We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we see the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.Recommended by the Association of Black Women Historians.

    L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), "Big Trouble" brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn. After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow. "Big Trouble" captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war. Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.

    'The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is their's.'--Kas Maine A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family--a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication--Charles van Onselen has re-created the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

    This collection offers an all-important lesson for the labor movement: that problems of occupational health and safety are not merely technical problems but rather problems relating to workers' lack of control over the organization of capitalist production.

    Drawing on oral histories and archival materials, Halpern explores the experiences of and relationship between black and white workers in a fifty-year period that included labor actions during World War I, Armour's violent reaction to union drives in the late 1930s, and organizations like the Stockyards Labor Council and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.

    The activist authors of the text s in this collection challenged the prevailing stereotype....As they point out, the practice of direct action, and of sabotage, are as old as class society itself, and have been an integral part of the everyday worklife of wage-earners in all times and places. To the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) belongs the distinction of being the first workers' organization in the US to discuss these common practices openly, and to recognize their place in working class struggle. View direct action and sabotage in the spirit of creative nonviolence, Wobblies readily integrated these tactics into their struggle to build industrial unions. [From the Introduction]

    Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

    Roger Horowitz looks at local leaders and meatpacking workers in Chicago, Kansas City, Sioux City, and Austin, Minnesota, closely examining the unionizing of the workplace and the prominent role of black workers and women in UPWA. Horowitz shows how three major firms in U.S. meat production and distribution became dominant by virtually eliminating union power. The union's decline, he argues, reflected massive pressure by capital for lower labor costs and greater control over the work process. In the end, the victorious firms were those that had been most successful at increasing the rate of exploitation of their workers, who now labor in conditions as bad as those of a century ago.

    Employed in a wide range of occupations - as ironworkers, carpenters, truck drivers, electricians, sprinkler fitters, subway operators, welders - the women vividly describe the large and small challenges of life on the job. Their candid first-person narratives express common themes: the drive to prove oneself in trades where women are still vastly underrepresented, the struggles with harassment from male co-workers, the growing self-confidence from new-found skills, the sweet success of conquering previously unthinkable challenges - and earning "men's wages" for it.

    Emphasizing the integration of traditional labor history topics with historical accounts of gender, female subjectivity, and community, this volume focuses on the experience of working women at mid-century, especially those laboring in the urban industrial sector. In its exploration of working women’s agency and consciousness, this collection offers rich detail regarding women’s lives as daughters, housewives, mothers, factory workers, trade union leaders, and political activists.Widely seen as a hostile sexualized space, the modern factory was considered a threat, not only to the virtue of working women, but also to the survival of the family, and thus, the future of the nation. Yet working-class women continued to labor outside the home and remained highly visible in the expanding world of modern industry. In nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala, the contributors make extensive use of oral histories to describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. The volume includes discussion of previously neglected topics such as single motherhood, women’s struggle against domestic violence, and the role of women as both desiring and desired subjects.Contributors. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Lynn Pedersen Cluff, John D. French, Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Heidi Tinsman, Theresa R. Veccia, Barbara Weinstein

    Starting with the transaction rather than the individual, it builds upon a coherent theory and applies it to a wide range of experience, from household labor to transformations of health care in Great Britain and the United States.This book’s analysis sheds new light on persisting inequalities by race and gender in the labor market. Written with advanced undergraduates in economics, public policy, sociology, history, and other social sciences in mind, it should also stir wide discussion among professional students of work and labor markets.

    Involved in the radical labor movement on many fronts, Bengston was the editor of Svenska Socialisten from 1912 until he dropped out of the Scandinavian Socialist Federation in 1920. Even after 1920, however, his sympathies remained with the movement he had once strongly espoused.

    John R. Hall argues that recent historical and intellectual developments require reworking basic assumptions about classes and their dynamics. The contributors effectively abandon the notion of a transcendent class struggle. They seek instead to understand the historically contingent ways in which economic interests are pursued under institutionally, socially, and culturally structured circumstances.In his introduction, Hall proposes a neo-Weberian venue intended to bring the most promising contemporary approaches to class analysis into productive exchange with one another. Some of the chapters that follow rework how classes are conceptualized. Others offer historical and sociological reflections on questions of class identity. A third cluster focuses on the politics of class mobilizations and social movements in contexts of national and global economic change.

    He provides a measured assessment of multinational managements’ strategies to downsize, introduce flexible production and compel workers to accept less pay for more work. He emphasizes the need, in the face of these changes, for renewal and international coordination among national unions and provides examples, from North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia, of how this has been achieved.A bracing riposte to the conventional wisdom concerning the irresistible power of globalization, Workers in a Lean World is a definitive account of contemporary labor relations on a global scale.

    In a brilliant book, Michael Goldfield doggedly documents the persistence of racism in the American nation through a penetrating assessment of racism in the labor movement.

    Using a full palette including survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author delineates the “dialectics of domination and resistance in the maquilas,” and develops a telling critique of labor-process theory—a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras. Writing with grace, passion, and scholarly rigor, Devon Peña first locates the maquila industry within the history of workplace organizations. He then examines border workplace and community struggles from the perspectives of the women who work in the maquiladoras—devoting ample space to the workers’ own narratives. He describes the workers’ struggles for democracy and social justice in the workplace, and for sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from factory to community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s. No earlier book has so closely examined the struggles of female maquila workers. These women have typically been portrayed as passive, apolitical, and easily exploited. Peña, however, presents an opposing view by illuminating the intricate subaltern life of the shop floor: the workers’ informal and often invisible methods of resistance to hazardous conditions, sexual harassment, and managerial tyranny. The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant, vivid analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization, and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternative modes of development that are ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate.