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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > General
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the United States’ acquisition of an overseas empire compelled the nation to reconsider the boundary between domestic and foreign--and between nation and empire. William D. Riddell looks at the experiences of merchant sailors and labor organizations to illuminate how domestic class conflict influenced America’s emerging imperial system. Maritime workers crossed ever-shifting boundaries that forced them to reckon with the collision of different labor systems and markets. Formed into labor organizations like the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific and the International Seaman’s Union of America, they contested the U.S.’s relationship to its empire while capitalists in the shipping industry sought to impose their own ideas. Sophisticated and innovative, On the Waves of Empire reveals how maritime labor and shipping capital stitched together, tore apart, and re-stitched the seams of empire.
As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, white supremacists believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen’s Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role. Costaguta charts the socialist movement’s journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused and racial-conscious American socialism. As he shows, the shift relied on a strong immigrant influence personified by the cosmopolitan Marxist thinker and future IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon. The class-focused movement that emerged became American socialism’s most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.
Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.
As the founder of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the first woman faculty member of Harvard University, Alice Hamilton will be remembered for her contributions to public health and her remarkable career. Born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Hamilton attended several medical schools contributing to her lifelong dedication to learning. Focusing on the investigation of the health and safety conditions – or rather lack thereof – in the nation's factories and mines during the second decade of the twentieth century, her discoveries led to factory and mine level-initiated reforms, and to city, state, and federal reform legislation. It also led to a greater recognition in the nation's universities for formal academic programs in industrial and public health. In 1919 the Harvard officials considered Hamilton the best qualified person in the country to lead their effort in this area. The Education of Alice Hamilton is an inspiring story of a woman dedicated to erudition and helping others.
Workplaces in the United States are safer today than they were 120 years ago. In this book, Donald W. Rogers attributes this improvement partly to the development in the Progressive Era of surprisingly strong state-level work safety and health regulatory agencies, a patchwork of commissions and labor departments that advanced safety law from common-law negligence to the modern system of administrative regulation. Centering on the most important of these state agencies, the Wisconsin Industrial Commission, Rogers examines how Wisconsin's program operated in practice, what its results were, and how it compared to protective labor law arrangements in Ohio, California, New York, Illinois, and Alabama. He illuminates the achievements of these agencies, including their integration of workers compensation and commission regulation (two bedrocks of modern occupational safety law), as well as their establishment of worker-employer advisory committees, administrative safety codes, a "safety first" ethic, and "prevailing good practices" in modernizing firms. He also reveals the mixed success that these bodies met in their code enforcement efforts and industrial health initiatives. Rogers shows how safety commissions reconciled technological progress with industrial efficiency, justice, and stability. Connecting this history to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, Making Capitalism Safe will revise historical understandings of state regulation, compensation insurance, and labor law politics--issues that remain pressing in our time.
Between Conflict and Collegiality explores how ethnonational-religious struggle between Jews and Palestinians affects relations in ethnically mixed work teams in Israel. Asaf Darr documents the tensions that permeate the workplace and reveals when such tensions threaten the cohesion of the work environment. Darr chronicles the grassroots coping strategies employed by both Jewish and Palestinian through field studies conducted with workers in various sectors in Israel, adopting a comparative method that identifies the differences in how ethnonational-religious tensions play out. Between Conflict and Collegiality asks how workers deal with external ethnonational and religious pressures and whether the broader ethnonational conflict is reflected in the career expectations and trajectories of minority group members. Darr examines whether minority group members' use of their own language at work become a point of contestation; how religion is manifested in the workplace; whether co-workers from different ethnonational groups form amicable relations that extend beyond the workplace; and whether positive experiences working in ethnically mixed workplaces have the potential to mitigate conflict in the wider society.
The UAW's Southern Gamble is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany and Japan, as well as documenting the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization-immigrant women of color employed as nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in New York City-formed to fight for dignity and respect and to "bring meaningful change" to their work. Alana Lee Glaser examines the process of how these domestic workers organized against precarity, isolation, and exploitation to help pass the 2010 New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first labor law in the United States protecting in-home workers. Solidarity & Care examines the political mobilization of diverse care workers who joined together and supported one another through education, protests, lobbying, and storytelling. Domestic work activists used narrative and emotional appeals to build a coalition of religious communities, employers of domestic workers, labor union members, and politicians to first pass and then to enforce the new law. Through oral history interviews, as well as ethnographic observation during DWU meetings and protest actions, Glaser chronicles how these women fought (and continue to fight) to improve working conditions. She also illustrates how they endure racism, punitive immigration laws, on-the-job indignities, and unemployment that can result in eviction and food insecurity. The lessons from Solidarity & Care along with the DWU's precedent-setting legislative success have applications to workers across industries. All royalties will go directly to the Domestic Workers United
The UAW's Southern Gamble is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany and Japan, as well as documenting the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
Henry George (1839-1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume IV of this series presents the unabridged text of Protection or Free Trade (1886). Read into the U.S. Congressional Record in its entirety in 1892, Protection or Free Trade is one of the most well articulated defenses in the nineteenth century for the free exchange of goods, services, and labor. By exposing the monopolistic practices and the privileging of special interests in the trade policies of his time, George constructed a monumental theoretical bulwark against the apologists for protective tariffs and diverse trade preferences. Free trade today is often associated with a neo-liberal agenda that oppresses working people. In Protection or Free Trade George argues that free trade, when linked with land value taxation or the systematic collection of economic rent, reduces wealth and income inequality. True free trade elevates the condition of labor to a degree far greater than any form of trade protectionism. The full and original text of Protection or Free Trade presented in Volume IV of The Annotated Works of Henry George is supplemented by annotations which explain George's many references to the trade policies and disputes of his day. A new index augments accessibility to the text, the annotations, and their key terms. The introductory essay by Professor William S. Peirce, "Henry George and the Theory and Politics of Trade," provides the historical, political, and conceptual context for George's debates with the prominent political economists and trade experts of his time. Trade barriers typically serve the interests of a few and impede the overall economic progress of society. Protectionism fosters poverty and animates global conflict. The development of trade policy cannot be pursued in isolation from the broader principles of sound economics and a radical tax reform that benefits labor.
The labor-climate movement in the U.S. laid the groundwork for the Green New Deal by building a base within labor for supporting climate protection as a vehicle for good jobs. But as we confront the climate crisis and seek environmental justice, a "jobs vs. environment" discourse often pits workers against climate activists. How can we make a "just transition" moving away from fossil fuels, while also compensating for the human cost when jobs are lost or displaced? In his timely book, Clean Air and Good Jobs, Todd Vachon examines the labor-climate movement and demonstrates what can be envisioned and accomplished when climate justice is on labor's agenda and unions work together with other social movements to formulate bold solutions to the climate crisis. Vachon profiles the workers and union leaders who have been waging a slow, but steadily growing revolution within their unions to make labor as a whole an active and progressive champion for both workers and the environment. Clean Air and Good Jobs examines the "movement within the movement" offering useful solutions to the dual crises of climate and inequality.
Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region's local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity. He uses surveys and social media data to measure multiple dimensions of gender norms, including expectations toward women in leadership, attitudes toward working mothers, as well as the division of household labor. Gendered Places reveals that different locations, even within the same region of the country, such as Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, have distinct gender norms and highly influential cultural environments. Scarboroughshows how these local norms shape the attitudes and behaviors of residents with implications on patterns of inequality such as the gender wage gap. His findings offer valuable insight for community leaders and organizers making efforts to promote equality in their region. Scarboroughrecognizes local culture as not value-neutral, but highly crucial to the gender structure that perpetuates, or challenges, gender inequality. Gendered Places questions how these gender norms are sustained and their social consequences.
In The Future We Need, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta bring a novel perspective to building worker power and what labor organizing could look like in the future, suggesting ways to evolve collective bargaining to match the needs of modern people—not only changing their wages and working conditions, but being able to govern over more aspects of their lives. Weaving together stories of real working people, Smiley and Gupta position the struggle to build collective bargaining power as a central element in the effort to build a healthy democracy and explore both existing levers of power and new ones we must build for workers to have the ability to negotiate in today and tomorrow's contexts. The Future We Need illustrates the necessity of centralizing the fight against white supremacy and gender discrimination, while offering paths forward to harness the power of collective bargaining in every area for a new era.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that mass mobilization warfare fosters democratic reform and expands economic, social, and political rights, War and Democracy reexamines the effects of war on domestic politics by focusing on how wartime states either negotiate with or coerce organized labor, policies that profoundly affect labor's beliefs and aspirations. Because labor unions frequently play a central role in advancing democracy and narrowing inequalities, their wartime interactions with the state can have significant consequences for postwar politics. Comparing Britain and Italy during and after World War I, Elizabeth Kier examines the different strategies each government used to mobilize labor for war and finds that total war did little to promote political, civil, or social rights in either country. Italian unions anticipated greater worker management and a "land to the peasants" program as a result of their wartime service; British labor believed its wartime sacrifices would be repaid with "homes for heroes" and the extension of social rights. But Italy's unjust and coercive policies radicalized Italian workers (prompting a fascist backlash) and Britain's just and conciliatory policies paradoxically undermined broader democratization in Britain. In critiquing the mainstream view that total war advances democracy, War and Democracy reveals how politics during war transforms societal actors who become crucial to postwar political settlements and the prospects for democratic reform.
Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagne demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes. Gagne explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagne goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.
