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Autoworkers Under the Gun

Author: Gregg Shotwell

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2012-02-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1608461637

The veteran autoworker and author of the pro-labor newsletter Live Bait & Ammo offers a blow-by-blow analysis of workers’ rights under attack. Greg Shotwell was a machine operator at General Motor’s Delphi division during its tragic spinoff from GM and eventual bankruptcy. He watched from a front-row seat as the United Auto Workers Union collaborated with antilabor policies that led to plant closings and cuts to wages and benefits. A dissident member of the UAW, Shotwell made a name for himself chronicling the outrages and absurdities of corporate managers and corrupt union leaders in his popular shop-floor newsletter, Live Bait & Ammo. Autoworkers Under the Gun collects Shotwell’s essential writings during that fateful period. These LB&A fliers quickly grew legs of their own, distributed by rank-and-file workers in auto plants across the United States and cited by industry analysts. Spanning a decade of autoworker resistance, this body of work stands as a call to action for a new generation of workers coming of age in recession-wracked America.

Autoworkers Under the Gun

Author: Gregg Shotwell

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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The Package King

Author: Joe Allen

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 164259217X

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“An incisive history” of how a bicycle messenger service in Seattle became a global behemoth, and the labor battles along the way (Dissent). We may see their trademark brown trucks everywhere today, but few people know the behind-the-scenes story of United Parcel Service and how it became one of America’s most admired companies. This book reveals how UPS managed to displace General Motors—the very symbol of American capitalism—to become the largest private-sector unionized employer in the United States; its long, tumultuous history with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and its effects on its workers and surrounding communities. It also explores the question of its future in the age of Amazon—as it battles to hold on to the throne of the Package King. “Get a copy of Allen’s book for yourself and then pass it on to a UPS driver the next time you get a delivery. She is part of the most organized section of what is possibly the most important industry in 21st-century capitalism, and the outcome of her story will have a lot to do with what our world looks like on the other side of this pandemic.” —Indypendent

Class Struggle Unionism

Author: Joe Burns

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1642596817

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For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy. Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democtractic and fighting labor movement.

The UAW's Southern Gamble

Author: Stephen J. Silvia

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1501769723

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The UAW's Southern Gamble is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.

Can the Working Class Change the World?

Author: Michael D. Yates

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1583677127

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One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.

Revolt on Goose Island

Author: Kari Lydersen

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2014-05-13

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1612193951

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Revised and updated, with a new afterword by the author “There is much talk about ‘audacity’ these days, but true chutzpah is when the workers take over the factory and take on the bank. Kari Lydersen’s invaluable account of the Republic sit-down strike is an instruction manual for worker dignity.” —Mike Davis, author of Buda’s Wagon and City of Quartz December 5, 2008: It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Days after getting a $45 billion bailout from the U.S. government, Bank of America shut down a line of credit that kept Chicago’s Republic Windows & Doors factory operating. The bosses, who knew what was coming, had been sneaking machinery out in the middle of the night. They closed the factory and sent the workers home. Then something surprising happened: Republic’s workers occupied the factory and refused to leave. Kari Lydersen, an award-winning reporter, tells the story of the factory takeover, elegantly transforming the workers’ story into a parable of labor activism for the twenty-first century, one that concludes with a surprising and little-reported victory.

America’s Other Automakers

Author: Timothy J. Minchin

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-04

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0820368156

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In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters. Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.

Work Work Work

Author: Michael Yates

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-07-23

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1583679650

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"For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other - and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today's "captains of industry" like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos"--

Save Our Unions

Author: Steve Early

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1583674306

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"Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they're trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor's past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book's insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform"--