Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Voice of Southern Labor chronicles the experiences of southern textile workers and provides a unique perspective on the social, cultural, and historical forces that came into play when the group struck in 1934. The workers’s grievances and solidarity were reflected in the music they listened to and sang, and this book offers a context for this intersection of labor, politics, and culture.

Mark S. Anner spent ten years working with labor unions in Latin America and returned to conduct eighteen months of field research: he found himself in the middle of violent raids, was detained and interrogated in a Salvadoran basement prison cell, and survived a bombing in a union cafeteria. This experience as a participant observer informs and enlivensSolidarity Transformed, an illustrative, nuanced, and insightful account of how labor unions in Latin American are developing new strategies to defend the interests of the workers they represent in dynamic global and local contexts. Anner combines in-depth case studies of the auto and apparel industries in El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, and Argentina with survey analysis. Altogether, he documents approximately seventy labor campaigns-both successful and failed-over a period of twenty years. Anner finds that four labor strategies have dominated labor campaigns in recent years: transnational activist campaigns; transnational labor networks; radical flank mechanisms; and microcorporatist worker-employer pacts. The choice of which strategy to pursue is shaped by the structure of global supply chains, access to the domestic political process, and labor identities. Anner's multifaceted approach is both rich in anecdote and supported by quantitative research. The result is a book in which labor activists find new and creative ways to support their members and protect their organizations in the midst of political change, global restructuring, and economic crises. Mark S. Anner spent ten years working with labor unions in Latin America and returned to conduct eighteen months of field research: he found himself in the middle of violent raids, was detained and interrogated in a Salvadoran basement prison cell, and survived a bombing in a union cafeteria. This experience as a participant observer informs and enlivensSolidarity Transformed, an illustrative, nuanced, and insightful account of how labor unions in Latin America are developing new strategies to defend the interests of the workers they represent in dynamic global and local contexts. Anner combines in-depth case studies of the auto and apparel industries in El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, and Argentina with survey analysis. Altogether, he documents approximately seventy labor campaigns-both successful and failed-over a period of twenty years. Anner finds that four labor strategies have dominated labor campaigns in recent years: transnational activist campaigns; transnational labor networks; radical flank mechanisms; and microcorporatist worker-employer pacts. The choice of which strategy to pursue is shaped by the structure of global supply chains, access to the domestic political process, and labor identities. Anner's multifaceted approach is both rich in anecdote and supported by quantitative research. The result is a book in which labor activists find new and creative ways to support their members and protect their organizations in the midst of political change, global restructuring, and economic crises.

Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the \"real\" sweatshop has become intertwined with the \"invented\" sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about \"the shop.\" Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches,Sweatshopdraws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.

The \"Third Period\" trade union activities of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), especially the creation of independent \"red\" industrial unions as opposed to continuing to work within the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, has been widely criticized in the literature. The recent opening of the CPUSA archives has made it possible to reevaluate the Party's activities during this era. While the TUUL unions suffered major defeats and had difficulties in organizing in the heavy and mass production industries such as mining, textile, maritime and steel, these unions experienced considerable organizing success in light industries in New York City, particularly after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933. Besides promoting industrial organization, the TUUL's vision of union organization was structurally different from that of the AFL. Specifically, the red industrial unions, unlike the AFL unions, attempted to promote democratic, rankand-file participation in union affairs as opposed to leaving such activities solely in the hands of the union officialdom.

This essay draws upon a larger study of over forty strikes which involved both male and female strikers in the United States between the years 1887 and 1903. Here the focus of analysis is on those strikes which began with demands raised by women workers. The essay examines the nature of women workers' demands, the ways in which cooperation with male co-workers altered those demands, and the affect that formal union involvement had on women strikers and their strike demands. Because the original set of case studies examines strikes across the United States, the strikes explored here also highlight a variety of geographic locations. The insights gained suggest future paths for research on the distinction between women's and men's strike demands.

This case study examines the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union's successful 3-1/2-year effort (1988-91) to organize workers at S. Lichtenberg, a Georgia-based curtain manufacturer. The author uses archival research and extensive interviews with rank-and-file activists to determine why the union was able to triumph after earlier (1966 and 1971) failed attempts to organize. He finds that political changes in the post-civil rights South, the solidarity provided by race, gender, and religious identification, and the union's creative tactics coalesced in a winning strategy. The findings have significant implications not only for Southern organizing but also for the labor movement's renewed emphasis on attracting new members.

From 1910 to 1927 workers in the Mexican cotton textile industry took advantage of the larger surrounding revolution to create a revolution of their own. Based on a significant and persistent challenge to workplace authority, millhands radically transformed the labour regime in Mexican industry. Although owners combated the workers' rebellion, they never inflicted a decisive defeat. As a consequence, the conditions of work in Mexican mills improved dramatically. Among the advancements workers fought for, and obtained, were a sharp reduction in the working day from fourteen hours to eight, mandated medical care for work-related accidents and illnesses and union control of hiring and firing. The latter included the union shop and a system of tripartite boards that made it virtually impossible to fire workers who enjoyed union support. The new labour regime reflected changes in the formal and informal institutions of work, but its final institutionalisation empowered unions more than the rank and file workers who fought to change the social relations of work.

Ernest Calloway arrived in Chicago on the morning of May 30, 1937. Later that day, during an infamous event that came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, police attacked workers and their supporters who were picketing the Republic Steel plant in south Chicago, resulting in ten deaths and dozens of injuries. Amid the string of impressive victories the CIO had been compiling, the violence at Republic Steel represented a grim reminder that the advance of industrial unionism was by no means inevitable or assured. As Calloway recalled several years later, it was a “befitting anti-union welcome to one

The racial integration of the southern textile industry beginning in 1957 was resisted and resented by many white workers, refuting the positive impression put forward by contemporary accounts.

Analyzing data from extensive surveys of U.S. nonfarm families in 1889-90-predominantly families from eastern states-the authors of this paper show that workers affiliated with labor organizations had earnings that were 22 percent higher than the earnings of other workers, an effect comparable in magnitude to estimates for modern unions. Wage differentials varied considerably across the eight industries studied and across skill levels within each industry.