Boston's economy has become defined by a disconcerting trend that has intensified throughout much of the United States since the 2008 recession. Economic growth now delivers remarkably few benefits to large sectors of the working class - a phenomenon that is particularly severe for immigrants, people of color, and women. Labor in 21st Century Boston explores this nation-wide phenomenon of "unshared growth" by focusing on Boston, a city that is famously liberal, relatively wealthy, and increasingly difficult for working people (who service the city's needs) to actually live in. Labor in 21st Century Boston is the only comprehensive analysis of labor and popular mobilizing in Boston today, the volume contributes to a growing body of academic and popular literature that examines urban America, racial and economic inequality, labor and immigration, and the right-wing assault on working people.

From before the dawn of the twentieth century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations and industrialists whose millions bought political influence and armed guards for their company towns. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel," Mother Jones. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent, then broken, and the violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict. The fight for civil rights and unionization in West Virginia verged on civil war and stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the U.S. Senate. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills, celebrated labor historian James Green tells this story like never before.

In the context of the evolution of affirmative action at the national and state levels, this study offers an empirical account of the citizens' movement in California that successfully resulted in the passage of a constitutional amendment to abolish such preferences in public education, public employment, and public contracting. It describes how the concept of affirmative action was transmuted into quotas and set-asides even in those situations where there was no credible evidence of past discrimination. This process was aided by Presidential Executive Orders as well as by some Supreme Court decisions which, until the late 1980s, failed to provide clear parameters of compensatory versus preferential actions. The California movement arose to reassert the original vision of equality as contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Raza, Anderson, and Custred, who have studied the historical development of the phenomenon and have witnessed its actual operation, lift the curtain of secrecy that surrounds such preferences.

This book challenges the notion that affirmative action is a benign and temporary measure that simply provides a helping hand to those who are disadvantaged. There is ample evidence of the institutionalization of preferences that generally provide advantages to those who could otherwise compete on their own merits. Such unfair competitive advantages, provided by government agencies and public educational institutions have neither moral nor political majority support; however, they continue to exist through pressure of political interest groups, liberal political ideology, and entrenched bureaucrats who administer the system. Quite contrary to some people's thinking, the system of preferences may no longer be considered either permanent or necessary.

"A valuable contribution to public policy debates concerning the workplace of the future and the nature and implications of the 'information economy.'"
--Choice (of the first edition)

In this eye-opening book, Joan Greenbaum tells the story of changes in management policies, work organization, and the design of office information systems from the 1950s to the present. She describes the impact of new technologies on the organization of working life with a keen awareness of the social forces that seek to benefit from them, showing how the process is driven by the needs of capitalist profit and control over the workforce rather than the good of society or greater efficiency.

Windows on the Workplace takes as its starting-point the experience of office workers and their own accounts of it. The book includes interviews with a wide range of workers, including young people entering a workplace in which the expectation of stable, long-term employment has all but disappeared. Greenbaum's approach is to locate their experiences and expectations within broader social and economic patterns, and to show how these patterns are constantly changing.

In a field that is constantly changing, this book captures the moment and clarifies the direction in which it is moving. It exposes the myth that technological advance and free market economics are creating a better future for all, and reveals the reality behind the myth.

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

El Salvador's long civil war had its origins in the state repression against one of the most militant labor movements in Latin American history. Solidarity under Siege vividly documents the port workers and shrimp fishermen who struggled yet prospered under extremely adverse conditions during the 1970s only to suffer discord, deprivation and, eventually, the demise of their industry and unions over the following decades. Featuring material uncovered in previously inaccessible union and court archives and extensive interviews conducted with former plant workers and fishermen in Puerto el Triunfo and in Los Angeles, Jeffrey L. Gould presents the history of the labor movement before and during the country's civil war, its key activists, and its victims into sharp relief, shedding new and valuable light on the relationships between rank and file labor movements and the organized left in twentieth-century Latin and Central America.

After suffering the hardships and horrors of the First World War, workers and soldiers faced the agony of the post-war Canadian economy. With rising inflation, unprecedented unemployment, and an increasingly repressive state, the atmosphere was ripe for revolt. The Russian Czar had been overthrown just eighteen months ago and workers had revolution on their minds. On May 15, 1919 more than 30,000 workers in Winnipeg, Manitoba walked off the job and began a general strike that would last six weeks and change the course of Canadian history. The strikers' demands began with higher wages, collective bargaining rights, and more power for working people. As sympathy strikes broke out and more workers joined the call, the Winnipeg Strike Committee became a de-facto government Like so many labour actions before and since, the strikers were met with a violent end . On "Bloody Saturday" the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged into the crowd, killing two workers and injuring dozens more. One hundred years later, the Winnipeg General Strike continues to be a poignant reminder of the power of the state and capital over workers' lives and the brutal ends governments and bosses have and will use to crush workers' movements, and an inspirational example of the possibilities of class struggle and solidarity.

This book develops an understanding of workplace justice and labour rights in Vietnam from factory workers' voices and their resistance against abuse and exploitation. Through interviews with workers and a close analysis of their letters and petitions to the unions and state authorities, Nguyen illuminates how workers' resistance is enabled and stifled by the legal and political systems that are supposed to protect their rights and benefits. Their calls for justice reflect socialist ideology and widely held norms within society, as well as ideals and values embedded in labour law. The book demonstrates how state law brings about social change through shaping workers' expectations and increasing consciousness of rights and justice. This book will be of interest to scholars of law, politics and society, and scholars, students and practitioners interested in labour rights in developing countries.

Explains the reality of labor markets and the nature and necessity of class struggle For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Waltons family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos. In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.

"A lively and engaging chronicle that adds yet another dimension to the historical record."-The Boston Globe
When George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars, the former slaves suffering under Jim Crow laws found his offer of a steady job and worldly experience irresistable. They quickly signed up to serve as maid, waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African Americans in the country by the 1920s.
Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the complicated world of the Pullman porter and the vital cultural, political, and economic roles they played as forerunners of the modern black middle class. "Rising from the Rails" provides a lively and enlightening look at this important social phenomenon.

Labour relations are at the heart of China's extraordinary economic rise. This growth, accompanied by internal migration, urbanisation and rising income have brought a dramatic increase in the aspirations of workers, forcing the Chinese government to restructure its relationships with both employers and workers. In order to resolve disputes and manage workplace militancy, the once monolithic official trade union is becoming more flexible, internally. No longer able to rely on government support in dealing with worker unrest, employers are rapidly forming organisations of their own. In this book, a new generation of Chinese scholars provide analyses of six distinct aspects of these developments. They are set in the broader context by the leading authority on Chinese labour law and two western specialists in comparative labour relations. The result is a comprehensive study for scholars and graduate students working in Chinese industrial relations, comparative labour law, human resource management, NGOs and international labour organisations.

2020 Book of the Year * International Labor History Association Honorable Mention * Philip Taft Labor History Prize This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester - and the McCormick family that largely controlled it - garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket "riot," the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America's late 20th-century industrial decline. Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.

In the early hours of New Year's Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph "Jock" Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies-and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation's major unions on the brink of historical change.

This is the first fully annotated edition of Social Problems (1883) and The Condition of Labor (1891), two important works by one of America's most popular social economists. Social Problems grew out of a series of articles Henry George (1839-1897) published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper titled, "Problems of Our Times." In his passionate, journalistic style, George described in graphic detail the horrific conditions facing large sections of the American people and how, by returning to first principles, society could remedy these conditions for current and future generations. The Condition of Labor takes the form of an open letter to Pope Leo XIII in response to the pontiff's famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Echoing the religious themes dominant throughout all of his works, George argued that poverty is not part of God's natural order and therefore, could be eradicated through political action. Both Social Problems and The Condition of Labor demonstrate George's deep commitment to the reconciliation of ethics and economics in such a way that makes the world richer ethically and better off economically.

From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. With specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tradition. Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers' control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to create a new world from the ashes of the old.

Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and edits "WorkingUSA."

Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director, and political scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

This book has both empirical and theoretical goals. The primary empirical goal is to examine the evolution of industrial relations in Western Europe from the end of the 1970s up to the present. Its purpose is to evaluate the extent to which liberalization has taken hold of European industrial relations and institutions through five detailed, chapter-length studies, each focusing on a different country and including quantitative analysis. The book offers a comprehensive description and analysis of what has happened to the institutions that regulate the labor market, as well as the relations between employers, unions, and states in Western Europe since the collapse of the long postwar boom. The primary theoretical goal of this book is to provide a critical examination of some of the central claims of comparative political economy, particularly those involving the role and resilience of national institutions in regulating and managing capitalist political economies.

This book has both empirical and theoretical goals. The primary empirical goal is to examine the evolution of industrial relations in Western Europe from the end of the 1970s up to the present. Its purpose is to evaluate the extent to which liberalization has taken hold of European industrial relations and institutions through five detailed, chapter-length studies, each focusing on a different country and including quantitative analysis. The book offers a comprehensive description and analysis of what has happened to the institutions that regulate the labor market, as well as the relations between employers, unions, and states in Western Europe since the collapse of the long postwar boom. The primary theoretical goal of this book is to provide a critical examination of some of the central claims of comparative political economy, particularly those involving the role and resilience of national institutions in regulating and managing capitalist political economies.

This book describes the different elastomers utilized in tyre retreading. Among others, it discusses reinforcing fillers in terms of their efficacy, the use of bonding agents, and their relevance to the tyre retreading process. The authors give specific guidelines for the practical compounding of different rubber compounds to make retread. A practical approach is also taken to describing the manufacturing technology used in tyre retreading.

This volume identifies empirical sites and methodological frames for approaching the construction of migration as a public problem. Starting from the premise that transnationalism becomes structural in setting the public agenda, the authors explore topics and arguments on migration in media and political discourses, as well as the ways migrants and non-migrants recontextualize these discourses in the process of making sense of migration, as a matter of citizenship and policy action.

Widely used since the mid-twentieth century, GDP (gross domestic product) has become the world's most powerful statistical indicator of national development and progress. Practically all governments adhere to the idea that GDP growth is a primary economic target, and while criticism of this measure has grown, neither its champions nor its detractors deny its central importance in our political culture. In The Power of a Single Number, Philipp Lepenies recounts the lively history of GDP's political acceptance-and eventual dominance. Locating the origins of GDP measurements in Renaissance England, Lepenies explores the social and political factors that originally hindered its use. It was not until the early 1900s that an ingenuous lone-wolf economist revived and honed GDP's statistical approach. These ideas were then extended by John Maynard Keynes, and a more focused study of national income was born. American economists furthered this work by emphasizing GDP's ties to social well-being, setting the stage for its ascent. GDP finally achieved its singular status during World War II, assuming the importance it retains today. Lepenies's absorbing account helps us understand the personalities and popular events that propelled GDP to supremacy and clarifies current debates over the wisdom of the number's rule.

In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to comply with the demands of globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers' rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility?the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed?which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. Showing how flexibilization and other processes have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, these in-depth case studies reveal the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or to increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people's interests effectively in the future.

