Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labour, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy. Dionicio Nodin Valdes examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farm-workers, and organized labour. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, and that the labour movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.

This volume traces the themes of power, independence, and workers' control as they were practiced by Numsa. A number of small metal organizations, with at times antagonistic organizational and political strategies, were built in different ways and with different attitudes to the exiled liberation movements of the early 1980s. They eventually unified into one powerful organization. Forrest describes how workers' struggles built this power, and she scrutinizes the strategies used in the late 1980s, such as innovative bargaining strategies, to significantly improve the conditions of South Africa's impoverished workers. The volume then progresses to examine how Numsa used its power in an attempt to insert a workers' perspective into the political transition of the early 1990s. It explores the obstacles the union faced, such as the violence that erupted across the country, and its commonality and divergence from the politics of the liberation movements (chiefly the ANC).

The legend of the six rural labourers who were transported to Australia in 1834 for swearing an oath of solidarity is celebrated as the foundation of the modern trade union movement. The labourers suffered no violence 'save the extreme and horrible violence of the law itself'. The true lesson from the story demonstrates that societies need guarantees to prevent 'injustice within the law'.

The Polish crisis in the early 1980s provoked a great deal of reaction in the West. Not only governments, but social movements were also touched by the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarnosc in the summer of 1980, the proclamation of martial law in December 1981, and Solidarnosc's underground activity in the subsequent years. In many countries, campaigns were set up in order to spread information, raise funds, and provide the Polish opposition with humanitarian relief and technical assistance. Labor movements especially stepped into the limelight. A number of Western European unions were concerned about the new international tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the new hard-line policy of the US and saw Solidarnosc as a political instrument of clerical and neo-conservative cold warriors. This book analyzes reaction to Solidarnosc in nine Western European countries and within the international trade union confederations. It argues that Western solidarity with Solidarnosc was highly determined by its instrumental value within the national context. Trade unions openly sided with Solidarnosc when they had an interest in doing so, namely when Solidarnosc could strengthen their own program or position. But this book also reveals that reaction in allegedly reluctant countries was massive, albeit discreet, pragmatic, and humanitarian, rather than vocal, emotional, and political.

For many years, farm workers fought to rescue themselves from bleak, soul-destroying poverty. Their victories and their bitterest defeats, from the cruel treatment of the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the false dawn of the Second World War are recounted in Sharpen the Sickle. 'It is the history of the awakening of the exploited rural poor. It shows us the times, the way workers and their families lived. Every page brings alive, the privation and bitterness that made farm workers among the first to organize themselves into a Union and to take on their exploiters. And it does not hesitate to criticize the men who led them and the decisions taken.' Jack Boddy, General Secretary of the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers. Reg Groves (1908-1988) was a lifelong socialist from a rural background. He was the author of several books, including A History of the Chartist Movement, The Peasants Revolt 1381, Conrad Noel and the Thaxted Movement and Seed Time and Harvest.

Drawing on Marxism and engaging with theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj i ek, John Michael Roberts argues that a new expressive ideology has coalesced within the contemporary workplace around the theme of 'competence'. The 'competence' agenda encourages management and workers to build networks of trust, cooperation and dialogue between one another. By examining the competent public sphere as it appears in the global economy, the author takes to task the competence agenda, relates this agenda to the hegemony of global finance and to the fetishism of the new economy, exposes the dilemmas and contradictions of the competence agenda, and through everyday examples from the UK and USA illustrates how competence is played out and resisted in the contemporary workplace. This bookprovides a fascinating critical account of how the way we work today is debated and discussed by management and workers.

On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in one of the most significant strikes in American history--one that made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
In Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz tells the story of the UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale. A longtime leader in the movement and current lecturer in public policy at Harvard, he offers unique insight. Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises had relied on migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In 1965, after successive waves of attempts at organizing this large and growing population, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, and the three-year-old NFWA all found themselves on the ground, recruiting members. That year, some 800 Filipino grape workers began a strike, under the aegis of the AFL-CIO. The UFW soon joined the action with some 2,000 Mexican workers. The UFW's leaders turned the strike into a kind of civil rights struggle; they engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycotted growers, and transformed itself into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully? Ganz points to three elements: the greater motivation of its leaders, their ties to the community and access to grass-roots knowledge, and their open and deliberative decision-making process. In total, the ability to devise good strategy and turn short-termadvantages into long-term gains.
As both an insider and scholar, Ganz provides insight unavailable anywhere else. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminal contribution to the movement's struggles and ultimate success.

