Author: Committee on Canadian Labour History Publisher: [St. John's, Nfld.] : LLAFUR/CCLH ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Papers from a conference of Committee on Canadian Labour History and Llafur, the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, held in April 1987 near Newtown in Mid-Wales.
Author: Committee on Canadian Labour History Publisher: [St. John's, Nfld.] : LLAFUR/CCLH ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Papers from a conference of Committee on Canadian Labour History and Llafur, the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, held in April 1987 near Newtown in Mid-Wales.
Author: Staughton Lynd Publisher: PM Press ISBN: 1629631280 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 100
Book Description
Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd's experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement. While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic. To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers' self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas. This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.
Author: Joe Burns Publisher: Haymarket Books ISBN: 1642596817 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy. Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democtractic and fighting labor movement.
Author: John D. Belshaw Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773570403 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture.
Author: Janice Ruth Fine Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801472572 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
As national policy is debated, a locally based grassroots movement is taking the initiative to assist millions of immigrants in the American workforce facing poor pay, bad working conditions, and few prospects to advance to better jobs. Fine takes a comprehensive look at the rising phenomenon of worker centers, fast-growing institutions that improve the lives of immigrant workers through service advocacy and organizing.—from publisher information.
Author: S. Janaka Biyanwila Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136904263 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Based on extensive original research, this book examines the challenges confronting trade unions in the global South, by focusing on trade union struggles in Sri Lanka under neo-liberal globalisation. It centres on movement politics of unions; explains union capacities to mobilise workers as a part of broad counter movement; and specifies worker struggles in Sri Lanka. The author identifies key dimensions of variation in the approaches taken by oppositional groupings, in particular unions, other labour organisations and the labour movement, and locates those variations in a larger theoretical context. Three case studies on trade unions in tea plantations, garment factories and among the nurses show how these theoretical dimensions operate in practice, and the consequences for the sort of opposition that is (and is not) created. The book contributes to the on-going debate on social movement unionism, and it also reveals their gaps in terms of addressing how class injustices are mediated through ethno-nationalist projects reproducing ethnic and gender hierarchies. It acknowledges the diversity of experiences and forms of resistance in the global South and critically engages with issues of gender, ethnicity and labour internationalism, providing a useful contribution to studies on South Asian Politics as well as Labour and Development Studies.
Author: Steven K. Ashby Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252076400 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
This on-the-ground labor history focuses on the bitterly contested labor conflict in the early 1990s at the A. E. Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where workers waged one of the most hard-fought struggles in recent labor history. Originally family-owned, A. E. Staley was bought out by the multinational conglomerate Tate & Lyle, which immediately launched a full-scale assault on its union workforce. Allied Industrial Workers Local 837 responded by educating and mobilizing its members, organizing strong support from the religious and black communities, building a national and international solidarity movement, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the plant gates. Drawing on seventy-five interviews, videotapes of every union meeting, and their own active involvement organizing with the Staley workers, Steven K. Ashby and C. J. Hawking bring the workers' voices to the fore and reveal their innovative tactics, such as work-to-rule and solidarity committees, that inform and strengthen today's labor movement.
Author: Gregory S. Kealey Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773513523 Category : Electronic books Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
This collection of twelve essays by Gregory Kealey, will be of great interest to students and scholars of Canadian history, labour history, Marxist and socialist theory and history, and political science.
Author: Committee on Canadian Labour History
Author: Committee on Canadian Labour History
Author: Staughton Lynd
Author: Joe Burns
Author: John D. Belshaw
Author: Janice Ruth Fine
Author: Bo Gabriel de Montgomery
Author: S. Janaka Biyanwila
Author: Steven K. Ashby
Author: Gregory S. Kealey