Originally published in 1904, Commanders of the Dining Room features brief biographies of more than fifty African American head waiters and front-of-house restaurant staff, giving insight into the traditions and personalities that shaped these culinary institutions. Maccannon, himself an African American and a former head waiter, also offers a brief portrait of the Head and Second Waiters' National Benefit Association (a union for the industry and for African American hotel workers). Though the HSWNBA was formed in Chicago and held conventions there, many of the waiters profiled in this book hail from southern restaurants. Maccannon published Commanders to increase the visibility and stature of Black waiters; to assure employers that they could count on members of the HSWNBA to thoroughly know their business; to attest to their commitment to be dependable workers; and to showcase model African American manhood. In the vein of Booker T. Washington, Commanders proclaimed to young waiters that they could achieve success if they educated themselves, worked hard, and joined an association like the HSWNBA. In Commanders they could see head waiters, at the pinnacle of the profession, who had started out at the bottom and worked their way to the top, overcoming a variety of challenges along the way.

This book examines social, political, and cultural conflicts opened by the abolition of slavery and the fashioning of wage relations in the era of the American Civil War. It offers a new, close look at the origins, goals, and tactics of popular political clubs created by emancipated workers in the countryside of one of the Deep South's oldest plantation states. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record that allowed ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberty.

This is the first detailed survey of democratic ideas on the British Left in the period leading to 1914. Socialists of the late nineteenth century inherited assumptions about the priority of democracy from a long tradition of British Radicalism. However, the advent of the Fabians, who rejected this tradition as primitive, and of an ILP leadership more concerned to enter than reform parliament, meant that the movement was split between 'strong' and 'weak' views of democracy. By the eve of the First World War a consensus was emerging that might have formed the basis for a more realistic and more radical approach to democracy than has actually been pursued by the Labour Party and the Left during the twentieth century. Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement assesses an important debate in the history of socialist ideas and in the formation of the British Labour movement.

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 the last twenty years, Italy has undergone significant changes in the functioning of the labor market and industrial relations. This makes it an excellent case study for evaluating labor market practices and possibilities for reform. This book brings together leading Italian and European scholars to trace the evolution of labor bargaining and industrial relations from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy.

Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere.

But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

Employment Relations in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry presents a detailed review of employment relations within a distinctive and significant part of the service economy. Uniquely combining employment relations and the hospitality and tourism fields, this book draws on recently published sources to give readers a comprehensive and internationally comparative perspective on the subject area.

The text boldly extends more traditional analysis of employment relations by integrating new topics into the discussion, such as the role of customers and the implication of gender at work. It also explores issues of continuity and change in a specific service sector, examining the industry by workplace size and sub-sector, and is illustrated with numerous case studies. Material is included from 50 countries, across all continents, ensuring a fully international view is presented.

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone studying hospitality and tourism, industrial relations and human resource management.

Based on three years of ethnographic research, this book takes a close look at one of the CIO unions that did not move from craft to business unionism: the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union's (ILWU) major longshore local (Local 10, San Francisco). American unionism looks quite different than conventional scholarly wisdom suggests when actual union practices are observed. One finds that in the ILWU, resistance to management's authority is collectively legitimated behavior, and explicitly acknowledged as good trade unionism. This case study suggests that American labor's trajectory is neither inevitable nor determined; that militant, democratic forms of unionism are possible in the United States; and that collective bargaining need not eliminate contests for control over the workplace. Under certain conditions, the contract is a bargain that reflects and reproduces fundamental disagreement; it is a document that states how production and conflict will proceed.

This book is a study of contemporary changes in French employment relations and management. It includes an overview of the origins of the present employment institutions and practices as well as a critical appreciation of French work sociology, but its main focus is on the evolution of the French political economy of work at the start of the 21st century. Based on a combination of original research and findings from recent studies into French employment relations and the working practice of French firms, it provides both an essential source for comparative purposes and an original approach to understanding change.

This book, based on detailed research at national, regional and workplace level, analyzes the development of trade unions and industrial relations in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet system.

This book examines the manner in which the EU affects employee relations systems in economically peripheral European countries, specifically Ireland and Hungary. It asks whether the EU offers peripheral countries the opportunity to modernize their industrial relations. Emer O'Hagan argues that the EU implements an unofficial development policy which it pressures states to adopt. These initiatives amount to the frequently referred to European Social Model (ESM), which, she argues, can cause difficulty for policy makers because it is ill-defined, vague and contradictory.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia are better known for the stories told about them than for any document historical significance. Renowned for their audacity and hooliganism the 'Wobblies' were particularly notorious for their active opposition to World War I. This landmark book conveys the vitality and drama of Wobbly activity, and also assesses the impact of the IWW on Australian political and labour history. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Verity Burgmann writes with vigour and passion about Wobbly culture, and describes their doctrines, methods and organisation. The book highlights the unique nature of the IWW in Australia, and traces Wobbly influence in much post-war activity. Now, with the widespread collapse of communism and the inadequacies of labour parties, the IWW, as an alternative form of revolutionary working-class politics, merits renewed investigation.

This book analyses the crucial features of unionised labour markets. The models in the book refer to labour contracts between unions and management, but the method of analysis is also applicable to non-union labour markets where workers have some market power. In this book, Alison Booth, a researcher in the field, emphasises the connection between theoretical and empirical approaches to studying unionised labour markets. She also highlights the importance of taking into account institutional differences between countries and sectors when constructing models of the unionised labour market. While the focus of the book is on the US and British unionised labour markets, the models and analytical methods are applicable to other industrialised countries with appropriate modifications.

In their efforts to achieve freedom, ex-slaves mounted a dual struggle to elude the personal domination of the old order and to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of emerging wage employment. This book draws on a rich documentary record to allow ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations that underlay their efforts. The author discusses the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South, in which can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom.

This is the first systematic study of strikebreaking, intimidation, and anti-unionism in the United States, subjects essential to a full understanding of labor's fortunes in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes. Using a social-historical approach, Stephen Norwood focuses on the mercenaries the corporations enlisted in their anti-union efforts - particularly college students, African American men, the unemployed, and men associated with organized crime. Norwood also considers the paramilitary methods unions developed to counter mercenary violence. The book covers a wide range of industries across much of the country. Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.

This book is a study of the relationship between full-time union officials and shop stewards across the whole of British industry (public and private, manufacturing and services) in 1986-91. It is the first major study of union officials for 20 years, and one of the most detailed studies of workplace collective bargaining and union organisation following the recession of the early 1980s. In the wake of recession, union decline, industrial restructuring, anti-union legislation, and changes in union policies (towards a new realism), Britain is said by some commentators to be entering a new era of industrial relations. This book provides a unique body of evidence that throws new light on this claim, and casts serious doubt on its validity. It combines survey, interview, questionnaire and observation data and thus overcomes the well known limitations of both large-scale surveys and individual case studies.

Neither an autobiography nor a scholarly analysis, Labor's Struggles, 1945-1950: A Participant's View is a skillful blend of both genres. Informative and original in its insights and analyses, this book provides the reader with information available from no other source. These insights must be included in any subsequent efforts to interpret this period in labor history. Richter based this account largely on his own experience as legislative representative for the United Auto Workers-CIO from 1943 to 1947, as well as on documents and conversations from that period, supplemented with historical research. Active in the effort to educate the working class on all important historical and legislative issues and on the political process, Richter wrote and lectured often for UAW and other union audiences and authored a syndicated column that was frequently featured on the front pages of local union papers and city and state central council papers. This study of policy making in union headquarters and in Washington focuses on the 1945 splits within the CIO as well as the sharp divisions between the "social" CIO and the "opportunistic" AFL. In addition, it focuses on the Labor Management (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947, which divided an already fragmented movement. A foreword by David Montgomery, a prominent labor historian, introduces the author's story.

This book analyzes consumer organizing tactics and the decline of the Seattle labor movement in the 1920s, as a case study of the U.S. labor movement in the 1920s. The book examines the transformation of the movement after the famous Seattle General Strike of 1919 by showing that workers organized not only at the point of production, but through politicized consumption as well, employing boycotts, cooperatives, labor-owned businesses, and union label promotion. It pays special attention to the gender dynamics of labor's consumer campaigns, as trade union men sought to persuade their wives to "shop union," and to the racial dynamics of campaigns organized by white workers against Seattle's Japanese-American businesses.

