These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Disavowing the political orthodoxy of the times, Brinton sought to use the past as a guide, but not an anchor, in his visionary writings. Solidarity’s influence on the ’60s New Left, and today’s libertarian Global Justice Movement is a testament to their salience. Tactfully edited by David Goodway, For Workers’ Power includes articles, essays and pamphlets as well as Brinton’s classic works The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, Paris: May ’68 and The Irrational in Politics.Maurice Brinton lives in London with his wife. Editor David Goodway is a professor of social history in Leeds.

    Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.

    The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect.With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups.Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.

    With striking portraits of managers, workers, organizers and local officials, the book sets the Appalachian plant closings squarely in the economic and political context of economic development strategies and uncovers a government and economic leadership whose policies show little regard for the workers they leave behind. Yet the repeated defeat of the workers sparked an astonishingly fiery economic justice movement in Tennessee, as factory workers were transformed into sophisticated activists, generating coalitions, starting allied campaigns for living wages, and writing groundbreaking legislation.With careful consideration of what made some movements flourish and others die, To Move a Mountain is at once a detailed and intricate ethnography and an inspiring story on the evolution of seemingly insignificant local organizing efforts into sustained social movements.

    West was a poet, a pioneer advocate for civil rights, a preacher, a historian, a labor organizer, a folk-music revivalist, an essayist, and an organic farmer. He is perhaps best known as an educator, primarily as cofounder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and founder of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia. In his old age, West served as an elder statesman for his causes.  No Lonesome Road allows Don West to speak for himself. It provides the most comprehensive collection of his poetry ever published, spanning five decades of his literary career. It also includes the first comprehensive and annotated collection of West's nonfiction essays, articles, letters, speeches, and stories, covering his role at the forefront of Southern and Appalachian history, and as a pioneer researcher and writer on the South's little-known legacy of radical activism.   Drawing from both primary and secondary sources, including previously unknown documents, correspondence, interviews, FBI files, and newspaper clippings, the introduction by Jeff Biggers stands as the most thorough, insightful biographical sketch of Don West yet published in any form.   The afterword by George Brosi is a stirring personal tribute to the contributions of West and also serves as a thoughtful reflection on the interactions between the radicals of the 1930s and the 1960s.   The best possible introduction to his extraordinary life and work, this annotated selection of Don West's writings will be inspirational reading for anyone interested in Southern history, poetry, religion, or activism.

    Amusing, revealing and witty One Pair of Hands, One Pair of Feet, and My Turn to Make the Tea give a wonderful evocation of the post-war years of the twenties and thirties. 'Surely,' I thought, 'there's something more to life than just going to parties that one doesn't enjoy, with people one doesn't even like?' So begins Monica Dickens's first career move as, bored of being a debutante, she is let loose on series of unsuspecting upper-class employers as a cook-general in One Pair of Hands. Cooking, cleaning and telling all in this deliciously funny memoir, written at the age of twenty-two, this was her first book. One Pair of Feet continues her adventures when she recounts her first, and only, year of training to be a nurse, and My Turn to Make the Tea completes the trilogy by telling of her time as a very junior, very enthusiastic reporter on a local newspaper.

    Although the work of Dorothea Lange and other photographers from the 1930s often comes to mind, virtually every photographer of consequence at some time, for some reason, photographed in the fields of the Golden State. This includes such unlikely twentieth-century artists as fashion photographer Richard Avedon and commercial photographer Max Yavno, along with the nineteenth-century masters Carleton E. Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Their work, however, does not unfold along neat, predictable lines. While it has both obscured the place of field hands in modern agriculture and made a case against the farm labor system as an instrument of poverty and oppression, the best of these photographs goes far beyond advertising and exposé, cutting through layers of ignorance and indifference and raising difficult moral questions that force us to reflect on the extent to which, as a society, we require the subservience of an entire class of people. This volume presents 282 of these important photographs.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    But, as Brian Obach shows, the two largest and most powerful social movements in the United States actually share a great deal of common ground. Unions and environmentalists have worked together on a number of issues, including workplace health and safety, environmental restoration, and globalization (as in the surprising solidarity of "Teamsters and Turtles" in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle).Labor and the Environmental Movement examines why, when, and how labor unions and environmental organizations either cooperate or come into conflict. By exploring the interorganizational dynamics that are crucial to cooperative efforts and presenting detailed studies of labor-environmental group coalition building from around the country (examining in detail examples from Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin), it provides insight into how these movements can be brought together to promote a just and sustainable society.Obach gives a brief history of relations between organized labor and environmental groups in the United States, explores how organizational learning can increase organizations' ability to work with others, and examines the crucial role played by "coalition brokers" who maintain links to both movements. He challenges research that attempts to explain inter-movement conflict on the basis of cultural distinctions between blue-collar workers and middle-class environmentalists, providing evidence of legal and structural constraints that better explain the organizational differences class-culture and new-social-movement theorists identify. The final chapter includes a model of the crucial determinants of cooperation and conflict that can serve as the basis for further study of inter-movement relations.

    We are much more reluctant to recognize them at home. This book exposes the violations of human rights witnessed daily in workplaces across our country. Based on detailed case studies in a variety of sectors, it reveals an unfair advantage in U.S. law and practice that allows employers to fire or otherwise punish thousands of workers as they seek to exercise their rights of association and to exclude millions more from laws that protect their rights to bargain and to organize. Unfair Advantage approaches workers' use of organizing, collective bargaining, and strikes as an exercise of basic rights where workers are autonomous actors, not objects of unions' or employers' institutional interests. Both historical experience and a review of current conditions around the world indicate that strong, independent, democratic trade unions are vital for societies where human rights are respected. In Lance Compa's view, human rights cannot flourish where workers' rights are not enforced. While researching workers' exercise of these rights in different industries, occupations, and regions of the United States, Human Rights Watch found that freedom of association is under severe, often buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it. Cornell University Press is making this valuable report, originally published in August 2000, available again as a paperback with a new introduction and conclusion that bring the story up-to-date.

    Written throughout Stan Weir's decades as a blue-collar worker and labour educator, 'Singlejack Solidarity' offers a rare look at modern life and social relations as seen from the factory, dockside and the shop floor.

    Focusing on the complex relationships between the globalizing economy and the health of Earth's environment, the latest edition of the annual survey by the Worldwatch Institute reveals the health of the planet's ecosystems, describes and analyzes a variety of global environmental issues and problems

    In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, higher education scholars Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades detail the aggressive engagement of U.S. higher education institutions in the knowledge-based economy and analyze the efforts of colleges and universities that develop, market, and sell research products, educational services, and consumption items in the private marketplace. social networks and circuits of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as new organizational structures and expanded managerial capacity to link higher education institutions and markets. They depict an ascendant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime expressed in faculty work, departmental activity, and administrative behavior. Clarifying the regime's internal contradictions, they note the shifting public subsidies embedded in new revenue streams and the emphasis less on serving than on leveraging resources from student customers. Defining the terms of academic capitalism in the new economy, this groundbreaking study offers essential insights into the trajectory of American higher education.

    It shows how craftsmen - teamsters, barbers, musicians, and others - violently governed commerce in Chicago through pickets, assaults, and bombings. These tradesmen forcefully contested the power of national corporations in their city. Their resistance shaped American law, heavily influencing the New Deal and federal criminal statutes. This book thus shows that American industrial policy resulted not from a "search for order," but from a brutal struggle for control.