Workingmen's Democracy

Workingmen's Democracy PDF Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

Workingmen's Democracy

Workingmen's Democracy PDF Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

Labor in American Politics

Labor in American Politics PDF Author: J. David Greenstone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Study of the political activities of trade unions in the USA, with particular reference to the impact thereof in election campaigns of the democratic political party - examines the political behaviour of union members in urban areas and covers social change, historical, economic implications and sociological aspects and trends in the orientation of the American trade union movement in the age of consumer-producer class politics. Bibliography pp. Xxxi to xli and references.

Labor and American Politics

Labor and American Politics PDF Author: Charles M. Rehmus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description


Politics of US Labor

Politics of US Labor PDF Author: David Milton
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0853455708
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were coopted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. And, as he demonstrates, crucial to the outcome was the specific nature of the political coalitions contending for supremacy. In analyzing the politics of this struggle, Milton presents a fine description of the major strikes, beginning in 1933-1934, that led to the formation of the CIO and the great industrial unions. He looks closely at the role of the radical political groups, including the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, and the Socialist Party, and provides an enlightening discussion of their vulnerability during the red-baiting era. He also examines the battle between the AFL and the CIO for control of the labor movement, the alliance of the AFL with business interests, and the role of the Catholic Church. Finally, he shows how the extraordinary adeptness of President Roosevelt in allying with labor while at the same time exploiting divisions within the movement was essential to the successful channeling of social revolt into economic demands.

State of the Union

State of the Union PDF Author: Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

The Right and Labor in America

The Right and Labor in America PDF Author: Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812223608
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This collection of essays by leading American historians explains how and why the fight against unionism has long been central to the meaning of contemporary conservatism.

Pure and Simple Politics

Pure and Simple Politics PDF Author: Julie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139427040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Scholarship on American labor politics has been dominated by the view that the American Federation of Labor, the dominant labor organization, rejected political action in favor of economic strategies. Based upon extensive research into labor and political party records, this study demonstrates that, despite the common belief, the AFL devoted great attention to political activity. The organization's main strategy, however, which Julie Greene terms 'pure and simple politics', dictated that trade unionists alone should shape American labor politics. Exploring the period from 1881 to 1917, Pure and Simple Politics focuses on the quandaries this approach generated for American trade unionists. Politics for AFL members became a highly contested terrain, as leaders attempted to implement a strategy which many rank-and-file workers rejected. Furthermore, its drive to achieve political efficacy increasingly exposed the AFL to forces beyond its control, as party politicians and other individuals began seeking to influence labor's political strategy and tactics.

Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994

Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 PDF Author: Kevin Boyle
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791497321
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 traces the rise and fall of labor's power over the course of the twentieth century. It does so through provocative and engaging essays written by distinguished scholars of the modern labor movement. The essays focus on different times and places, from turn-of-the-century steel mills to the streets of 1930s Detroit to the halls of Congress in the 1990s. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, the authors adopt a variety of approaches, from broad syntheses to careful case studies. Altogether, the essays tell a single story, of workers struggling to find a voice for themselves and their unions within the nation they helped to build. It is a story of victories won and of defeats endured.

Schools of Democracy

Schools of Democracy PDF Author: Clayton Sinyai
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729918
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this new political history of the labor movement, Clayton Sinyai examines the relationship between labor activism and the American democratic tradition. Sinyai shows how America's working people and union leaders debated the first questions of democratic theory—and in the process educated themselves about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. In tracing the course of the American labor movement from the founding of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s to the 1968 presidential election and its aftermath, Sinyai explores the political dimensions of collective bargaining, the structures of unions and businesses, and labor's relationships with political parties and other social movements. Schools of Democracy analyzes how labor activists wrestled with fundamental aspects of political philosophy and the development of American democracy, including majority rule versus individual liberty, the rule of law, and the qualifications required of citizens of a democracy. Offering a balanced assessment of mainstream leaders of American labor, from Samuel Gompers to George Meany, and their radical critics, including the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinyai provides an unusual and refreshing perspective on American labor history.

For a Labor Party

For a Labor Party PDF Author: John Pepper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description