The State and Labor in Modern America
The State and Labor in Modern America

Author: Melvyn Dubofsky

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0807861154

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this important new book, Melvyn Dubofsky traces the relationship between the American labor movement and the federal government from the 1870s until the present. His is the only book to focus specifically on the 'labor question' as a lens through which to view more clearly the basic political, economic, and social forces that have divided citizens throughout the industrial era. Many scholars contend that the state has acted to suppress trade union autonomy and democracy, as well as rank-and-file militancy, in the interest of social stability and conclude that the law has rendered unions the servants of capital and the state. In contrast, Dubofsky argues that the relationship between the state and labor is far more complex and that workers and their unions have gained from positive state intervention at particular junctures in American history. He focuses on six such periods when, in varying combinations, popular politics, administrative policy formation, and union influence on the legislative and executive branches operated to promote stability by furthering the interests of workers and their organizations.

State of the Union
State of the Union

Author: Nelson Lichtenstein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-10-26

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1400838525

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Labor’s Great War
Labor’s Great War

Author: Joseph A. McCartin

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 146961703X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalition's efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.

For All These Rights
For All These Rights

Author: Jennifer Klein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-01-02

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1400835666

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The New Deal placed security at the center of American political and economic life by establishing an explicit partnership between the state, economy, and citizens. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, most people depend overwhelmingly on private health insurance and employee benefits. The astounding rise of this phenomenon from before World War II, however, has been largely overlooked. In this powerful history of the American reliance on employment-based benefits, Jennifer Klein examines the interwoven politics of social provision and labor relations from the 1910s to the 1960s. Through a narrative that connects the commercial life insurance industry, the politics of Social Security, organized labor's quest for economic security, and the evolution of modern health insurance, she shows how the firm-centered welfare system emerged. Moreover, the imperatives of industrial relations, Klein argues, shaped public and private social security. Looking closely at unions and communities, Klein uncovers the wide range of alternative, community-based health plans that had begun to germinate in the 1930s and 1940s but that eventually succumbed to commercial health insurance and pensions. She also illuminates the contests to define "security"--job security, health security, and old age security--following World War II. For All These Rights traces the fate of the New Deal emphasis on social entitlement as the private sector competed with and emulated Roosevelt's Social Security program. Through the story of struggles over health security and old age security, social rights and the welfare state, it traces the fate of New Deal liberalism--as a set of ideas about the state, security, and labor rights--in the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond.

New Democracy
New Democracy

Author: William J. Novak

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674260449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Workers' Paradox
Workers' Paradox

Author: Ruth O'Brien

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780807847374

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reinterpreting the roots of twentieth-century American labor law and politics, Ruth O'Brien argues that it was not New Deal Democrats but rather Republicans of an earlier era who developed the fundamental principles underlying modern labor policy. By exam

Whose Detroit?
Whose Detroit?

Author: Heather Ann Thompson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1501702017

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions. Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center. Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant. Whose Detroit? brings the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism and integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights

Author: Zaragosa Vargas

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2007-10-28

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0691134022

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

Labor Politics in Latin America
Labor Politics in Latin America

Author: Paul W. Posner

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2018-08-14

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1683400569

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to remain competitive in the face of increasing globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers’ rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility—the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed—which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. In-depth case studies show how flexibilization as well as privatization, trade liberalization, and economic deregulation have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, leading to the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people’s interests effectively in the future.

L.A. Story
L.A. Story

Author: Ruth Milkman

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2006-08-03

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1610443969

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sharp decreases in union membership over the last fifty years have caused many to dismiss organized labor as irrelevant in today's labor market. In the private sector, only 8 percent of workers today are union members, down from 24 percent as recently as 1973. Yet developments in Southern California—including the successful Justice for Janitors campaign—suggest that reports of organized labor's demise may have been exaggerated. In L.A. Story, sociologist and labor expert Ruth Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed for unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights. L.A. Story shatters many of the myths of modern labor with a close look at workers in four industries in Los Angeles: building maintenance, trucking, construction, and garment production. Though many blame deunionization and deteriorating working conditions on immigrants, Milkman shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Her analysis reveals that worsening work environments preceded the influx of foreign-born workers, who filled the positions only after native-born workers fled these suddenly undesirable jobs. Ironically, L.A. Story shows that immigrant workers, who many union leaders feared were incapable of being organized because of language constraints and fear of deportation, instead proved highly responsive to organizing efforts. As Milkman demonstrates, these mostly Latino workers came to their service jobs in the United States with a more group-oriented mentality than the American workers they replaced. Some also drew on experience in their native countries with labor and political struggles. This stock of fresh minds and new ideas, along with a physical distance from the east-coast centers of labor's old guard, made Los Angeles the center of a burgeoning workers' rights movement. Los Angeles' recent labor history highlights some of the key ingredients of the labor movement's resurgence—new leadership, latitude to experiment with organizing techniques, and a willingness to embrace both top-down and bottom-up strategies. L.A. Story's clear and thorough assessment of these developments points to an alternative, high-road national economic agenda that could provide workers with a way out of poverty and into the middle class.