The Right And Labor In America

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812207912
Total Pages : 439 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Right and Labor in America written by Nelson Lichtenstein and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism, today as well as a century ago. The Right and Labor in America explores the multifaceted history and range of conservative hostility toward unionism, opening the door to a fascinating set of individuals, movements, and institutions that help explain why, in much of the popular imagination, union leaders are always "bosses" and trade union organizers are nothing short of "thugs." The contributors to this volume explore conservative thought about unions, in particular the ideological impulses, rhetorical strategies, and political efforts that conservatives have deployed to challenge unions as a force in U.S. economic and political life over the century. Among the many contemporary books on American parties, personalities, and elections that try to explain why political disputes are so divisive, this collection of original and innovative essays is essential reading.

Author : Richard D. Kahlenberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780870785238
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right written by Richard D. Kahlenberg and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American society has grown dramatically more unequal over the past quarter century. The economic gains of American workers after World War II have slowly been eroded--in part because organized labor has gone from encompassing one-third of the private sector workers to less than one-tenth. One reason for the labor movement's collapse is the existence of weak labor laws that, for example, impose only minimal penalties on employers who illegally fire workers for trying to organize a union. Attempts to reform labor law have fallen short because labor is caught in a political box: To achieve reform, labor needs the political power that comes from expanding union membership; to grow, however, unions need labor law reform. "Labor Organizing as a Civil Right" lays out the case for a new approach, one that takes the issue beyond the confines of labor law by amending the Civil Rights Act so that it prohibits discrimination against workers trying to organize a union. The authors argue that this strategy would have two significant benefits. First, enhanced penalties under the Civil Rights Act would provide a greater deterrent against the illegal firing of employees who try to organize. Second, as a political matter, identifying the ability to form a union as a civil right frames the issue in a way that Americans can readily understand. The book explains the American labor movement's historical importance to social change, it provides data on the failure of current law to deter employer abuses, and it compares U.S. labor protections to those of most other developed nations. It also contains a detailed discussion of what amending the Civil Rights Act to protect labor organizing would mean as well as an outline of the connection between civil rights and labor movements and analysis of the politics of civil rights and labor law reform.

Author : Raymond L. Hogler
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1440832404
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The End of American Labor Unions written by Raymond L. Hogler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining the history of the legal regulation of union actions, this fascinating book offers a new interpretation of American labor-law policy—and its harmful impact on workers today. Arguing that the decline in union membership and bargaining power is linked to rising income inequality, this important book traces the evolution of labor law in America from the first labor-law case in 1806 through the passage of right-to-work legislation in Michigan and Indiana in 2012. In doing so, it shares important insights into economic development, exploring both the nature of work in America and the part the legal system played—and continues to play—in shaping the lives of American workers. The book illustrates the intertwined history of labor law and politics, showing how these forces quashed unions in the 19th century, allowed them to flourish in the mid-20th century, and squelched them again in recent years. Readers will learn about the negative impact of union decline on American workers and how that decline has been influenced by political forces. They will see how the right-to-work and Tea Party movements have combined to prevent union organizing, to the detriment of the middle class. And they will better understand the current failure to reform labor law, despite a consensus that unions can protect workers without damaging market efficiencies.

Author : Zaragosa Vargas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691134022
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Labor Rights Are Civil Rights written by Zaragosa Vargas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-28 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

Author : William E. Forbath
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674037081
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement written by William E. Forbath and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

Author : Daniel R. Ernst
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252065125
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Lawyers Against Labor written by Daniel R. Ernst and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major revision of the history of labor law in the United States in the early twentieth century, "Lawyers against Labor" goes beyond legal issues to consider cultural, political, and industrial history as well. In the first full treatment of the turn-of-the-century American Anti-Boycott Association(AABA), Daniel Ernst ably leads the reader through a compelling story of business and politics. The AABA was an organization of small- to medium-sized employers whose staff litigated and lobbied against organized labor. Ernst captures in depth the characters involved, bringing them to life with a writer's eye and a touch of wit. As he examines the AABA at work to combat trade unions through the courts, he introduces its most notable leaders, Daniel Davenport and Walter Gordon Merritt - who personified the opposing points of view - and shows how pluralism had won itself a place in the legal, academic, political, corporate, and even trade-union worlds long before the New Deal.

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400838525
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book State of the Union written by Nelson Lichtenstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

Author : Rick Fantasia
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520240901
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Hard Work written by Rick Fantasia and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-06-16 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Author : Foster Rhea Dulles
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Labor in America written by Foster Rhea Dulles and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Steven Greenhouse
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 1101874430
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Beaten Down, Worked Up written by Steven Greenhouse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick