Download Free Labor Relations In The Automobile Industry During The Nineteen Twenties Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Labor Relations In The Automobile Industry During The Nineteen Twenties and write the review.

This book is a comprehensive history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. It covers changes in the kinds of workers who staffed the auto factories, developments in the labor process and in overall conditions of work, daily life outside the factories, informal responses of workers to routinized, monotonous, and highly structured work, and automobile worker unions before the creation of the United Automobile Workers. Although the 1920s were seen at the time as a period of peaceful and cooperative labor relations, author Joyce Peterson looks beneath the surface to discover the many ways in which auto workers expressed their displeasure with and attempted to fight against working conditions. The book also examines the Briggs strike of 1933, the first strike to significantly register the impact of the Great Depression upon the automobile industry and to mark the end of the pre-union era. The automobile industry was a model of twentieth century mass production techniques, of managerial organization, and of labor relations. Studying automobile workers in their historical and social setting explains a great deal about the nature of modern industry—how it affects the daily life and work of employees and how workers see themselves as individuals and members of a working class.
Autowork focuses on the character of automobile work in the modern factory and the relationships between autoworkers, their union, and management from 1913 to the present. Two-thirds of the essays are devoted to the post-World War II period, which historians have not examined as extensively as the early years of the automobile industry. In these original essays, the experiences of assembly-line workers come alive as never before. Using transcripts of government hearings, minutes of negotiations, records of arbitration proceedings, and articles in union newspapers, the authors present autoworkers' and union officials' descriptions of working conditions and the effect these conditions had on their health and home life. The essays analyze the dynamics of collective bargaining on important shop-floor issues such as safety, work pace, overtime, job assignments, and managerial discipline. Autowork demonstrates that many historians have underestimated the militancy and effectiveness of the United Automobile Workers of America.
This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime—a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study. Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later. Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs. Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.
Hooker (American thought and language, Michigan State U.) examines the transformation of a sleepy village, Highland Park, Michigan into an industrial boomtown that later became an urban ghetto. He describes how Ford's first large factory created the first American city dependent on the automobile industry, and how the company tried to control the lives of workers and residents. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR