Best of
Labor

1994

Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, And The Black Working Class


Robin D.G. Kelley - 1994
    Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners


Seumas Milne - 1994
    Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. There was an enemy within. It was the secret services of the British state, operating inside the NUM itself.Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, M15 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners’ leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign.In this new edition, published for the twentieth anniversary of Britain’s most important postwar social confrontation, new material brings the story up to date  – and, in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence scandals, highlights the continuing threat posed by the security services to democracy today.

An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History


Davis D. Joyce - 1994
    Joyce's course in Oklahoma history, a student once said, "I saw an Oklahoma I'd never seen before.""This is a splendid collection of writings in the true spirit of a 'people's history'. It begins with a delightful, wry overlook at Oklahoma by George Milburn, and goes on to tell about the state in way rarely seen in traditional histories. There are accounts of progressivism, of socialism, of labor radicalism, of Indian resistance, of black struggle against segregation, of women's campaigns for abortion rights. It includes fascinating portraits of people, some famous, some obscure, who were engaged in these struggles. I hope this become a model for similar volumes on other states."-Howard Zinn, author of People's History of the United States.Contents: "Oklahoma," George Milburn; "The Difficulty of Celebrating an Invasion, "Jerald C. Walker;"Progressivism in Oklahoma Politics, 1900-1913: A Reinterpretation," Kenny L. Brown;"Kate Barnard, Progressivism, and the West," Suzanne J. Crawford and Lynn R. Musslewhite; "'In Death You Shall not Wear It Either' The Persecution of Mennonite Pacifists in Oklahoma," Marvin E. Kroeker;"She Never Weakened: The Heroism of Freda Ameringer," John Thompson; "Wobblies in the Oilfields: The Suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma," Nigel sellars; "The Road Once Taken: Socialist Medicine in Southwestern Oklahoma," Alana Hughes; "Woody Guthrie: The Oklahoma Years, 1912-1929," Harry Menig; "The New Deal Comes to Shawnee," Dale E.Soden; "The Social Gospel of Nicholas Comfort," Bob Cottrell; "Behold the Walls," Clara Luper; "The Case of the Deerslayer," Stan Steiner; "Black Oklahoma and Sense of place," Jimmie L. Franklin; "The Southern Influence on Oklahoma," Danney Goble; "The Creation of an Oklahoma Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights: A Presonal/Historical Essay" Carole Jane Joyce; "Violence and Oppression of Women in Rural Oklahoma," Elizabeth D. Barlow; "Oklahoma's Gay Liberation Movement," Thomas E. Guild, Joan Luxenburg, and Keith Smith; "Even Among the Sooners, There Are More Important Things than Football," Alan Ehrenhalt.In revealing an Oklahoma many have never seen, this book can remind Oklahoma citizens of changes yet to be made, show how to mark them, and (perhaps most important of all) inspire them to do the job.

Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America


Jonathan D. Rosenblum - 1994
    Rosenblum's history of this one strike reveals to us, in chapter and verse, the barbaric use of power by the corporate big boys. It is a stunning metaphor for labor's trouble today.--Studs Terkel (from a review of the first edition)Rosenblum writes with the verve of a good journalist and the empirical precision of a fine scholar. He is as deft at sketching brief portraits of key executives, union officials, and rank-and-file strikers as he is at untangling the legal skein in which the miners got fatally ensnared.--Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review (from a review of the first edition)In this new edition, Jonathan D. Rosenblum describes the resurgence in 1996 and 1997 of union activism at Local 890 in Silver City, New Mexico, the famous Salt of the Earth union. Phelps Dodge obliterated all the unions at its Arizona properties in the devastating 1983 campaign of permanent replacement documented in Copper Crucible. The company later acquired the Chino mine in western New Mexico; with the copper ore came the elements of union rebirth. When Phelps Dodge officials argued that while unions may have had a purpose in the past, that time is gone, they rekindled the union's fighting spirit, according to Rosenblum. Local 890 beat back Phelps Dodge's 1996 decertification campaign, handing the company its first major setback against unions in fifteen years.

The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900 1940


Rajnarayan Chandavarkar - 1994
    He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton textile industry, its particular problems in the 1920s and 1930s and the mill owners' and the states' responses to them. The author also investigates how a labor force was formed in Bombay, its rural roots, urban networks, industrial organization and the way in which it shaped capitalist strategies.

Peasant Metropolis


David L. Hoffmann - 1994
    Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L. Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities--an influx unprecedented in world history--had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941. He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime. The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority. Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities. Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology. The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts


Anwar Shaikh - 1994
    economy for the postwar period. The patterns that result are significantly different from those derived within conventional systems of national accounts. Conventional national accounts seriously distort basic economic aggregates, because they classify military, bureaucratic and financial activities as the creation of new wealth, when in fact they should be classified as forms of social consumption that, like personal consumption, actually use up social wealth in the performance of their functions.

Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950


Gilbert G. González - 1994
    González relies on a variety of published sources and interviews with longtime residents to detail the education of village children; the Americanization of village adults; unionization and strikes; and the decline of the citrus picker village and rise of the urban barrio. His insightful study of the rural dimensions of Mexican-American life prior to World War II adds balance to a long-standing urban bias in Chicano historiography.

Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985


Gay W. Seidman - 1994
    Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.

Making History: Writings on History and Culture


E.P. Thompson - 1994
    Thompson’s writings and lectures delivered over a number of years, Making History covers the key debates in history and cultural theory that occupied Thompson throughout his career. Making History includes such landmark writings as Thompson’s influential and sympathetic assessments of the historians Raymond Williams and Herbert Gutman, as well as his judgments of the lasting value of classic English writers such as William Morris and Mary Wollstonecraft. Also included are Thompson’s perceptive and always witty contributions to current issues of debate, such as the role of poetry as a political act and the historical method and imagination. The book concludes with “Agenda for Radical History,” Thompson’s inspiring and oft-cited lecture on the future of history and the task of historians in years to come, a fitting conclusion to the book and to Thompson’s own exemplary career.

Post-Fordism


Ash Amin - 1994
    This book provides a superb introduction to these debates and their far-reaching implications, and includes key texts by post-Fordism's major theorists and commentators.