This is the final volume in the Historical Directory of Trade Unions series. It provides a comprehensive list of all British unions that operated within the building, construction, chemical, dock, maritime, engineering, government, mining, quarry, and shipbuilding industries.
The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.
First Published in 2017. Volume 6 of the directory contains the Trade Unions of Building and Construction, Agriculture, Fishing, Chemicals, Wood and Woodworking, Transport, Engineering and Metal Working, Government, Civil and Public Service, Energy and Extraction in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Shipbuilding.
Focusing on a story largely untold until now, Theresa A. Case studies the "Great Southwest Strike of 1886," which pitted entrepreneurial freedom against the freedom of employees to have a collective voice in their workplace. This series of local actions involved a historic labor agreement followed by the most massive sympathy strike the nation had ever seen. It attracted western railroaders across lines of race and skill, contributed to the rise and decline of the first mass industrial union in U.S. history (the Knights of Labor), and brought new levels of federal intervention in railway strikes. Case takes a fresh look at the labor unrest that shook Jay Gould's railroad empire in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. In Texas towns and cities like Marshall, Dallas, Fort Worth, Palestine, Texarkana, Denison, and Sherman, union recognition was the crucial issue of the day. Case also powerfully portrays the human facets of this strike, reconstructing the story of Martin Irons, a Scottish immigrant who came to adopt the union cause as his own. Irons committed himself wholly to the failed strike of 1886, continuing to urge violence even as courts handed down injunctions protecting the railroads, national union leaders publicly chastised him, the press demonized him, and former strikers began returning to work. Irons’s individual saga is set against the backdrop of social, political, and economic changes that transformed the region in the post–Civil War era. Students, scholars, and general readers interested in railroad, labor, social, or industrial history will not want to be without The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor.
Public approval of a book is indicated by its sale. A second edition of this having been exhausted, my publishers deem it advisable to issue a third edition revised to date. In assenting, I have had to examine it thoroughly in order to see whether the work required correction, and, if so, to what extent. After careful perusal I find no reason to modify any sentence, withdraw any expression, or correct any statement of fact in its pages. Much has happened since it was written in 1890, the proofs finally revised in January 1891, but in all respects my views are unchanged 3 nor have the last ten years Shown cause for any abandon ment of the opinions then held. My conclusions have proved sound in all instances, even where I ventured to predict. I have therefore left the text untouched except for a few verbal emendations, and the restoration of two pages (soa and 595) which were unaccountably dropped out in going through the press. All that I desire to add has been compressed into a Supplementary Chapter, in which the several controversial points are dealt with, and statistics are brought up to date. The book was written in the heat of controversies to which illusion is made, the somewhat severe criticisms being justified by the then facts and circumstances. If they now appear to be harsh, it is because the policy then denounced has been abandoned, or so modified as to be no longer open to the condemnation then pronounced.
The book traces Lord Morris of Aberavon's life from his deep roots and formative years in mid-Wales to his appointment as Attorney General and beyond, providing a fascinating insight into the personalities and dramas encountered along the way in politics and law.
Railway workers were a uniformed and respectable section of the Victorian and Edwardian working class. They built their trade unions in the face of employer hostility and their organisations played a crucial role in the construction of effective labour politics. Local political organisations owed much to the patience and creativity of railway workers, not least in small towns and country districts. Respectable Radicals uses rich archival sources to analyse this history through a series of case studies. It focuses, among other topics, on disasters, strikes, the modernisation policies of companies, inter-union rivalries and the promises and frustrations of labour politics. A dominant theme is the complex relationship between changing experiences of work, shifting trade union strategies and political identities. The result is a new perspective on a significant sector of trade unionism and on the character of labour politics from the 1890s to the 1950s.
Reference book comprising a bibliography aiming to bring together secondary source interdisciplinary material on labour relations in the UK between the years 1880 and 1970 - covers employees attitudes, trade unions and employees associations, employers organizations, the labour market and working conditions, etc.