Author: William Z. FosterPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 70
Book Description
The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement
Author: William Z. FosterPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 70
Book Description
BANKRUPTCY OF THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT
Author: WM Z. FOSTERPublisher:
ISBN: 9781033583029
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (Classic Reprint)
Author: Wm Z. FosterPublisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780260660695
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72
Book Description
Excerpt from The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement But American Labor is still asleep, drugged into insensibility by bourgeois propaganda. It is the only important labor movement in the world not yet aware of the revolutionary character of the fight that it is carrying on; it is the only one which has not declared for some sort of a socialist society as its ultimate goal. And the worst of it is that it is making no effort toward such an awakening. European Labor studies present day society deeply and draws funda mentally revolutionary conclusions therefrom, but American Labor takes capitalist economics and morals for granted. An earnest study of social institutions by a typical American labor leader would be a world curiosity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement
Author: William E. ForbathPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037081
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.
The Crisis of American Labor
Author: Sidney LensPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
A professional labor organizer surveys the present state of organized labor.
What Unions No Longer Do
Author: Jake RosenfeldPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727266
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
From workers’ wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post–World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in ten, and just one in twenty in the private sector—the lowest in a century. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have attempted to explain the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do lays bare the broad repercussions of labor’s collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the “golden age” of welfare capitalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. Rather, for generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America’s expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class. What Unions No Longer Do shows in detail the consequences of labor’s decline: curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants’ economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, and the result is a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.
Black and Blue
Author: Paul FrymerPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691134659
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline. The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement. From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
Labor Activism in Bankruptcy
Author: Andrew DawsonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 47
Book Description
This article analyzes labor union participation in corporate reorganizations and argues that this participation - particularly if expanded to include non-unionized workers - can provide benefits for corporate governance in the Chapter 11 context. Many of the same dynamics that have motivated labor unions to engage in corporate governance through shareholder activism and labor campaigns also have motivated labor unions to participate more actively in the bankruptcies of corporate employers: workers have long-term interests in their employers but they are generally excluded from corporate governance mechanisms. In addition, bankruptcy and financial distress create unique governance dynamics that create an even stronger incentive for labor unions to develop new strategies to protect their interests. These dynamics have been characterized as a creditor competition for corporate control, and this competition simultaneously threatens the interests of workers and creates new opportunities for workers to participate in the reorganization process.This labor participation in the reorganization process can protect not only the interests of the represented workers but also the interests of all stakeholders, as workers and their unions can be a valuable repository of information regarding the firm and industry. For example, in both the Hostess Bakeries and American Airlines bankruptcies discussed in this article, labor unions were able to forge alliances with other stakeholders and potential purchasers based in part on the unions' internal perspective on the debtors' operations.This article concludes by considering whether, in the face of declining unionization rates, statutory employee committees could be used more broadly to incorporate worker voice into bankruptcy governance. While such committees are already permissible under current bankruptcy law, they are rarely used, in part, because of their perceived costs. The value contributed by labor union participation, however, suggests that these costs should be reconsidered in light of the benefits such committees can provide.
State of the Union
Author: Nelson LichtensteinPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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.
An Injury to All
Author: Kim MoodyPublisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860919292
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO’s conservative ideology of “business unionism” effectively disarmed unions in the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its post-war gains. With extraordinary attention to the viewpoints of rank-and-file workers, Moody chronicles the major, but largely unreported, efforts of labor’s grassroots to find its way out of the crisis. In case studies of auto, steel, meatpacking and trucking, he traces the rise of “anti-concession” movements and in other case studies describes the formidable obstacles to the “organization of the unorganized” in the service sector. A detailed analysis of the Rainbow Coalition’s potential to unite labor with other progressive groups follows, together with a pathbreaking consideration of the possibilities of a new “labor internationalism.”
