There Is Power in a Union PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download There Is Power in a Union PDF full book. Access full book title There Is Power in a Union by Philip Dray. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Philip Dray
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307389766
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 818
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the nineteenth-century textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for the American bounty has shaped our national experience. In this stirring new history, Philip Dray shows us the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. His epic, character-driven narrative not only restores to our collective memory the indelible story of American labor, it also demonstrates the importance of the fight for fairness and economic democracy, and why that effort remains so urgent today.
Author: Philip Dray
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307389766
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 818
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the nineteenth-century textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for the American bounty has shaped our national experience. In this stirring new history, Philip Dray shows us the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. His epic, character-driven narrative not only restores to our collective memory the indelible story of American labor, it also demonstrates the importance of the fight for fairness and economic democracy, and why that effort remains so urgent today.
Author: Stephen Innes
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ten leading scholars of early American social history here examine the nature of work and labor in America from 1614 to 1820. The authors scrutinize work diaries, private and public records, and travelers' accounts. Subjects include farmers, farmwives, urban laborers, plantation slave workers, midwives, and sailors; locales range from Maine to the Caribbean and the high seas. These essays recover the regimen that consumed the waking hours of most adults in the New World, defined their economic lives, and shaped their larger existence. Focusing on individuals as well as groups, the authors emphasize the choices that, over time, might lead to prosperity or to the poorhouse. Few people enjoyed sinecures, and every day brought new risks. Stephen Innes introduces the collection by elucidating the prophetic vision of Captain John Smith: that the New World offered abundant reward for one's "owne industrie." Several motifs stand out in the essays. Family labor has begun to assume greater prominence, both as a collective work unit and as a collective economic unit whose members worked independently. Of growing interest to contemporary scholars is the role of family size and sex ratio in determining economic decision, and vice ersa. Work patterns appear to have been driven by the goal of creating surplus production for markets; perhaps because of a desire for higher consumption, work patterns began to intensify throughout the eighteenth century and led to longer work days with fewer slack periods. Overall, labor relations showed no consistent evolution but remained fluid and flexible in the face of changing market demands in highly diverse environments. The authors address as well the larger questions of American development and indicate the directions that research in this expanding field might follow.
Author: Foster Rhea Dulles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: William E. Scheuerman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438485506
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book Here
Book Description
The American labor movement isn't dead. It's just moving from the bargaining table to the streets. In A New American Labor Movement, William Scheuerman analyzes how the decline of unions and the emergence of these new direct-action movements are reshaping the American labor movement. Tens of thousands of exploited workers—from farm laborers and gig drivers to freelance artists and restaurant workers—have taken to the streets in a collective attempt to attain a living wage and decent working conditions, with or without the help of unions. This new worker militancy, expressed through mass demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, political action, and similar activities, has already achieved much success and offers models for workers to exercise their power in the twenty-first century. Finally, Scheuerman notes, many of the strategies of the new direct-action groups share features with the sectoral bargaining model that dominates the European labor movement, suggesting that sectoral bargaining may become the foundation of a new American labor movement.
Author: David Milton
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0853455708
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Get Book Here
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.
Author: Steven Greenhouse
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101874430
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Get Book Here
Book Description
“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick
Author: Steve Early
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608460991
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Get Book Here
Book Description
Trade union leader and journalist Steve Early discusses how to reverse American labour's current decline.
Author: Andrew E. Kersten
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814747868
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor’s Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.
Author: Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
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.
Author: Daniel E. Bender
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479871257
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Get Book Here
Book Description
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.