Individual essays chart the position of men and women in work, assess the impact of immigration and map industrial politics. Case studies open up other fields: unions' relations with the Labour Party, media coverage, union education, the Cold War and the diverse political forces from Labourism to Trotskyism forging industrial relations. This path-breaking analysis provides an excellent guide to the trade unionism and militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.

In this book leading European economists examine the current status of social pacts and their future. Particular focus is placed on the role of trade unions, and the positive role they can play for economic and social stability by agreeing to set wages on the basis of a target rate of inflation. As the European Union expands and social change accelerates, this insightful book will be of interest to all concerned with social and economic developments across Europe.

Ramparts of Resistance examines the experience of British and US workers during the last three decades to offer a broad analysis of the need for a new independent politics of trade unionism. Recent years have seen great changes in the trade union movement, from waves of strikes in the 1970s to a battery of employer and state onslaughts, culminating in the anti-union legislation of the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at grassroots labour struggles, Cohen explores issues of reformism, trade union democracy and the political meaning of ordinary workplace resistance, and puts forward ideas for change. Ramparts of Resistance examines the failure of the union movement to rise to the neo-liberal challenge and calls for a new politics of independent unionism and an explicitly class-based renewal of 'workers' power'. Coming at a time when union activity and membership involvement continues despite the odds, this book is an inspiring guide to the direction that unionism should take.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago, site of the Haymarket affair and the Pullman strike, had acquired a reputation as the bastion of labor unions. At the same time, Progressive-era Chicago was known as the laboratory of social reform-the city where muckraking journalists, college-trained professionals, and civic-minded millionaires worked together to rebuild the slums, improve sanitation, and eradicate political corruption. When union workers and middle-class reformers united, the combination of labor militancy and astute politics was truly a force to be reckoned with. In Chicago's Progressive Alliance, Leidenberger tells the story of the coalition of reformers and workers advocating municipal control of Chicago's streetcars. Why streetcars? At the time, streetcars were the main mode of transportation for Chicago's diverse population, so common interest certainly played a factor. Workers also shared the reformers' ideology, and issues surrounding streetcars encompassed a host of Progressive concerns: the debate over the extent of state power over private service enterprises, the crusade against corruption, and the uses and public nature of city spaces. Most important, the alliance embodied Progressivism's central ideal-overcoming class conflict and defining the public interest. By examining the alliance's formation, political tactics, and ultimate demise, Leidenberger offers new insights on the history of labor, class relations, and political culture in urban America. Dramatic photos of streetcars and of union laborers and their supporters accentuate this study of Progressivism in action. Chicago's Progressive Alliance will appeal to those interested in American political history, labor history, urban history, and transportation history.

Using a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007, Labor in Israel investigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel's political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel's complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor's relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel's history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he shows the ways in which the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the labor movement regime. Organized labor is now trying to renegotiate its place in contemporary Israel, a society that no longer accepts labor's longstanding claim to be the representative of the people. As such, Preminger concludes that organized labor in Israel is in a transitional and unsettled phase in which new marginal initiatives, new organizations, and new alliances that have blurred the boundaries of the sphere of labor have not yet consolidated into clear structures of representation or accepted patterns of political interaction.

In his heyday, Carlo Tresca ranked among the most important radicals and labour activists in the United States, often sharing the spotlight with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 'Big Bill' Haywood, and Emma Goldman. A charismatic Italian anarchist who became a folk hero to immigrant and native-born workers alike, Tresca was described by comrades as a 'freelance revolutionary' because of his independent spirit and militant activism. During his wild and adventurous career spanning nearly forty years (1904-1943), Tresca pursued a range of activities unmatched by any of his radical contemporaries: independent newspaper editor, labour agitator and organizer, civil libertarian, foremost leader of the Italian American anti-fascist resistance, and an indomitable foe of Stalinism. Culminating over a decade of research, this fast-paced and vivid biography brings to life the volatile world of radical politics in early twentieth-century America through one of its foremost figures.

