Southern Labor in Transition, 1940-1995 PDF Download

Author: Robert H. Zieger
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499906
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
A collection of original essays based on oral history and archival research, this volume illuminates diverse aspects of southern workers' experience in the modern era. Included here are essays on agricultural workers, teachers, and fire fighters, as well as pieces on air transport, paper manufacturing, and aircraft production. Other topics include workers' organizations that fall outside the traditional labor movement and the role of cotton textile workers in the recent history of southern labor relations. Themes involving race, the varieties of union representation, and labor's impact on southern politics are especially prominent throughout this collection.

Author: Vincent J. Roscigno
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816640164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The 1934 strike of southern textile workers, involving nearly 400,000 mill hands, remains perhaps the largest collective mobilization of workers in U.S. history. How these workers came together in the face of the powerful and coercive opposition of management and the state is the remarkable story at the center of this book.The Voice of Southern Labor chronicles the lives and experiences of southern textile workers and provides a unique perspective on the social, cultural, and historical forces that came into play when the group struck, first in 1929, and then on a massive scale in 1934. The workers' grievances, solidarity, and native radicalism of the time were often reflected in the music they listened to and sang, and Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher offer an in-depth context for understanding this intersection of labor, politics, and culture.The authors show how the message of the southern mill hands spread throughout the region with the advent of radio and the rise of ex-mill worker musicians, and how their sense of opportunity was further bolstered by Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio speeches and policies.Vincent J. Roscigno is associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University. William F. Danaher is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Charleston.

Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy

Author: Michael K. Honey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393078329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
The definitive history of the epic struggle for economic justice that became Martin Luther King Jr.'s last crusade. Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black ministers; volatile, young, black-power advocates; idealistic organizers and tough-talking unionists; the first black members of the Memphis city council; the white upper crust who sought to prevent change or conflagration; and, finally, the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr., undertaking a Poor People's Campaign at the crossroads of his life, vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI, and seeing in the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.

Author: Steve Estes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787633X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. He then explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society.

Author: Martin Halpern
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031309408X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Social change advocates won a remarkable series of victories during the 20th century. This study examines both successful and unsuccessful efforts, ranging from the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s to the divisive debate between Gore and Nader supporters during the 2000 election. Halpern details the ingredients essential to shaping progressive campaigns. While left-wing activists sustained grass roots movements and worked with allies in left-center coalitions, trade unions energized by progressive activists gave the efforts institutional weight with crucial assistance from Democratic presidents committed to liberalism. Frequently facing repression, left-wingers nevertheless managed to pass their values on to their children, who in turn sustained new sets of social movements. Leftists worked alongside other progressives to form left-center coalitions on issues such as Civil Rights and labor law reform. Influenced by liberalism, Roosevelt, Johnson, and Kennedy gave crucial assistance to the social change process. Shying away from liberalism, Carter and Clinton and Vice President Gore failed to provide comparable assistance, disappointing progressive activists and unions and leading to important setbacks. Whether the Democratic Party will once again seek to elect a president with a liberal vision to assist a revitalized labor movement, a newly energized left, and left-center coalitions in the social change process remains to be seen.

Author: Robert H. Zieger
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813042720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the dynamic new face of Southern labor since 1950. Life and Labor in the New New South weaves together the best work of established scholars with emerging cutting-edge research on ethnicity, gender, prison labor, de-industrialization, rapidly changing demographic and employment patterns, and popular response to globalization.

Author: Robert H. Woodrum
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820328799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.

Author: Melvyn Dubofsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118976878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
This book, designed to give a survey history of American labor from colonial times to the present, is uniquely well suited to speak to the concerns of today’s teachers and students. As issues of growing inequality, stagnating incomes, declining unionization, and exacerbated job insecurity have increasingly come to define working life over the last 20 years, a new generation of students and teachers is beginning to seek to understand labor and its place and ponder seriously its future in American life. Like its predecessors, this ninth edition of our classic survey of American labor is designed to introduce readers to the subject in an engaging, accessible way.

Author: Michael G. Hillard
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753177
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? Shredding Paper unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry. Michael G. Hillard deconstructs the paper industry's unusual technological and economic histories. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests. Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, Hillard highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. Shredding Paper truthfully and transparently tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a "folk" version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, Hillard offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.