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Battling for American Labor

Battling for American Labor PDF Author: Howard Kimeldorf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520218337
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
"This riveting, nuanced book takes seriously the workplace radicalism of many early twentieth century American workers. The restriction of working class militancy to the workplace, it shows, was no mere economism. Organizational rather than psychological in orientation, Battling For American Labor accounts for both the early preference of dockworkers in Philadelphia and hotel and restaurant workers in New York for the IWW rather than the AFL and for the reversal of this choice in the 1920s. In so doing, it points the way to a fresh reading of American labor history."—Ira Katznelson, Columbia University "Howard Kimeldorf's book, based on sound and solid historical research in archives, newspapers, journals, memoirs and oral histories, argues that workers in the United States, regardless of their precise union affiliation, harbored syndicalist tendencies which manifested themselves in direct action on the job. Because Kimeldorf's book reinterprets much of the history of the labor movement in the United States, it will surely generate much controversy among scholars and capture the attention of readers."—Melvyn Dubofsky, Binghamton University, SUNY "Howard Kimeldorf's new book is a very exciting accomplishment. This book will surely leave a major imprint on labor history and the sociology of labor. Kimeldorf's focus on repertoires of collective action and practice instead of ideology is a particularly important contribution; one that will force students of labor to rethink many worn-out arguments. After reading Battling For American Labor, one will no longer be able to assume the IWW's defeat was inevitable, or take seriously psychological theories of worker consciousness."—David Wellman, author of The Union Makes Us Strong

Battling for American Labor

Battling for American Labor PDF Author: Howard Kimeldorf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520218337
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
"This riveting, nuanced book takes seriously the workplace radicalism of many early twentieth century American workers. The restriction of working class militancy to the workplace, it shows, was no mere economism. Organizational rather than psychological in orientation, Battling For American Labor accounts for both the early preference of dockworkers in Philadelphia and hotel and restaurant workers in New York for the IWW rather than the AFL and for the reversal of this choice in the 1920s. In so doing, it points the way to a fresh reading of American labor history."—Ira Katznelson, Columbia University "Howard Kimeldorf's book, based on sound and solid historical research in archives, newspapers, journals, memoirs and oral histories, argues that workers in the United States, regardless of their precise union affiliation, harbored syndicalist tendencies which manifested themselves in direct action on the job. Because Kimeldorf's book reinterprets much of the history of the labor movement in the United States, it will surely generate much controversy among scholars and capture the attention of readers."—Melvyn Dubofsky, Binghamton University, SUNY "Howard Kimeldorf's new book is a very exciting accomplishment. This book will surely leave a major imprint on labor history and the sociology of labor. Kimeldorf's focus on repertoires of collective action and practice instead of ideology is a particularly important contribution; one that will force students of labor to rethink many worn-out arguments. After reading Battling For American Labor, one will no longer be able to assume the IWW's defeat was inevitable, or take seriously psychological theories of worker consciousness."—David Wellman, author of The Union Makes Us Strong

Battling for American Labor

Battling for American Labor PDF Author: Howard Kimeldorf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520922747
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States—its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action—can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism. Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.

Beaten Down, Worked Up

Beaten Down, Worked Up PDF Author: Steven Greenhouse
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101874430
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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

The Fight for $15

The Fight for $15 PDF Author: David Rolf
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620971143
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
“Rolf shows that raising the minimum wage to $15 is both just and necessary, lest the American dream of middle class prosperity turn into a nightmare” (David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist). Combining history, economics, and commonsense political wisdom, The Fight for $15 makes a deeply informed case for a national fifteen-dollars-an-hour minimum wage as the only practical solution to reversing America’s decades-long slide toward becoming a low-wage nation. Drawing both on new scholarship and on his extensive practical experiences organizing workers and grappling with inequality across the United States, David Rolf, president of SEIU 775—which waged the successful Seattle campaign for a fifteen dollar minimum wage—offers an accessible explanation of “middle out” economics, an emerging popular economic theory that suggests that the origins of prosperity in capitalist economies lie with workers and consumers, not investors and employers. A blueprint for a different and hopeful American future, The Fight for $15 offers concrete tools, ideas, and inspiration for anyone interested in real change in our lifetimes. “The author’s plainspoken approach and stellar scholarship illuminate in-depth discussions about the deliberate policy decisions that began to decimate the middle class at the start of the 1980s as well as the insidious new ways in which big business continues to attack American workers today via stagnant wages, rampant subcontracting, unpredictable scheduling, and other detrimental practices associated with the so-called ‘share economy.’” —Kirkus Reviews “David Rolf has become the most successful advocate for raising wages in the twenty-first century.” —Andy Stern, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy

The Battle of Blair Mountain

The Battle of Blair Mountain PDF Author: Robert Shogan
Publisher: Palabra
ISBN: 9780465077731
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners-- outraged over years of brutality and exploitation-- picked up their Winchesters and marched against their tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of deputies, state police, and makeshift militia. Only the intervention of a Federal expeditionary force ended this undeclared war. In The Battle of Blair Mountain, Robert Shogan shows this long-neglected slice of American history to be a saga of the conflicting political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the power structure of twentieth-century America.

Women and the American Labor Movement

Women and the American Labor Movement PDF Author: Philip S. Foner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781608469215
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 623

Book Description
A comprehensive account of the women who organized for labor rights and equality from the early factories to the 1970's.

The Long Deep Grudge

The Long Deep Grudge PDF Author: Toni Gilpin
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642590894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
“The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles

Upon the Altar of Work

Upon the Altar of Work PDF Author: Betsy Wood
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052323
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state. Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

Battling the Plantation Mentality

Battling the Plantation Mentality PDF Author: Laurie B. Green
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. No single event makes this more plain, Laurie Green argues, than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of "freedom" in postwar Memphis, Green demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing "plantation mentality" based on race, gender, and power that permeated southern culture long before--and even after--the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan "I AM a Man!" the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. Green traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, Green demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.

Minutemen

Minutemen PDF Author: Jim Gilchrist
Publisher: WND Books
ISBN: 0977898415
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
This book is a first-hand account from the frontlines, and what it says will shock you. Jim Gilchrist teams up with Jerome Corsi, the co-author of Unfit for Command - the book that derailed John Kerry's presidential campaign - to describe in vivid detail how the nation's southern border has disintegrated into a Wild West of human trafficking, drug smuggling, and violent gangs. Readers of this disturbing and timely book will learn how: Mexico encourages the mass emigration of millions of impoverished peasants, and why the Mexican government will stop at nothing to keep the border open; The Catholic Church uses its power and influence to subvert immigration laws, and why Church leaders are speaking out in favor of amnesty; American taxpayers are forced to pay the staggering economic and cultural price tag of illegal immigration, and why our government wants to keep the true costs hidden from the public. Like their Revolutionary War predecessors who defended America against a hostile foreign power, today's Minutemen have risen up to answer their nation's call against another invasion. Minutemen is their story, as well as an urgent call to arms to all of their countrymen.