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“His aim is to make the history of labor in the U.S. more accessible to students and the general reader. He succeeds” (Booklist). In a blend of economic, social, and political history, Paul Le Blanc shows how important labor issues have been, and continue to be, in the forging of our nation. Within a broad analytical framework, he highlights issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, and includes the views of key figures of United States labor. The result is a thought-provoking look at centuries of American history from a perspective that is too often ignored or forgotten. “An excellent overview, enhanced by a valuable glossary.” —Elaine Bernard, director of the Harvard Trade Union Program
Life and Labor brings together the most stimulating scholarship in the field of labor history today. Its fifteen essays explore the impact of industrialization and technology on the lives of working people and their responses to the changes in society over the past one-hundred-fifty years. Focusing on the everyday life of working-class Americans, it discusses such topics as production technology, occupational mobility, industrial violence, working women, resistance to exploitation, fraternal organizations, and social and leisure-time activities. The essays are written in a lively manner accessible to an undergraduate audience and also provide insights and a solid background for graduate students and scholars in the field of American labor and social history. The book presents the work of members of the generation of labor and social historians who matured in the 1970s and who are now establishing themselves as leaders in their fields.
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An analysis of how the working class can mobilize as a force for change in the present day 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.
Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War. Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness. In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.
"[Jones's] painstakingly researched volume is an invaluable antidote to those who argue that our shameful past has no relevance to our perplexing present." --David Kusnet, Baltimore Sun