"The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders" maps and challenges many of the mythologies that surround the late iconic labor leader. Focusing on Chavez' own writings, Leon argues that" La Causa" can be fruitfully understood as a quasi-religious movement, based on Chavez's charismatic leadership, which he modeled after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi. Chavez recognized that spiritual prophecy, or political spirituality, was the key to disrupting centuries old dehumanizing narratives that conflated religion with race. Chavez's body became emblematic for Chicano identity, and enfleshed a living revolution. While there is much debate and truth-seeking around how he is remembered, through investigating the leader's construction of his own public memory, the author probes the meaning of the discrepancies. By refocusing Chavez's life and beliefs into three broad movements--mythology, prophecy, and religion--Leon brings us a moral and spiritual agent to match the political leader.

In this indispensable study of Canadian industrialization, Craig Heron examines the huge steel plants that were built at the turn of the twentieth century in Sydney and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and Trenton, Hamilton, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Presenting a stimulating analysis of the Canadian working class in the early twentieth century, "Working in Steel" emphasizes the importance of changes in the work world for the larger patterns of working-class life.

Heron's examination of the impact of new technology in Canada's Second Industrial Revolution challenges the popular notion that mass-production workers lost all skill, power, and pride in the work process. He shifts the explanation of managerial control in these plants from machines to the blunt authoritarianism and shrewd paternalism of corporate management. His discussion of Canada's first steelworkers illuminates the uneven, unpredictable, and conflict-ridden process of technological change in industrial capitalist society. As engaging today as when first published in 1988, "Working in Steel" remains an essential work in Canadian history.

How did the Chicago Teamsters Local 705, once notorious for corruption and despotism, become an organization that the Wall Street Journal hailed as "a model of reform"? In this compelling narrative, Bruno tells of the often violent, always contentious struggle to reform one of the nation's most powerful and independent union locals. During the worst years, Chicago Teamsters operated under thinly veiled threats and settled differences by fistfights. Workers who questioned the powerful leadership faced physical intimidation, verbal abuse, and trumped-up charges that threatened their jobs. With the expulsion of key leaders in the early 1990s, however, a decade-long struggle for control of the union began as Local 705 cast off the old days of coercion and payoffs. Reformers encouraged rank-and-file Teamsters to choose their own leaders, and after two successive open elections, an unprecedented number of Teamsters turned out to vote in a dramatic 2000 election featuring five political slates and a diverse range of issues. Clear and captivating, Reforming the Chicago Teamsters raises important national issues about the balance of power between large corporations and working-class Americans, the role of workplace democracy in civil society, and the ways unions can both hinder and promote worker interests.

Although labor unions have faced a decline in membership in recent decades, they have not necessarily lost their political clout. The Unions and the Democrats illuminates the inner dynamics of labor's relationship to the American political system over the past generation. It examines organized labor from the Johnson administration through the 2000 elections, showing that labor's alliance with the Democratic Party has endured despite changes in the economy and the revival of conservatism.

Drawing on extensive interviews with union leaders and lobbyists, Taylor E. Dark provides a historical perspective often lacking in studies of union political involvement. He compares the relationship of presidents Johnson, Carter, and Clinton with labor and analyzes cases of union involvement in legislative lobbying, executive decision-making, and both congressional and presidential elections.

The book explores such topics as the effects of political reform on union power, the development of union legislative goals, and the impact of unions on economic policymaking, and also evaluates the controversy over union campaign spending in the 1996 elections. It demonstrates that labor's evolving alliance with the Democrats continues to shape America.

The failure of the Textile Workers Union of America to organize its jurisdiction has often been considered the CIO's most critical setback in establishing industrial unionism in the United States. The textile industry had more than 1,250,000 workers, and the massive organizing campaign the CIO launched in 1937 resulted in perhaps the longest, most bitter, and most significant labor-capital clash of the century.

In Culture of Misfortune, Clete Daniel integrates many primary sources, including extensive archival records and numerous oral interviews, into his examination of this conflict. He pays close attention to the internal political culture of the TWUA and how it was affected by the dislocation and transformation of the textile industry the postwar assault on workers' rights, and the risks of activism in the face of the rampant anti-unionism of the South.

