The Samuel Gompers Papers
The Samuel Gompers Papers

Author: Samuel Gompers

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 630

ISBN-13: 9780252025648

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With almost forty years' experience as a labor leader by 1909, Samuel Gompers had learned the value of practical achievements. Shorter hours, higher wages, safer and more sanitary workplaces, and a voice in establishing working conditions were the hallmarks of trade unionism in the Progressive Era, and these hard-won, incremental gains had significantly improved working-class lives. While these were not all he hoped to achieve, they represented, Gompers believed, essential victories in a bitter class struggle that was far from over. This installment of the multivolume documentary history of the nation's premier labor leader covers a period marked by industrial tragedies--such as the 1909 Cherry Hill mine disaster and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire--and industrial violence, including the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. These years were punctuated by hard-fought strikes and judicial proceedings directed against trade unionists, most notably the Danbury Hatters' and Buck's Stove cases and the prosecution of the McNamaras. For Gompers, these were demanding years that taxed his health and energy but ultimately strengthened his resolve as he became a crucial player in the AFL's efforts to establish collective bargaining as the basis of industrial democracy.

Solidarity Blues
Solidarity Blues

Author: Richard Iton

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-06-19

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 080786076X

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A number of arguments have been made to explain the relative weakness of the American Left. A preference for individualism, the effects of prosperity, and the miscalculations of different components of the Left, including the labor movement, have been cited, among other factors, as possible explanations for this puzzling aspect of American exceptionalism. But these arguments, says Richard Iton, overlook a crucial factor--the powerful influence of race upon American life. Iton argues that the failure of the American Left lies in its inability to come to grips with the centrality of race in the American experience. Placing the history of the American Left in an illuminating comparative context, he also broadens our definition of the Left to include not just political parties and labor unions but also public policy and popular culture--an important source for the kind of cultural consensus needed to sustain broad social and collectivist efforts, Iton says. In short, by exposing the impact of race on the development of the American Left, Iton offers a provocative new way of understanding the unique orientation of American politics.

Heartland Blues
Heartland Blues

Author: Marc Dixon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-23

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0190917040

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The Midwest experienced an upheaval over labor rights beginning in the winter of 2011. For most commentators, the fallout in the Midwest and unions' weak showing in the 2016 presidential election a few years later was just more evidence of labor's emaciated state. In Heartland Blues, Marc Dixon provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the late 1950s. Drawing on social movement theories and archival materials, he analyzes campaigns over key labor policies as they were waged in the heavily unionized states of Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin-the very same states at the center of more recent battles over labor rights. He shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for less powerful groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at the time, but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. Thus, the labor movement's social and political isolation and their limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the ensuing decades, as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide. Showing how labor rights have been challenged in significant ways in the industrial Midwest in the 1950s, Heartland Blues both identifies enduring problems for labor and forces scholars to look beyond size when seeking clues to labor's failures and successes.