The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place. Ernest Thompson dedicated his life to organizing the powerless. This lively, illustrated personal narrative of his work shows the great contribution that people's coalitions can make to the struggle for equality and freedom. Thompson cut his teeth organizing one of the great industrial unions, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and brought his organizing skills and commitment to coalition building to Orange, New Jersey. He built a strong organization and skillfully led fights for school desegregation, black political representation, and strong government in a city he initially thought of as a "dirty Jim Crow town going nowhere." Thompson came to love the City of Orange and its caring citizens, seeing in its struggles a microcosm of America. This story of people's power is meant for all who struggle for human rights, economic opportunity, decent housing, effective education, and a chance for children to have a better life. Ernest Thompson (1906-1971) grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on a farm that had been given to his family at the end of the Civil War. The family was very poor and oppressed by racist practices. Thompson was determined to get away and to obtain power. He migrated to Jersey City, where he became part of the union organizing movement that built the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). He became the first African American to hold a fulltime organizing position with his union, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He eventually headed UE's innovative Fair Employment Practices program and fought for equal rights and pay for women and minority workers. Thompson also helped build the National Negro Labor Council, 1951-1956, and served as its director of organizing. In 1956, under the onslaught of the McCarthy era, UE was split in two, and Thompson lost his job. His wife, Margaret Thompson, brought the local school segregation to his attention. Ernie "Home" Thompson organized to desegregate the regional schools, building strong coalitions and political power for the black community that ultimately served all the people of Orange.

While workers movements have been largely phased out and considered out-dated in most parts of the world during the 1990s, the 21st century has seen a surge in new and unprecedented forms of strikes and workers organisations. The collection of essays in this book, spanning countries across global South and North, provides an account of strikes and working class resistance in the 21st century. Through original case studies, the book looks at the various shades of workers' movements, analysing different forms of popular organisation as responses to new social and economic conditions, such as restructuring of work and new areas of investment.

The revival of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is all the more welcome for having followed one of the worst economic disasters-a quarter century of economic malaise for most of the region-since the industrial revolution. Six of the world's fastest-growing economies in the first decade of this century were African. Yet only in Ethiopia and Rwanda was growth not based on resources and the rising price of oil. Deindustrialization has yet to be reversed, and progress toward creating a modern economy remains limited. This book explores the vital role that active government policies can play in transforming African economies. Such policies pertain not just to industry. They traverse all economic sectors, including finance, information technology, and agriculture. These packages of learning, industrial, and technology (LIT) policies aim to bring vigorous and lasting growth to the region. This collection features case studies of LIT policies in action in many parts of the world, examining their risks and rewards and what they mean for Sub-Saharan Africa.

Most existing theoretical approaches to industrial relations and human resources management (IR/HRM) build their analyses and policy prescriptions on one of two foundational assumptions. They assume either that conflict between workers and employers is the natural and inevitable state of affairs; or that under normal circumstances, cooperation is what employers can and should expect from workers. By contrast, A New Theory of Industrial Relations: People, Markets and Organizations after Neoliberalism proposes a theoretical framework for IR/HRM that treats the existence of conflict or cooperation at work as an outcome that needs to be explained rather than an initial presupposition. By identifying the social and organizational roots of reasoned, positively chosen cooperation at work, this framework shows what is needed to construct a genuinely consensual form of capitalism. In broader terms, the book offers a critical theory of the governance of work under capitalism. 'The governance of work' refers to the structures of incentives and sanctions, authority, accountability and direct and representative participation within and beyond the workplace by which decisions about the content, conditions and remuneration of work are made, applied, challenged and revised. The most basic proposition made in the book is that work will be consensual-and, hence, that employees will actively and willingly cooperate with the implementation of organizational plans and strategies-when the governance of work is substantively legitimate. Although stable configurations of economic and organizational structures are possible in the context of a bare procedural legitimacy, it is only where work relationships are recognized as right and just that positive forms of cooperation will occur. The analytic purpose of the theory is to specify the conditions under which substantive legitimacy will arise. Drawing in particular on the work of Alan Fox, Robert Cox and Jurgen Habermas, the book argues that whether workers fight against, tolerate or willingly accept the web of relationships that constitutes the organization depends on the interplay between three empirically variable factors: the objective day-to-day experience of incentives, constraints and obligations at work; the subjective understanding of work as a social relationship; and the formal institutional structure of policies, rules and practices by which relationships at work are governed.