This book analyzes consumer organizing tactics and the decline of the Seattle labor movement in the 1920s, as a case study of the U.S. labor movement in the 1920s. The book examines the transformation of the movement after the famous Seattle General Strike of 1919 by showing that workers organized not only at the point of production, but through politicized consumption as well, employing boycotts, cooperatives, labor-owned businesses, and union label promotion. It pays special attention to the gender dynamics of labor's consumer campaigns, as trade union men sought to persuade their wives to "shop union," and to the racial dynamics of campaigns organized by white workers against Seattle's Japanese-American businesses.

This book is based on fresh and original research with 50 EU business associations and 150 of their members, drawing on literature from a wide range of disciplines, and presents some highly original synthesis. It assesses the effectiveness of EU business associations and their potential to bring value to the EU policy-making process and to their members, and lends a methodology by which they can be evaluated.The book bocates and assesses factors in the environment of EU business associations that influence their 'governabliity,' that is their ability to unify their members' intersts and to ensure they work together for the sam purpose. It then examines variation in the governability of EU business associations. From this, the reader will be able to understand the prospect for, and limitations on, the effectiveness of EU business associations, why they vary in their capacities and performance, and why they vary in their ability to bring value to their members and to the EU policy-making process.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, many scholars and policymakers predicted that the pillars of Communism would collapse along with the state. Yet, the official trade unions not only continued to exist yet gained power in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. Sue Davis explains the reasons why the official trade unions survive and thrive and why new, independent unions remain weak despite massive Western assistance. She examines many factors ranging from state policy to labor power in the late Soviet period as well as the first five years of the post-Soviet era in Russia and Ukraine.

In May 1914, workers walked off their jobs at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, launching a lengthy strike that was at the heart of the American Federation of Labor's first major attempt to organize southern workers in over a decade. In its celebrity, the Fulton Mills strike was the regional contemporary of the well-known industrial conflicts in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Ludlow, Colorado. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the strike was an important episode in the development of the New South, and as Clifford Kuhn demonstrates, its story sheds light on the industrialization, urbanization, and modernization of the region.

Drawing on an extraordinary collection of sources--including reports from labor spies and company informants, photographs, federal investigations, oral histories, and newly uncovered records from the old mill's vaults--Kuhn vividly depicts the strike and the community in which it occurred. He also chronicles the struggle for public opinion that ensued between management, workers, union leaders, and other interested parties. Finally, Kuhn reflects on the legacy of the strike in southern history, exploring its complex ties to the evolving New South.

It is fashionable to speak of trades unions in the UK as organisations in decline. However, it is their organisation and, in particular, their financial status, which ultimately dictates unions' ability to survive, recruit, and influence employers. This book provides the first systematic picture of union financial status for thirty years, and reveals a dramatic picture. Though, overall, unions have become financially less healthy in the post-war period, many unions experienced an improved financial position during the membership contraction of the Thatcher years. It also shows that the long term financial decline of unions has been more affected by competition between unions for membership than by the effects of traumatic industrial disputes.

European trade unions are among the most influential and powerful institutions within Western economies, in many cases cooperating with the government and employers' associations in socio-economic decision-making processes. Consequently they also play an important role in the formulation of policies relating to immigration and the migrant workers, who are arriving and becoming part of the workforce the unions are representing and protecting against employers and other authorities. However, trade unions have not always fulfilled their role as the most obvious organization to defend the interests of foreign workers to the extent they could be expected. The reasons for this are complex and due to conflicts of interests that arise from their intermediary position between employers, government authorities, and indigenous workers. This volume offers a rich analysis of the situation in seven major European countries but also a comparison of the data found and an attempt to account for the differences established. It ends with some conclusions on the prospects of trade unions within the European Union, and on the lessons to be learned from the present analysis.

This is a detailed study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Donald Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop floor relations between workers and managers, the position of women workers and their specific role in the Soviet economy. Filtzer argues that the main concern of Khrushchev's labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This de-Stalinization had to be carried out without undermining the essential power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term tendency towards economic stagnation. In his conclusions, Filtzer shows how the labour problems under Khrushchev were the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.