Labor Relations

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.

Most Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules. Work hours declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories, but they've increased significantly since the '70s. Worked Over traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to a new rhythm of work and describes how we might gain a greater say over our labor time - and build a more just society in the process.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America's shores remade our own country a century ago.

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first nonfiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

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.

L’Établi, ce titre désigne les quelques centaines de militants intellectuels qui, à partir de 1967, s’embauchaient, s’établissaient dans les usines ou les docks. Robert Linhart fût l’un de ceux-là. Après une année comme ouvrier dans l’usine Citroën de Choisy, il décide, dix ans plus tard, délivrer son témoignage. Poignant et précis, ce récit nous permet de saisir le rapport que les hommes entretiennent entre eux par l’intermédiaire des objets.

The movement for a shorter workweek that once defined the labor movement in the United States was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the changes that occurred within organized labor and traces their influence on the decline of the shorter hour's movement.

As two-income families find themselves ever more time-poor, many look to outsource to cleaners, nannies, and care workers. More and more, it would seem, people are finding themselves without either the emotional or the financial resources to take care of themselves and each other. The home, rather than an escape from the work and its pressures, is in fact an extension of it. After Work is a crucial corrective to this trend, extending its attention beyond paid jobs to the impact of domestic work upon familial relationships, social bonds, and our conceptions of domestic space.

The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means, we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world and what we choose not to bring into the world.

From inside the walls of Enron, a lone whistleblower attempted to avert the course of events leading to the largest bankruptcy in American history. On August 16, 2001, Sherron Watkins wrote an anonymous letter to Enron's Chairman, Ken Lay, laying out problems with Enron's use of partnerships to hide debt. She warned of a possible scandal that could topple the company if investors and the news media learned of the operations. Then, she revealed her identity and confronted Lay directly.

On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in one of the most significant strikes in American history - one that made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Marshall Ganz tells the story of the UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale.

One of America's greatest investigative reporters brings to life the gripping, no-holds-barred clash of two American titans: Robert Kennedy and his nemesis, Jimmy Hoffa. From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961.

The Peter Kropotkin Anthology includes The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Fields, Factories and Workshops, Appeal to the Young, and an original biography of Kropotkin titled The Life of Kropotkin. Kropotkin was a thought leader in communist anarchism and tirelessly approached a cause which he believed would benefit humanity and continued to inspire his fellow countrymen to join the movement until his death in 1921.

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

How do public employees win and lose their collective bargaining rights? And how can public sector labor unions protect those rights? These are the questions answered in From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging. Dominic Wells takes a mixed-methods approach and uses more than five decades of state-level data to analyze the expansion and restriction of rights.

On the Line takes listeners inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery. Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back.

Harvesting Injustice exposes how America's H-2A visa program—designed to protect temporary agricultural workers—has become a sophisticated mechanism for legal exploitation. Drawing from his family's multigenerational experience with agricultural labor programs, author Juan Rodriguez Aceves reveals the invisible chains binding hundreds of thousands of workers who feed America.

In the 1960s and '70s, class struggle surged in US industrial cities. Many leftists joined these struggles by going to work in the nation’s factories; among them was Noel Ignatiev. He labored in different factories during this period, and this memoir came from his experiences as an electrician in the blast furnace division of US Steel Gary Works. His firsthand account reveals the day-to-day workings of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the exploitation of labor. More so, though, we see the seeds of a new society sown in the workers’ on-the-job resistance.

L'icône militant queer Océan donne la parole aux travailleur.se.s du sexe qui ont souvent été ignoré.e.s, marginalisé.e.s et victimisé.e.s par la société. Elles disent le stigmate, la marginalisation, la précarité, les violences systémiques mais aussi les ressources et l'empowerment. Pour elles, l'intime est résistance. Publication originale en mars 2020.