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"Labor history of the United States"
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Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
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The influence machine : the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the corporate capture of American life
\"The United States now has three political parties, though only two of them are elected.The newest was founded a century ago, but just came to power in the last decade: It's the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the political party of the new American oligarchy. In this groundbreaking investigation of the big business takeover of the American political process, Alyssa Katz draws upon years of research to chronicle the rise to power of the organization and the oversized, combative personalities who lead it. The Chamber -- through its secret corporate sponsors, from Philip Morris to Exxon to Wal-Mart -- can take credit for some of the most disturbing trends in American life: the reversal of environmental protections, the buying of judgeships, the destruction of unions and worker protections, the rise of virulent anti-government ideology, the toxic role of campaign cash, and the creation of \"astroturf\" groups, culminating in the Tea Party, as cover for advancing a corporate agenda. Through its propaganda, lobbying, and campaign cash, the Chamber has created a right-wing monster that even it struggles to control, a conservative movement that is destabilizing American politics as never before. The Chamber tells this history as a series of gripping narratives that take us into the backrooms of Washington where the battles over how our country is run and regulated are fought, and then out into the real world where we see how the Chamber's campaigns play out in real lives. But in the end, Katz also points to the possibility of reversing the influence of the Chamber and its affiliated groups, and fixing our democracy\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Labor rights are civil rights
In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched,Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation.
The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.
He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.
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Making the World Safe for Workers
In this intellectually ambitious study, Elizabeth McKillen explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's administration. McKillen highlights the major fault lines and conflicts that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. As McKillen shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.
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Where Are the Workers?
The labor movement in the United States is a bulwark of democracy
and a driving force for social and economic equality. Yet its
stories remain largely unknown to Americans. Robert Forrant and
Mary Anne Trasciatti edit a collection of essays focused on
nationwide efforts to propel the history of labor and working
people into mainstream narratives of US history. In Part One, the
contributors concentrate on ways to collect and interpret
worker-oriented history for public consumption. Part Two moves from
National Park sites to murals to examine the writing and visual
representation of labor history. Together, the essayists explore
how place-based labor history initiatives promote understanding of
past struggles, create awareness of present challenges, and support
efforts to build power, expand democracy, and achieve justice for
working people.
A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the
Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our
historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism.
Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor
Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan
Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom
MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan,
Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon
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A Contest of Ideas
For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship--on labor, politics, and social thought--to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.
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The Right and Labor in America
The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism, today as well as a century ago.
The Right and Labor in Americaexplores the multifaceted history and range of conservative hostility toward unionism, opening the door to a fascinating set of individuals, movements, and institutions that help explain why, in much of the popular imagination, union leaders are always \"bosses\" and trade union organizers are nothing short of \"thugs.\" The contributors to this volume explore conservative thought about unions, in particular the ideological impulses, rhetorical strategies, and political efforts that conservatives have deployed to challenge unions as a force in U.S. economic and political life over the century. Among the many contemporary books on American parties, personalities, and elections that try to explain why political disputes are so divisive, this collection of original and innovative essays is essential reading.
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Working hard for the american dream
Working Hard for the American Dream examines the various economic, social, and political developments that shaped labor history in the United States from World War I until the present day. Presents an overview of labor history that also considers women workers, ethnic America, and post-World War II workers Incorporates the most recent scholarship in labor history Takes the story of labor up to the present day in a readable and accessible manner.
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Black and blue
In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five.Black and Blueexplores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline.
The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement.
From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power,Black and Bluechronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
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