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\"In this gutsy, eye-opening examination of the lives of workers in the New South, Vanesa Ribas, working alongside mostly Latino/a and native-born African American laborers for sixteen months, takes us inside the contemporary American slaughterhouse. Ribas, a native Spanish speaker, occupies an insider/outsider status there, enabling her to capture vividly the oppressive exploitation experienced by her fellow workers. She showcases the particular vulnerabilities faced by immigrant workers--a constant looming threat of deportation, reluctance to seek medical attention, and family separation--as she also illuminates how workers find connection and moments of pleasure during their grueling shifts. Bringing to the fore the words, ideas, and struggles of the workers themselves, On The Line underlines how deep racial tensions permeate the factory, as an overwhelmingly minority workforce is subject to white dominance. Compulsively readable, this extraordinary ethnography makes a powerful case for greater labor protection, especially for our nation's most vulnerable workers\"--Provided by publisher.

\"How does one put into words the rage that workers feel when supervisors threaten to replace them with workers who will not go to the bathroom in the course of a fourteen-hour day of hard labor, even if it means wetting themselves on the line?\"-From the PrefaceIn this gutsy, eye-opening examination of the lives of workers in the New South, Vanesa Ribas, working alongside mostly Latino/a and native-born African American laborers for sixteen months, takes us inside the contemporary American slaughterhouse. Ribas, a native Spanish speaker, occupies an insider/outsider status there, enabling her to capture vividly the oppressive exploitation experienced by her fellow workers. She showcases the particular vulnerabilities faced by immigrant workers-a constant looming threat of deportation, reluctance to seek medical attention, and family separation-as she also illuminates how workers find connection and moments of pleasure during their grueling shifts. Bringing to the fore the words, ideas, and struggles of the workers themselves,On The Lineunderlines how deep racial tensions permeate the factory, as an overwhelmingly minority workforce is subject to white dominance. Compulsively readable, this extraordinary ethnography makes a powerful case for greater labor protection, especially for our nation's most vulnerable workers.

If Civil Rights Unionism examines the effort to build democracy, a second Reconstruction, and the New Deal, largely from the bottom up, Victory at Home offers a clearer view on the effects of social policy, chiefly from the top down. [Charles D. Chamberlain] explores the federal government's efforts during World War π, through the War Manpower Commission and other agencies, to mobilize labour to defeat fascism abroad and weaken [Jim Crow] labour markets throughout the South. The author chiefly relies upon federal and state records and the familiar interpretative device of workers' agency to examine how they were acted upon and in turn shaped the policies of the federal government, employers, and local and regional elites. Someone has to play the straw man, and in this case it is the liberal writers and photographers who attempted to draw attention to southern poverty and arguably portrayed southern workers as hapless flotsam drifting backwards in a sea of misery. As the author states, \"no longer the stereotypical white migrant family documented by Dorothea Lange and Agnes Meyer, southern workers and their families have emerged as diverse, active agents of their own destinies during the war as they utilized a variety of strategies, including migration, institution building, and labor organizing to improve their lives and gain economic security.\" (4) The question of fair employment served as a \"harbinger of battles over civil and states' rights after the war\" with this book providing a \"regional synthesis of this struggle for equality and, specifically, the ways in which local African American civil rights and labor activists initiated an indigenous jobs movement with support from liberal allies in the FEPC and the War Manpower Commission across the South and Southwest.\" (5) While such efforts were not fully successful, they \"enabled the region's working families to gain unprecedented geographic and economic mobility and in the process threatened the South's culture of poverty and dependence\" that the region's ruling class fostered and depended upon. [Kenneth D. Durr] is not particularly interested in the workplace, although he does analyse the ways liberalism and desegregation undermined whites' sense of security. A case in point was Bethlehem Steel's Sparrow Point. In 1956 a white conservative steelworker, using nakedly racial appeals, ousted liberal and moderate unionists who had built an electoral alliance with black workers. The International USWA ultimately removed the new president, who claimed, in the midst of HUAC investigations that revealed five communists at Bethlehem Steel, that the International USWA removed him because he was a \"God-fearing anti-communist.\" (108) As in many locals where the International had intervened, a common enough practice at this time (particularly in the midst of the widespread challenge to the International leadership of the union), the white demagogue appealed to the rights of the (white) majority to elect whomever they chose. Durr finds that \"the language of white rights, let alone of 'white supremacy', was at a dead end. Appeals to other kinds of rights were becoming increasingly more accurate.\" In the years to come, the local union would be polarized by \"black activism\" appealing to that third of the membership, and \"mounting white discontent.\" (109)