Labor Relations History

The McCarthy-era witch hunts marked the culmination of an anticommunist crusade launched after the First World War. With Bolshevism triumphant in Russia and public discontent shaking the United States, conservatives at every level of government and business created a network dedicated to sweeping away the "spider web" of radicalism they saw threatening the nation. In this groundbreaking study, Nick Fischer shines a light on right-wing activities of the time, showing that the term "spider web" far more accurately described the anticommunist movement.

As World War II wound down in 1945 and the cold war heated up, the skilled trades that made up the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) began a tumultuous strike at the major Hollywood studios. This turmoil escalated further when the studios retaliated by locking out CSU in 1946. This labor unrest unleashed a fury of Red-baiting that allowed studio moguls to crush the union and seize control of the production process, with far-reaching consequences.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

The Mill - set in early 19th-century Cheshire - was Channel 4's biggest drama launch of 2013, and captivated viewers with the tales of the lives of the young girls and boys in a northern mill. Focusing on the apprentices at Quarry Bank Mill, David Hanson's book uses a wealth of first-person source material including letters, diaries, and mill records, to tell the stories of the children who lived and worked at Quarry Bank throughout the 19th century.

In this long-out-of-print oral history classic, Alice and Staughton Lynd chronicle the stories of more than two dozen working-class organizers who occupied factories, held sit-down strikes, walked out, picketed, and found other bold and innovative ways to fight for workers' rights. Rank and File brings the militancy of these firebrand organizers to life - whether it was in founding unions, challenging sexism and racism, safety violations, and management intimidation, or working for broader social changes.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial that culminated in four controversial executions and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic 20-year struggle for the eight-hour workday.

In this, the first broad historical overview of labor in the United States in 20 years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. Unlike recent books that have covered labor in the 20th century, Labor's Story in the United States looks at the broad landscape of labor since before the Revolution. Throughout, the audiobook focuses on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of democracy, painting a vivid picture of the strength of labor movements.

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor-relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought and ranged across all of the major industries of the region. Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today.

Blood Runs Coal comes at a time of resurgent labor movements in the United States and the current administration's attempts to bolster the fossil-fuel industry. Brilliantly researched and compellingly written, it sheds light on the far-reaching effects of industrial and socioeconomic change that unfold across America to this day.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

“Incisive and compelling, reflecting the painful wisdom and knowledge that Bill Ong Hing has accrued over the course of fifty years . . . ”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers...

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement - especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations - and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration.

Between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences.

In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between Black parents and Jewish teachers. Later, however, he built alliances with Blacks, and at the time of his death in 1997, such figures as Bill Clinton celebrated Shanker for being an educational reformer.

G.C. "Red" Jones' classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of "Bloody Harlan", and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.

In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience-store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing", Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being - and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead.