Dreams of Dignity Workers of Vision
Author: Grace Palladino
Publisher:
Published: 2016-08-31
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780997843101
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Harry Van Arsdale, Jr.
Author: Gene Ruffini
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-05-20
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1317468929
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Harry Van Arsdale (1905-1986) was a towering figure in the New York labor scene. After being initiated into the Local 3 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1925 and becoming its business manager in 1933, Van Arsdale turned the then corrupt and disorganized union into a force to be reckoned with. He became president of the New York City Central Labor Council in 1957, which put him in a position to become a greater influence for labor relations locally and nationally. As business manager and president of these organizations, Van Arsdale advocated and won shorter work days, in order to give more men a chance to work - especially important in the 1930s. He instituted paid vacation, paid holidays, annuity plans, and educational opportunities for union workers - novelties at that time - as well as scholarships for workers' children. His sincere commitment to improving the lives of American workers and their families made him a truly beloved figure. This fascinating memoir traces Van Arsdale's sixty-plus years as a union member and powerful labor figure, and provides colorful details of his many remarkable accomplishments.
Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits
Author: Grace Palladino
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-09-05
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1501729306
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits follows the history of the Building and Construction Trades Department from the emergence of building trades councils in the age of the skyscraper; through treacherous fights over jurisdiction as new building materials and methods of work evolved; and through numerous Department campaigns to improve safety standards, work with contractors to promote unionized construction, and forge a sense of industrial unity among its fifteen (and at times nineteen) autonomous and highly diverse affiliates. Arranged chronologically, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits is based on archival research in Department, AFL-CIO, and U.S. government records as well as numerous union journals, the local and national press, and interviews with former Department officers. Grace Palladino makes the history of the building trades come alive. By investigating the sources of conflict and unity within the Building and Construction Trades Department over time, and demonstrating how building trades unions dealt with problems and opportunities in the past, she provides a historical context for the current generation of workers and leaders as they devise new strategies to suit their current situation.
Capital Moves
Author: Jefferson Cowie
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-01-24
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 1501723561
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs—and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route—one taken time and again by major American manufacturers—is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants, RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s—a region rapidly becoming one of the most industrialized on the continent.
Out of the Jungle
Author: Thaddeus Russell
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 9781592130276
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"[T]he Teamsters, the largest A.F.L. affiliate... has been understudied... Russell's motives in seeking to redress this imbalance are certainly commendable." ?Maurice Isserman, The New York Times Book Review"[A] well-researched study of the longtime Teamsters leader...[that] could put Hoffa back on the historical map for a new generation of students of labor history." ?Publishers Weekly "An unexpectedly enthralling account of Jimmy Hoffa's tactics and aspirations... Russell's history of the Teamsters under Hoffa illustrates the vibrancy of the labor movement?for better or worse?during the middle 50 years of the 20th century." ?Kirkus Reviews "In this gripping biography of Jimmy Hoffa... Thaddeus Russell launches a vigorous attack on the reigning orthodoxy in labor history." ?David L. Chappell, Newsday "Russell bravely challenges the received wisdom of the left, the right, and the morally earnest center. If you want to get serious about the real meaning of class in the last century, read this gracefully yet powerfully argued book." ?Nelson Lichtenstein "Out of the Jungle delivers a much-needed and more nuanced understanding of a tumultuous period in the history of...the nation." ?John Gallagher, Detroit News/Free Press "...strongly recommended reading." ?The Midwest Book Review's Bookwatch
Money, Power, and the People
Author: Christopher W. Shaw
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-09-05
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 022663647X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An “engaging and well-researched study [of] ordinary people who joined together to challenge financial institutions” (Choice). Banks and bankers are hardly the most beloved institutions and people in this country. With its corruptive influence on politics and stranglehold on the American economy, Wall Street is held in high regard by few outside the financial sector. But the pitchforks raised against this behemoth are largely rhetorical: We rarely see riots in the streets or public demands for an equitable and democratic banking system that result in serious national changes. Yet the situation was vastly different a century ago, as Christopher W. Shaw shows. This book upends the conventional thinking that financial policy in the early twentieth century was set primarily by the needs and demands of bankers. Shaw shows that banking and politics were directly shaped by the literal and symbolic investments of the grassroots. This engagement remade financial institutions and the national economy, through populist pressure and the establishment of federal regulatory programs and agencies like the Farm Credit System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Shaw reveals the surprising groundswell behind seemingly arcane legislation, as well as the power of the people to demand serious political repercussions for the banks that caused the Great Depression. One result of this sustained interest and pressure was legislation and regulation that brought on a long period of relative financial stability, with a reduced frequency of economic booms and busts. Ironically, this stability led to the decline of the very banking politics that brought it about. Giving voice to a broad swath of American figures, including workers, farmers, politicians, and bankers alike, Money, Power, and the People recasts our understanding of what might be possible in balancing the needs of the people with those of their financial institutions.
