Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state.Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

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.

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.

The dramatic story of Chile's coal miners in the mid-twentieth century has never before been told. In Mining for the Nation, Jody Pavilack shows how this significant working-class sector became a stronghold of support for the Communist Party as it embraced cross-class alliances aimed at defeating fascism, promoting national development, and deepening Chilean democracy. During the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, the coal miners emerged as a powerful social and political base that came to be seen as a threat to existing hierarchies and interests. Pavilack carries the story through the end of World War II, when a centrist president elected with crucial Communist backing brutally repressed the coal miners and their families in what has become known as the Great Betrayal, ushering Cold War politics into Chile with force. The patriotic fervor and tragic outcome of the coal miners' participation in Popular Front coalition politics left an important legacy for those who would continue the battle for greater social justice in Chile in the coming decades.

This book is a disciplined, paired comparison of the eight Latin American countries with the longest history of urban commercial and industrial development - Brazil and Chile, Mexico and Venezuela, Uruguay and Colombia, Argentina and Peru. The authors show how and why state party responses to the emergence of an organized working class have been crucial in shaping political coalitions, party systems, patterns of stability or conflict and the broad contours of regimes and their changes. The argument is complex yet clear, the analysis systematic yet nuanced. The focus is on autonomous political variables within particular socioeconomic contexts, the treatment of which is lengthy but rewarding.... Overall, a path-breaking volume. - Foreign Affairs Excellent comparative-historical analysis of eight countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) focuses on emergence of different forms of control and mobilization of the labor movement. By concentrating on alternative strategies of the State in shaping the labor movement, authors are able to explain different trajectories of national political change in countries with longest history of urban, commerc

This book examines how Progressive Labor (PL) insurgents challenged the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and tried to revolutionize labor in New York City's garment industry during the 1960s. Progressive Labor's role in New York City's economically important but declining garment industry -- the group's first attempt to organize industrial workers on the job -- suggests the problematic nature of PL's attempt to transform itself from a group of radical intellectuals into a mass working-class party. Pitted against powerful opponents, such as the garment firms and the imperious, socially progressive, and historically anticommunist ILGWU, a handful of PLers were able to foment a surprising number of work stoppages, which exposed the egregious problems facing low-paid black and Latino garment workers and their problematic relationship with the ILGWU. Progressive Labor's experience in New York City's garment industry suggests that industry workers were very willing to fight their trade union battles under communist leadership, but were far less willing to commit themselves to Progressive Labor's strategy for communist revolution.

The decline of the U.S. textile and apparel industries between the 1940s and 1970s helped lay the groundwork for the twenty-first century's potent economic populism in America. James C. Benton looks at how shortsighted trade and economic policy by labor, business, and government undermined an employment sector that once employed millions and supported countless communities. Starting in the 1930s, Benton examines how the New Deal combined promoting trade with weakening worker rights. He then moves to the ineffective attempts to aid textile and apparel workers even as imports surged, the 1974 pivot by policymakers and big business to institute lowered trade barriers, and the deindustrialization and economic devastation that followed. Throughout, Benton provides the often-overlooked views of workers, executives, and federal officials who instituted the United States' policy framework in the 1930s and guided it through the ensuing decades. Compelling and comprehensive, Fraying Fabric explains what happened to textile and apparel manufacturing and how it played a role in today's politics of anger.

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

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.

Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else? The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream, Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life-as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business-What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by-and how we can deliver on-the American Dream of today.

In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age. Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

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.

This book takes a systems-thinking approach to allow readers to understand how Workplace safety and health (WSH) is an integral part of any organisation. The different chapters are strung together by an overarching model of incident causation, and underpinning models are presented to allow a strong conceptual foundation. Practical WSH knowledge also discussed in relevant chapters to ensure that beginners have an introduction to the fundamentals of WSH hazards and controls.The second edition presents additional systems thinking concepts and archetypes not covered previously, the safe design process in Australia, thoughts on learning disabilities and safety culture, and additional case studies. Besides the strong emphasis on conceptual framework, readers will also be exposed to the details of a WSH management system and practical WSH processes, hazards and controls. A series of online quizzes are available to readers to help them to reinforce the concepts of each chapter.Undergraduates and post-graduates will benefit from the systematic introduction to the foundations of WSH management. Practitioners will strengthen their conceptual understanding and widen their perspective by re-visiting the foundations of WSH management through a systems-thinking lens.

The 1939 Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO was a constitutional milestone that strengthened the right of Americans, including labor organizers, to assemble and speak in public places. Donald W. Rogers eschews the prevailing view of the case as a morality play pitting Jersey City, New Jersey, political boss Frank Hague against the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allied civil libertarian groups. Instead, he draws on a wide range of archives and evidence to re-evaluate Hague v. CIO from the ground up. Rogers's review of the case from district court to the Supreme Court illuminates the trial proceedings and provides perspectives from both sides. As he shows, the economic, political, and legal restructuring of the 1930s refined constitutional rights as much as the court case did. The final decision also revealed that assembly and speech rights change according to how judges and lawmakers act within the circumstances of a given moment. Clear-eyed and comprehensive, Workers against the City revises the view of a milestone case that continues to impact Americans' constitutional rights today.

The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh.

In April 2005 a factory making sweaters for the European market collapsed like a pack of cards during the nightshift in Savar near Dhaka, Bangladesh. The circumstances of this disaster, which caused the deaths of 64 clothing workers and injured a further 84, proved to be a final straw for trade unionists and NGO activists who had long been concerned about the state of factory safety and the inadequacies of social protection in the Ready Made Garment industry in the South East Asian country. Last Nightshift in Savar presents a detailed account of the national and international campaign efforts to bring the owner and his multinational buyers to book. It is also an account of the emergence of two quite different but replicable buyer approaches to the provision of relief for workers in such calamitous circumstances, which hopefully sheds light on some of the contradictions of corporate social responsibility in the globalised economy in which we live today. Finally, it is the story of the efforts of the international trade union, and NGO movement and of two men, in particular, to drive home change in compensation for industrial injury and fatality in the less developed world.

The textile industry is one of the oldest in the country, going back several centuries. The industry experienced recession from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. However, this trend is reversed after the early 1990s when domestic demand for textiles products as well as exports increased substantially. What factors have contributed to the growth of the industry? What kind of changes have occurred in the structure of exports of the industry and what are their implications? Has the growth of this labour-intensive industry generated adequate employment? This book addresses such debates and examines the process of growth of India's textile industry, focusing on its performance on the employment front since the 1980s. Using macro-level data, the book analyses determinants of domestic demand and challenges the general perception that the growth of the industry was primarily driven by an expansion in exports of textile products. It argues that structural changes such as inter-fibre and inter-sectoral shifts and capacity expansion involving modernization have contributed to decline in quantity as well as quality of employment generated by the industry.