In this new paperback edition, Thomas Geoghegan has updated his eloquent plea for the relevance of organized labor in America with an afterword covering the labor movement through the 1990s. A funny, sharp, unsentimental career memoir, Which Side Are You On? pairs a compelling history of the rise and near-fall of labor in the United States with an idealist's disgruntled exercise in self-evaluation. Writing with the honesty of an embattled veteran still hoping for the best, Geoghegan offers an entertaining, accessible, and literary introduction to the labor movement, as well as an indispensable touchstone for anyone whose hopes have run up against the unaccommodating facts on the ground. Wry and inspiring, Which Side Are You On? is the ideal book for anyone who has ever woken up and realized, "You must change your life."

    The handbook has been used by Midwest Academy since 1973 in its organizing and activism seminars. Central to the Academy and the manual are

    For 10 years, Hamper, as did many of his fellow workers, showed up to work drunk and on drugs, was repeatedly laid off and called back, and battled continuously with foremen and supervisors.Eventually his talent for depicting these wretched work conditions formed into a column, called "Rivethead," that appeared in Midwest newspapers as well as in Mother Jones. This book is based on that column, which takes well-aimed potshots at American management and business and illuminates the world of the automobile builder and lunch pail carrier in hard-edged, vernacular prose.

    The author surveys criticisms of his work, accepting many such criticisms while challenging others, especially the view that the study of working-class racism implies a rejection of Marxism and radical politics.

    

    The Baltimore Book is both a history of "the other Baltimore" and a tour guide to places in the city that are important to labor, African American, and women's history. The book grew out of a popular local bus tour conducted by public historians, the People's History Tour of Baltimore, that began in 1982. This book records and adds sites to that tour; provides maps, photographs, and contemporary documents; and includes interviews with some of the uncelebrated people whose experiences as Baltimoreans reflect more about the city than Francis Scott Key ever did.The tour begins at the B&O Railroad Station at Camden Yards, site of the railroad strike of 1877, moves on to Hampden-Woodbury, the mid-19th century cotton textile industry's company town, and stops on the way to visit Evergreen House and to hear the narratives of ex-slaves. We travel to Old West Baltimore, the late 19th-century center of commerce and culture for the African American community; Fells Point; Sparrows Point; the suburbs; Federal Hill; and Baltimore's "renaissance" at Harborplace. Interviews with community activists, civil rights workers, Catholic Workers, and labor union organizers bring color and passion to this historical tour. Specific labor struggles, class and race relations, and the contributions of women to Baltimore's development are emphasized at each stop. In the series Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.

    In the first comprehensive study of these organizations, Hiltermann shows how local organizers provided basic services unavailable under military rule, while recruiting for the cause of Palestinian nationalism.

    . . . But absent from the tourism industry's historical recollection is any reference to the immigrants or black migrants and their children who constituted the army of laborers along the riverfront and provided the essential human power to keep the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing. . . . In examining one diverse group of workers--the 10,000 to 15,000 cotton screwmen, longshoremen, cotton and round freight teamsters, cotton yardmen, railroad freight handlers, and Mississippi River roustabouts--this book focuses primarily on the workplace and the labor movement that emerged along the waterfront."--From the preface

    Out of the turbulence and momentum are emerging new sets of personal, institutional and global standards pointing the way toward a more workable human ecology. For this evolutionary process we need new directions and expanded contexts for creating a "win-win" world and new scorecards for measuring a saner, more equitable, gender-balanced, ecologically-conscious future. Hazel Henderson, economist and human ecologist, reveals out vast potentials and possibilities.

    ranks with the best scholarship in Chicano history. ... Al Norte emerges as the most extensive discussion of migration, settlement, and entrenchment of Mexicanos in the Midwest." --Arnoldo De León, author of They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900.In the early part of the twentieth century, the productive agricultural lands of the upper Midwest attracted the interest of industrialists. They did not buy agricultural lands but, instead, geared up for mass production by constructing refineries and food processing plants, while contracting with family farmers to grow sugar beets, fruits, and vegetables. As a result, many agricultural jobs were created, and workers, especially from Texas and northern Mexico, rushed to fill them. Dennis N. Valdés' pioneering study is the first social history of these workers. Al Norte is a unique work in several respects. To begin with, it is the first extended history of Latinos in the Midwest, as well as the first scholarly social history of farmworkers in any region of the United States. In addition, Al Norte is the first study to examine the impact of changes in the work process on the daily lives of workers in an industry over a period of several decades. Dennis Nodín Valdés is associate professor of history and Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota.