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This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike. Hinging on a major reinterpretation of the Haymarket era, Labor and Urban Politics argues for labor's profound influence on the shaping of urban politics and the transformation of liberalism in late nineteenth-century America.''After this book, no one will have any excuse to write about late nineteenth-century politics in Chicago, or any other city, solely on the basis of the actions and interests of elites. Schneirov argues for the importance of the working class in municipal politics on a level that surpasses anything else in the literature.'' -- David Montgomery''The most thorough, deepest re-reading of Gilded Age reality that has yet emerged from labor historians. . . . Gives an unparalleled understanding of the world of contemporary labor.'' -- Leon Fink, author of In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz
One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s proudest accomplishments is his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program this double standard begs a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in Free Labor, John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on either side of the debate. Krinsky’s broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. Free Labor will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.
America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions. Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center. Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant. Whose Detroit? brings the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism and integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.
Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services. Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.
Having more in common than their deaths on the same day in 1997, the late Cheddi Jagan of Guyana and Michael Manley of Jamaica both represented a radical perspective in modern Caribbean politics. Jagan and Manley each had a bold and creative ability to connect labor and politics and made it their priority to minimize poverty and inequality and to enhance the welfare of the Caribbean's disadvantaged and dispossessed. Caribbean Labor and Politics looks closely at the legacies of Jagan and Manley and their ramifications for the political and economic struggles of the Caribbean region and the world. This edited volume brings together a variety of studies on the lives, works, and intellectual and practical contributions of these two stalwart political leaders. The chapters focus primarily on Jagan's and Manley's years as heads of state of their respective countries and also encapsulate their pre-political years-mainly their growing-up experiences and their organizational work in the labor movement. The core contributions of these men are characterized in terms of their pivotal struggles towards the realization of what we term the "working class project."
Introducing the role of urban social context in the field of labor revitalization, this book features global case studies in which strong coalitions have enabled new union influence as well as those in which such coalition building has been thwarted.
In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the privileged, creating the complex geopolitical pattern of Marco Z. Garrido’s “patchwork city.” Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a mélange of spaces defined by class, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He then looks beyond urban fragmentation to delineate its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of these slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. For enclave residents, the proximity of slums is a source of insecurity, compelling them to impose spatial boundaries on slum residents. For slum residents, the regular imposition of these boundaries creates a pervasive sense of discrimination. Class boundaries then sharpen along the housing divide, and the urban poor and middle class emerge not as labor and capital but as squatters and “villagers,” Manila’s name for subdivision residents. Garrido further examines the politicization of this divide with the case of the populist president Joseph Estrada, finding the two sides drawn into contention over not just the right to the city, but the nature of democracy itself. The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are all intensely connected. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other cities of the Global South—as race is to the study of American cities.
Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into New England's first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city. In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no "American Dream" awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.
In Putin's Labor Dilemma, Stephen Crowley investigates how the fear of labor protest has inhibited substantial economic transformation in Russia. Putin boasts he has the backing of workers in the country's industrial heartland, but as economic growth slows in Russia, reviving the economy will require restructuring the country's industrial landscape. At the same time, doing so threatens to generate protest and instability from a key regime constituency. However, continuing to prop up Russia's Soviet-era workplaces, writes Crowley, could lead to declining wages and economic stagnation, threatening protest and instability. Crowley explores the dynamics of a Russian labor market that generally avoids mass unemployment, the potentially explosive role of Russia's monotowns, conflicts generated by massive downsizing in "Russia's Detroit" (Tol'yatti), and the rapid politicization of the truck drivers movement. Labor protests currently show little sign of threatening Putin's hold on power, but the manner in which they are being conducted point to substantial chronic problems that will be difficult to resolve. Putin's Labor Dilemma demonstrates that the Russian economy must either find new sources of economic growth or face stagnation. Either scenario—market reforms or economic stagnation—raises the possibility, even probability, of destabilizing social unrest.