Social Labor

From the dark arts of the dirt units to the role of billionaire Clive Palmer, this is the untold story of an election debacle. The Labor Party was the unbeatable favourite to win the 2019 election right up until the polls closed and voters delivered the surprise verdict. If the results staggered pundits, they also shocked Bill Shorten and his frontbench, who had spent the final weeks of the campaign carefully planning for their first days in office. Party Animals uncovers the secret history of a Labor fiasco, the untold story behind Scott Morrison's miracle.

After decades of off-shoring, downsizing, shuttered factories, and stranded blue collar workers, the United States is on the edge of an industrial renaissance. This is news that would have seemed beyond improbable even a decade ago, but companies like Motorola Mobility, Apple, BMW, Bosch, and Volkswagen are opening plants and committing millions of dollars to build new products here.

Labor unions and courts have rarely been allies. From their earliest efforts to organize, unions have been confronted with hostile judges and antiunion doctrines. In this book, Julius G. Getman argues that while the role of the Supreme Court has become more central in shaping labor law, its opinions betray a profound ignorance of labor relations along with a persisting bias against unions.

In the 21st century the Labour Party has undergone the most extraordinary transformation in its history. After more than a decade of political dominance, the party lost two consecutive general elections and found its leadership usurped by the obscure far-left MP Jeremy Corbyn. As Britain voted to leave the EU, Labour seemed destined for long-term irrelevance. But then it all changed. Far from being the death of the party, as many had predicted, at one fell stroke the general election of 2017 heralded its strange and unexpected rebirth.

From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that.

"The Fall of USAID: How America's Foreign Aid Giant Became a Deep State Liability" is an explosive, meticulously researched account of the rise and catastrophic decline of one of Washington's most influential bureaucracies. Spanning six decades, this book uncovers how a once-noble agency, designed to promote global development and serve American interests, devolved into a sprawling, inefficient empire marked by mission creep, rampant corruption, ideological capture, and a pervasive resistance to reform.

The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America?

When Wisconsin became the first state in the nation in 1959 to let public employees bargain with their employers, the legislation catalyzed changes to labor laws across the country. In March 2011, when newly elected governor Scott Walker repealed most of that labor law and subsequent ones - and then became the first governor in the nation to survive a recall election fifteen months later - it sent a different message. Both times, Wisconsin took the lead, first empowering public unions and then weakening them.

Thirty years ago, the best-selling "letter to the government", Work in America, was published to national acclaim, including front-page coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It sounded an alarm about worker dissatisfaction and the effects on the nation as a whole.

To write The China Price, Alexandra Harney has penetrated further and deeper into China's enormous ecosystem of export-oriented industry than any outsider before her. She uncover the disturbing truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world.

Millions of Black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition.

Defining Marriage traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it. Writer Matt Baume provides an intimate glimpse into the private lives of those who dreamed of marriage in the 1970s, the survivors of the 1980s, the audacious pioneers of the 1990s, the tireless soldiers of the 2000s, and the champions who won marriage today.

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive. Through in-depth interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Fitzgerald examines what it means to do scientific research in the ambiguous terrain of autism research, a field marked by shifting horizons of uncertainty and ambivalence.

The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the US Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.

In Taken As Red acclaimed political journalist Anushka Asthana takes listeners behind the scenes of the 2024 general election campaign. As the political landscape undergoes a seismic shift, this gripping account provides an unprecedented insider's perspective on the inner workings of Keir Starmer's Labour and Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, and the events of this high-stakes electoral contest as it unfolded.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation.

Are taxi drivers in today's era of the ride-hail app performing care work akin to domestic and household labor? Drawing on interviews with drivers, labor organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as case law and other published resources, Spent Behind the Wheel is a must for listeners interested in critical studies of technological change and the gig economy, showing how drivers' capacities are drained for the benefit of riders, corporations, and the maintenance of the racial state.

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

In the 1950s manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of US income. Over the past 55 years that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent at the same time that real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing's share of the US economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy.

In How to Use the Invisible Hand within an Industrial Organization, Christian Parker—industrial anthropologist, airliner technician, and MBA—presents a visionary blueprint for modern business leaders. Inspired by Adam Smith’s revolutionary “invisible hand” concept, Parker reimagines the internal workings of corporations as micro-economies that can self-regulate and thrive through market-driven principles.