Sisters in the Brotherhoods
Author: J. LaTour
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2008-08-04
Total Pages: 640
ISBN-13: 0230614078
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Sisters in the Brotherhoods is an oral-history-based study of women who have, against considerable odds, broken the gender barrier to blue-collar employment in various trades in New York City beginning in the 1970s. It is a story of the fight against deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about what constitutes women's work, the middle-class bias of feminism, the daily grinding sexism of male co-workers, and the institutionalised discrimination of employers and unions. It is also the story of some gutsy women who, seeking the material rewards and personal satisfactions of skilled manual labour, have struggled to make a place for themselves among New York City's construction workers, stationary engineers, firefighters, electronic technicians, plumbers, and transit workers. Each story contributes to an important unifying theme: the way women confronted the enormous sexism embedded in union culture and developed new organisational forms to support their struggles, including and especially the United Tradeswomen.
The Samuel Gompers Papers
Author: Samuel Gompers
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 630
ISBN-13: 9780252025648
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →With almost forty years' experience as a labor leader by 1909, Samuel Gompers had learned the value of practical achievements. Shorter hours, higher wages, safer and more sanitary workplaces, and a voice in establishing working conditions were the hallmarks of trade unionism in the Progressive Era, and these hard-won, incremental gains had significantly improved working-class lives. While these were not all he hoped to achieve, they represented, Gompers believed, essential victories in a bitter class struggle that was far from over. This installment of the multivolume documentary history of the nation's premier labor leader covers a period marked by industrial tragedies--such as the 1909 Cherry Hill mine disaster and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire--and industrial violence, including the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. These years were punctuated by hard-fought strikes and judicial proceedings directed against trade unionists, most notably the Danbury Hatters' and Buck's Stove cases and the prosecution of the McNamaras. For Gompers, these were demanding years that taxed his health and energy but ultimately strengthened his resolve as he became a crucial player in the AFL's efforts to establish collective bargaining as the basis of industrial democracy.
A David Montgomery Reader
Author: David W. Montgomery
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2024-07-09
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 0252056795
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career. Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.
Dreams of Dignity Workers of Vision
Author: Grace Palladino
Publisher:
Published: 2016-08-31
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780997843125
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In 1891, 10 delegates representing eight cities and 300 electrical workers met in St. Louis. Led by a Texas-born lineman named Henry Miller, their goal was to organize and improve working conditions in the rapidly growing but extremely dangerous electrical industry.From that meeting came the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which has helped millions of workers in the United States and Canada rise up and join the middle class while also raising the quality of work in the electrical industry.In the follow-up to her history of the IBEW released in 1991, noted labor historian Grace Palladino adds three chapters covering the last 25 years. She reflects on a time of enormous challenges, such as globalization, which has roiled labor markets and sent jobs overseas. Internally, women and other underrepresented groups won more influence on union policy. The economic crisis of 2008 was devastating for wiremen and construction workers. But successfully meeting challenges has been an IBEW trademark throughout its 125-year history. An economic depression in the 1890s nearly destroyed the union before it got off the ground. So did the leadership split between Frank McNulty and James Reid from 1908-13. Internal divisions and right-to-work legislation caused deep rifts after World War II. But thanks to an engaged membership and inspirational leadership, the IBEW remains one of the world's leading trade unions. Palladino combines hours of research and interviews to bring this sometimes colorful history to life.
