Worlds apart from bureaucratic business unions like the AFL-CIO, these organizations emerged from workers involved in many kinds of labor, from African American nutpickers in St. Louis to chemical and rubber workers in Akron, and from bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta. The contributors draw on eyewitness interviews, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to describe experimental forms of worker activism during the period. This alternative unionism was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders!" resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, though often overlooked by historians, has much to teach us about union organizing today. Contributors: John Borsos, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Rosemary Feurer, Janet Irons, Michael Kozura, Mark D. Naison, Peter Rachleff, and Stan Weir

    Unlike most of the historical and sociological literature on Palestine in this period, Comrades and Enemies avoids treating the Arab and Jewish communities as if they developed independently of each other. Instead of focusing on politics, diplomacy, or military history, Lockman draws on detailed archival research in both Arabic and Hebrew, and on interviews with activists, to delve into the country's social, economic, and cultural history, showing how Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine helped to shape each other in significant ways.Comrades and Enemies presents a narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that extends and complicates the conventional story of primordial identities, total separation, and unremitting conflict while going beyond both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist mythologies and paradigms of interpretation.

    Mitchell's analysis appropriates the best of studies of representation while critiquing their abstraction from material production. All this while capturing the role of migrant workers in the making of the California landscape.

    It is essential reading for anyone whose view of slavery’s horrors might be softened by the current historical emphasis on slave community and family and slave autonomy and empowerment.Looking at Gowrie and Butler Island plantations in Georgia and Chicora Wood in South Carolina, William Dusinberre considers a wide range of issues related to daily life and work there: health, economics, politics, dissidence, coercion, discipline, paternalism, and privilege. Based on overseers’ letters, slave testimonies, and plantation records, Them Dark Days offers a vivid reconstruction of slavery in action and casts a sharp new light on slave history.

    By considering two villages in south Gujarat, the author discusses the mobilization of casual labor, demonstrating that this is characteristic of an employment pattern that dominates the rural and urban economy of large parts of South Asia. Elaborating on the social profile of the work migrants, the author shows that little has been done to improve their quality of life, which is defined by caste and class relations.

    If ever there were a book our young needed, it is Meatpackers-it reveals an epoch in which trade unions fought and won whatever rights working people possess today. With these rights constantly imperiled, this book is mandatory reading.--Studs Terkel The stories are dramatically and richly told, and they offer insights no scholarly study can quite adequately provide.--Peter Rachleff, Journal of American History Available for the first time in paperback, Meatpackers provides an important window into race and racism in the American workplace. In their own words, male and female packinghouse workers in the Midwest-mostly African-American-talk of their experiences on the shop floor and picket lines. They tell of their fight between the 1930s and 1960s for economic advancement and racial equality. In cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, and Waterloo, Iowa, meatpackers built a union that would defend their interests as workers-and fight for their civil rights.

    Using primary sources and critical commentary as well as personal recollection, Selvin reconstructs the tactics, strategies, policies and programmes of the strikes.

    This volume, the first in an important new series, presents a broad overview of recent literature on the history of workers in the Middle East since 1800 in a bold effort to bring together new directions in research and to reexamine the relevance of established ones. Taken together the essays provide a historically grounded context for viewing the shifting relationship between states and the world economy as well as between particular states and classes.

    The story that emerges is not just a story of long hours, little pay, and hazardous working conditions; it is also the uniquely American story of immigrant families working together to make a new life for themselves. It is a story of hardship and sacrifice, yet also of triumph and the fulfillment of hopes and dreams.