On April 5, 1918, as American troops fought German forces on the Western Front, German American coal miner Robert Prager was hanged from a tree outside Collinsville, Illinois, having been accused of disloyal utterances about the United States and chased out of town by a mob. In "Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I," Carl R. Weinberg offers a new perspective on the Prager lynching and confronts the widely accepted belief among labor historians that workers benefited from demonstrating loyalty to the nation. The first published study of wartime strikes in southwestern Illinois is a powerful look at a group of people whose labor was essential to the war economy but whose instincts for class solidarity spawned a rebellion against mine owners both during and after the war. At the same time, their patriotism wreaked violent working-class disunity that crested in the brutal murder of an immigrant worker. Weinberg argues that the heightened patriotism of the Prager lynching masked deep class tensions within the mining communities of southwestern Illinois that exploded after the Great War ended.

This volume examines attempted changes to industrial relations in Britain during 1948 1990, designed to promote institutional reforms of management and trade unions. Specific focus is given to the Donovan Commission and other trade union reforms, and incomes policies to connect pay more tightly with productivity. International initiatives of the AACP, BPC, and EPA are also included. MARKET 1: Undergraduates and postgraduates studying Economic History; British Economic History of the Twentieth-Century.

This book presents a series of research essays on the state of unions in many different parts of the world. Written by leading researchers in the field it provides insights into the causes of union decline. But it goes beyond historical analyses to investigate the prospects for the future. Can unions organize in segments of the workforce such as the youth, women, low wage workers and those in the informal sector? Can unions network with other organizations such as NGOs nationally and internationally to gain power and influence?

For much of the twentieth century, unions played a vital role in shaping political regimes and economic development strategies, particularly in Latin America and Europe. However, their influence has waned as political parties with close ties to unions have adopted neoliberal reforms harmful to the interests of workers.

What do unions do when confronted with this "loyalty dilemma"? Katrina Burgess compares events in three countries to determine the reasons for widely divergent responses on the part of labor leaders to remarkably similar challenges. She argues that the key to understanding why some labor leaders protest and some acquiesce lies essentially in two domains: the relative power of the party and the workers to punish them, and the party's capacity to act autonomously from its own government.

A groundbreaking labour study, this book offers a detailed portrait of the Citizens Alliance (CA), a union of Minneapolis business owners, which employed any means necessary to squelch the power of organised labour. The association blacklisted union workers, ran a spy network to ferret out union activity, and, when necessary, raised a private army to crush its opposition with brute force. The influence of the CA also reached across the state to battle socialists, labour unions, the Non-partisan League, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The book examines the philosophies and tactics of the Citizens Alliance from its inception in 1903 to the passage of the Labour Management Relations Act of 1947, legislation that effectively inhibited the power of unions. Based on over ten years of meticulous archival research, this book delves into such subjects as the founding of the William Hood Dunwoody Industrial Institute; the 1917 Streetcar Strike and the 1934 Teamsters' Strike; and the CA's collaboration with the Commission of Public Safety, Northwest Bancorporation, the courts, and the military. Both a business history and a labor history, "A Union Against Unions" offers a comprehensive picture of the CA's campaign against organised labour and a fascinating view of Minnesota history during the first half of the twentieth century.

This title takes a very different approach, exploring the transition from below at a micro-institutional level. It analyses the militant struggle of black workers against the despotism and racism of white power in the workplace, and of their participation in the broader political struggle against apartheid; the triumphant democratic breakthrough which culminated in the election of an ANC government in 1994; and the workers' strategy for reconstruction in the workplace and in local politics. The author explores the chaos and ungovernability in workplace and community as activists endeavoured to disrupt the order of apartheid, as well as the outlines of a new order that emerged from this turbulence. Simultaneously, it examines the divisions and contestation within the union - between political activists and shop stewards, between migrant outsiders and urban locals - that erupted in open conflict and violence between workers. The struggle against white power was simultaneously a struggle to build trade union organisation in a continuous process of forging and reforging the meaning and 'law' of the union. This title shows how trade union collective identity in the 1980s consisted of a complex amalgam of popular, class and workplace identities, many of which - popular political identity and migrant identity in particular - were forged beyond the workplace.

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.

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.

Brings together essays by tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and graduate employees from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in an analysis of the changing identity of academic labor. The essays included suggest alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom and reshaping the academic workplace.

Contributors discuss the impact of today's casualized academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty.

By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.