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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.

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.

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. InDisintegrating Democracy at Work, Virginia Doellgast contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains. Doellgast's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. Based on survey data and interviews with workers, managers, and union representatives, she found that German managers more often took the \"high road\" than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. Doellgast traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. Doellgast's comparative findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.

At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining briefly looked like a promising avenue to stability. But both employers and many middle-class observers remained wary of unions exercising independent power. Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our discussions of worker rights.

In Re-Union, David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution-a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership. These changes would represent a remarkable shift from the norm, but would be based on lessons from other countries, US history and current policy in several cities and states. In outlining the shift, Madland details how these proposals might mend the broken economic and political systems in the United States. He also uses three examples from Britain, Canada, and Australia to explore what there is yet to learn about this new system in other developed nations. Madland's practical advice in Re-Union extends to a proposal for how to implement the changes necessary to shift the current paradigm. This powerful call to action speaks directly to the workers affected by these policies-the very people seeking to have their voices recognized in a system that attempts to silence them.

Reflecting the increased attention to gender and women in the field of employment relations, there is now a growing international literature on women and trade unions. The interest in women as trade unionists arises partly from the fact that women comprise 40 percent of trade union membership in the USA and over 50 percent in the UK. Further, despite considerable overall union membership decline in both the UK and USA, more women than men are joining unions in both countries. Recognition of the importance of women to the survival and revival of trade union movements has in many cases produced an unprecedented commitment to equality and inclusion at the highest level. Yet the challenge is to ensure that this commitment is translated to action and improves the experience of women in their union and in their workplace. Gender and Leadership in Trade Unions explores and evaluates the similarities and differences in equality strategies pursued by unions in the US and the UK. It assesses the conditions experienced by women union members and how these impact on their leadership, both potential and actual. Women have made gains in both countries within union leadership and decision-making structures, however, climbing the ladder to leadership positions remains far from a smooth process. In the trade union context, women face multiple barriers that resonate with the barriers facing aspiring women leaders in other organizational contexts, including the gendered division of domestic work; the organization and nature of women's work; the organization and nature of trade union work and the masculine culture of trade unions. The discussion of women trade union leaders is situated more broadly within debates on governance, leadership and democracy within social justice activism.

The principles of trade unionism are based on working people acting together in solidarity with each other, to improve wages, working conditions, and life for themselves and all others. In its most developed forms, this extends not only to the worker next to you, but to working people all around the world, wherever they might be. Some of the foremost proponents of these principles in the United States since the 1880s has been the American Federation of Labor (AFL), then later the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and since their merger in 1955, the AFL-CIO. However, unknown to many labor leaders and most union members in the U.S., the foreign policy leaders of the AFL and then the AFL-CIO, have been carrying out an international foreign policy that has worked against workers in a number of \"developing countries.\" This has been done on their own, and in collaboration with the U.S. Government and its agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee for Labor and Diplomacy. In the post-World War II period, this foreign policy program has led to the AFL-CIO's foreign policy leadership helping to overthrow democratically elected governments—Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973); to support dictatorships in countries such as Guatemala, Brazil and Chile (after their respective military coups), as well as in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea; and to support efforts by reactionary labor leaders to help overthrow their democratically-elected leaders as in Venezuela in 2002. It has also included providing AFL-CIO support for U.S. Government policies around the world, including support for apartheid in South Africa. This book argues that these activities—done behind the backs and without the informed knowledge of American trade unionists—acts to sabotage the very principles of trade unionism that these leaders proclaim to

The Master of Seventh Avenue is the definitive biography of David Dubinsky (1892—1982), one of the most controversial and influential labor leaders in 20th-century America. A “character” in the truest sense of the word, Dubinsky was both revered and reviled, but never dull, conformist, or bound by convention. A Jewish labor radical, Dubinsky fled czarist Poland in 1910 and began his career as a garment worker and union agitator in New York City. He quickly rose through the ranks of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’Union (ILGWU) and became its president in 1932. Dubinsky led the ILGWU for thirty-four years, where he championed “social unionism,” which offered workers benefits ranging from health care to housing. Moving beyond the realm of the ILGWU, Dubinsky also played a leading role in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), particularly during World War II. A staunch anti-communist, Dubinsky worked tirelessly to rid the American labor movement of communists and fellow-travelers. Robert D. Parmet also chronicles Dubinsky’s influential role in local, national, and international politics. An extraordinary personality whose life and times present a fascinating lens into the American labor movement, Dubinsky leaps off the pages of this meticulously researched and vividly detailed biography.

Eyes on Labor narrates an essential chapter in American cultural history, offering a fascinating broad-stroke history of the relationship of photography to the complex and troubled history of 20th-century labor and unionization movements.

In this vibrant new history, Phil Tiemeyer details the history of men working as flight attendants. Beginning with the founding of the profession in the late 1920s and continuing into the post-September 11 era, Plane Queer examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. It examines the various hardships these men faced at work, paying particular attention to the conflation of gender-based, sexuality-based, and AIDS-based discrimination. Tiemeyer also examines how this heavily gay-identified group of workers created an important place for gay men to come out, garner acceptance from their fellow workers, fight homophobia and AIDS phobia, and advocate for LGBT civil rights. All the while, male flight attendants facilitated key breakthroughs in gender-based civil rights law, including an important expansion of the ways that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would protect workers from sex discrimination. Throughout their history, men working as flight attendants helped evolve an industry often identified with American adventuring, technological innovation, and economic power into a queer space.