own and other people's—because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.

More Perfect Unions

More Perfect Unions PDF Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674056256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being. Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong. Americans care deeply about marriages—their own and other people's—because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.

Forging Rivals

Forging Rivals PDF Author: Reuel Schiller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107012260
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
Forging Rivals tells the story of the rise and fall of postwar liberalism, vividly recounting the attempts of working people, labor lawyers, and civil rights litigators to create a legal system that promoted both economic opportunity and racial egalitarianism.

A More Perfect Union

A More Perfect Union PDF Author: J. A. Jance
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061760226
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
A shattering tale of corruption and homicide featuring Seattle detective J.P. Beaumont. A shocking photo screamed from the front pages of the tabloids—the last moments of a life captured for all the world to see. The look of sheer terror eternally frozen on the face of the doomed woman indicated that her fatal fall from an upper story of an unfinished Seattle skyscraper was no desperate suicide—and that look will forever haunt Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont. But his hunt for answers and justice is leading to more death, and to dark and terrible secrets scrupulously guarded by men of steel behind the locked doors of a powerful union that extracts its dues payments in blood.

Why Unions Matter

Why Unions Matter PDF Author: Michael Yates
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583671900
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.

The Speech

The Speech PDF Author: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608191494
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
After Senator Barack Obama delivered his celebrated speech, "A More Perfect Union," on March 18, 2008, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted that only Barack Obama "could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds." Pundits established the speech's historical eminence with comparisons to Abraham Lincoln's "A House Divided" and Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream." The future president had addressed one of the biggest issues facing his campaign-and our country-with an eloquence and honesty rarely before heard on a national stage. The Speech brings together a distinguished lineup of writers and thinkers-among them Adam Mansbach, Alice Randall, Connie Schultz, and William Julius Wilson -in a multifaceted exploration of Obama's address. Their original essays examine every aspect of the speech-literary, political, social, and cultural-and are punctuated by Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson's reportage on the issue of race in the now historic 2008 campaign. The Speech memorializes and gives full due to a speech that propelled Obama toward the White House, and prompted a nation to evaluate our imperfect but hopeful union.

Only One Thing Can Save Us

Only One Thing Can Save Us PDF Author: Thomas Geoghegan
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595588361
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Is labor's day over or is this the big moment? Acclaimed author Geoghegan asserts that only a new kind of labor movement can help the country switch course toward a future that is fair and prosperous for all Americans.

Save Our Unions

Save Our Unions PDF Author: Steve Early
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583674276
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they’re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor’s past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book’s insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform.

Asian American Workers Rising

Asian American Workers Rising PDF Author: Kent Wong
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780892150861
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book celebrates the first thirty years of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO (APALA), the first national Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) worker organization within the US labor movement. The voices in this book capture the spirit, determination, and commitment of a multiethnic, multigenerational group of AAPI labor activists who built a dynamic organization within the US labor movement to advance worker rights and labor solidarity. Included are founding members, emerging young activists who are charting a new path for AAPIs in labor, and the leaders who are no longer with us but who inspire others to continue their legacy.

Enough Blame to Go Around

Enough Blame to Go Around PDF Author: Richard Steier
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438449569
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since 1980 Richard Steier has had a unique vantage point to observe the gains, losses, and struggles of municipal labor unions in New York City. He has covered those unions and city government as a reporter and labor columnist for the New York Post and, since 1998, as editor and featured columnist of the Chief-Leader, a century-old independent newspaper that covers city and state government in greater detail than today's mainstream news organizations. Drawing from his column with the Chief-Leader, "Razzle Dazzle," Enough Blame to Go Around describes in vivid terms how the changed economy has drastically altered the city's labor landscape, and why it has been difficult for municipal unions to adapt. There can be no doubt, he writes, that public employee unions have contributed to the problems that confront them today, including corruption and failed leadership. But at the same time and for all their flaws, he believes unions represent the best chance for ordinary people to receive fair economic treatment.

Shakedown

Shakedown PDF Author: Steven Malanga
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1566639662
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
As their infatuation with President Obama fades, millions of Americans anxiously ask, Is this the change we were waiting for? The current administration represents change, for sure, Steven Malanga argues - a momentous transformation of the fundamental structure of American politics. A self-interested coalition of public-sector unions and government-financed community activists (like the young Barack Obama) has become our era''s characteristic political machine. In Shakedown, Mr. Malanga shows how this machine''s single-minded goal is always bigger government and more public spending. The bill, he says, is now coming due for the relentless rise of this new political powerhouse. He chronicles how public-sector unions and the corrupt political hacks beholden to them have all but bankrupted once-rich states like California and New Jersey. He details the campaigns to undermine the successful and popular 1990s welfare reform and to revitalize the failed, wasteful War on Poverty programs that funnel taxpayer money to the advocacy groups that are integral cogs in the new political machine. And he provides a comprehensive summary of how these same advocacy groups spent decades helping undermine mortgage standards in the name of helping the poor - in the process enriching themselves and enabling the housing meltdown. As Americans anxiously ponder the future direction of their government and their economy, Shakedown explores the questions of who got us in this mess and why we need change - constructive change - more than ever.