In the absence of federal legislation, each state in the United States has its own policies regarding family leave, job protection for women and childcare. No wonder working mothers encounter such a significant disparity when it comes to childcare resources in America! Whereas conservative states like Nebraska offer affordable, readily available, and high quality childcare, progressive states that advocate for women's economic and political power, like California, have expensive childcare, shorter school days, and mothers who are more likely to work part-time or drop out of the labor market altogether to be available for their children. In Motherlands, Leah Ruppanner cogently argues that states should look to each other to fill their policy voids. She provides suggestions and solutions for policy makers interested in supporting working families. Whether a woman lives in a state with stronger childcare or gender empowerment regimes, at stake is mothers' financial dependence on their partners. Ruppanner advocates for reducing the institutional barriers mothers face when re-entering the workforce. As a result, women would have greater autonomy in making employment decisions following childbirth.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) remains one of the best examples of a labor union that traces its origins to radical anti-racist principles. Today, very few mainstream unions remain that were founded on militant, radical, and "anti-racist" principles. The ILWU remains the strongest port union in the United States, and its members are among the highest paid blue-collar union workers in the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival oral histories research, and ethnographic observation, Solidarity Forever? highlights the struggle of a key group of Black and women leaders who fought for racial and gender equality in the ports of Southern California. The book argues that institutional and cultural forms of racial and gender inequality are embedded within US trade union locals leading to the following deleterious consequences for unions: (1) a proliferation of internal discrimination lawsuits within unions, which can cost the union International, or union local, potentially millions of dollars in legal fees and financial settlements thereby redistributing precious financial resources that could be spent on key activities related to making unions stronger from outside attacks; (2) an erosion of trust and solidarity among workers, the key values of any successful union, which ultimately undermines the radical democratic potential of unions and rank-and-file participation in union politics; and (3) the undermining of workers of color and women workers as full and equal participants in the labor movement. The future of organized labor in the United States could very well be determined by the ability of the labor movement, and labor unions in particular, to listen to those workers who have been relegated to the margins of the global economy-workers of color, immigrant workers, women workers, and all workers in the Global South.
Recognized as an authoritative treatment of an important subject area, and presented in a conversational and straightforward style, Industrial Hygiene Simplified, Second Edition is an updated edition of the original, well-received textbook. Industrial Hygiene Simplified is valuable and accessible for use by those involved in such disciplines as industrial technology, manufacturing technology, industrial engineering technology, occupational safety, management, and supervision. This book is ideal for those needing a refresh on industrial hygiene concepts and practices they may not use regularly, as well as those practitioners preparing for the Certified Industry Hygiene (CIH) exam. Because it is a dynamic discipline, there is no question about the field of industrial hygiene having undergone significant change over the past four decades. Some of the reasons for this change include technological innovations that have introduced new hazards in the workplace, increased pressure from regulatory agencies, realization by industrial executives that a safe and healthy workplace is typically a more productive and litigious-free workplace, skyrocketing health care and worker's compensation costs, and increased pressure from environmental groups and the public. These factors have created a need for an up-to-date and user-friendly book in industrial hygiene that contains the latest information for those who practice this profession in the age of high technology and escalating on-the-job injuries with accompanying increased health care costs. New features in the second edition of Industrial Hygiene Simplified include: *Presentation in lesson format *End-of-chapter review questions *"Did You Know" pertinent facts *Applicable and important math operations
The seventh of a new, well-received, and highly acclaimed series on critical infrastructure and homeland security, Transportation Protection and Homeland Security is a valuable reference source. The book was fashioned in response to the critical needs of transportation production managers, transportation engineers, security professionals (physical and cyber-security), students, and for anyone with a general interest in the security of transportation infrastructure systems. In Transportation Protection and Homeland Security, the reader will gain an understanding of the challenge of domestic preparedness-that is, an immediate need for a heightened state of awareness of the present threat facing the transportation sector as a potential terrorist target. Moreover, the reader will gain knowledge of security principles and measures that can be implemented-adding a critical component not only to your professional knowledge but also give you the tools needed to combat terrorism in the homeland-our homeland, both by outsiders and insiders.
In Union Voices, the result of a thirteen-year research project, three industrial relations scholars evaluate how labor unions fared in the political and institutional context created by Great Britain's New Labour government, which was in power from 1997 to 2010. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence, Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery present a multilevel analysis of what organizing means in the UK, how it emerged, and what its impact has been. Although the supportive legislation of the New Labour government led to considerable optimism in the late 1990s about the prospects for renewal, Simms, Holgate, and Heery argue that despite considerable evidence of investment, new practices, and innovation, UK unions have largely failed to see any significant change in their membership and influence. The authors argue that this is because of the wider context within which organizing activity takes place and also reflects the fundamental tensions within these initiatives. Even without evidence of any significant growth in labor influence across UK society more broadly, organizing campaigns have given many of the participants an opportunity to grow and flourish. The book presents their experiences and uses them to show how their personal commitment to organizing and trade unionism can sometimes be undermined by the tensions and tactics used during campaigns. |
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