Daniel explains the inability of the TWUA to match the achievements of CIO unions in other mass-production industries through an analysis of the internal dynamics of the organization and of the external political, social, and cultural impediments it confronted. He suggests that the multiplying difficulties that beset the TWUA pre-dicted the challenges faced by all industrial unions at the end of the twentieth century.

Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual jobs that were once key strongholds of organized labor. The first book to offer in depth coverage of this timely topic, Organizing Immigrants analyzes the recent history of and prospects for union organizing among foreign-born workers in the nation's most populous state.

Are foreign-born workers more or less receptive to unionization than their native-born counterparts? Are undocumented immigrants as likely as legal residents and naturalized citizens to join unions? How much does the political, cultural, and ethnic background of immigrants matter? What are the social, political, and economic conditions that facilitate immigrant unionization?

Drawing on newly collected evidence, the contributors to this volume explore these and other questions, analyzing immigrant employment and unionization trends in California and examining recent strikes and organizing efforts involving foreign-born workers. The case studies include both successful and unsuccessful campaigns, innovative and traditional strategies, and a variety of industrial and service sector settings.

Having come of age during a period of vibrant union-centered activism, Jack Metzgar begins this book wondering how his father, a U.S> Steel shop steward in the 1950s and '60s, and so many contemporary historians could forget what this country owes to the union movement. Combining personal memoir and historical narrative, Striking Steel argues for reassessment of unionism in American life during the second half of the twentieth century and a recasting of \u0022official memory.\u0022 As he traces the history of union steelworkers after World War II, Metzgar draws on his father's powerful stories about the publishing work in the mills, stories in which time is divided between \u0022before the union\u0022 and since. His father, Johnny Metzgar, fought ardently for workplace rules as a means of giving \u0022the men\u0022 some control over their working conditions and protection from venal foremen. He pursued grievances until he eroded management's authority, and he badgered foremen until he established shop-floor practices that would become part of the next negotiated contract. As a passionate advocate of solidarity, he urged coworkers to stick together so that the rules were upheld and everyone could earn a decent wage. Striking Steel's pivotal event is the four-month nationwide steel strike of 1959, a landmark union victory that has been all but erased from public memory. With remarkable tenacity, union members held out for the shop-floor rules that gave them dignity in the workplace and raised their standard of living. Their victory underscored the value of sticking together and reinforced their sense that they were contributing to a general improvement in American working and living conditions. The Metzgar family's story vividly illustrates the larger narrative of how unionism lifted the fortunes and prospects of working-class families. It also offers an account of how the broad social changes of the period helped to shift the balance of power in a conflict-ridden, patriarchal household. Even if the optimism of his generation faded in the upheavals of the 1960s, Johnny Metzgar's commitment to his union and the strike itself stands as an honorable example of what a collective action can and did achieve. Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel is a stirring call to remember and renew the struggle.

The successful 1997 strike by the Teamsters against UPS, and the overwhelming support the American public gave the strikers highlighted the impact of contingent work - an umbrella term for a variety of tenuous and insecure employment arrangements such as temping, independent contracting, employee leasing, and some self-employment and part-time or part-year work. This study contends that contingent work represents a profound deviation from the employment relations model that dominated most of the 20th century's labour relations. It delineates essential features of contingent work from both the workers' and the organization's point of view.

Challenging prevailing theories of development and labor, Gay Seidman's controversial study explores how highly politicized labor movements could arise simultaneously in Brazil and South Africa, two starkly different societies. Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.
Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.
In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.

Union of Parts examines one of the central puzzles in the economic and political successes of West Germany (FRG). In the decades between world war and reunification with the East, the FRG provided a model for combining high rates of unionization and substantial labor peace indeed, for collaboration between organized labor and organized capital as both groups faced the dislocations involved in adjusting to a changing global marketplace."

There is no better time than now to consider the labor history of the Golden State. While other states face declining union enrollment rates and the roll-back of workers' rights, California unions are embracing working immigrants, and voters are protecting core worker rights. What's the difference? California has held an exceptional place in the imagination of Americans and immigrants since the Gold Rush, which saw the first of many waves of working people moving to the state to find work. From Mission to Microchip unearths the hidden stories of these people throughout California's history. The difficult task of the state's labor movement has been to overcome perceived barriers such as race, national origin, and language to unite newcomers and natives in their shared interest. As chronicled in this comprehensive history, workers have creatively used collective bargaining, politics, strikes, and varied organizing strategies to find common ground among California's diverse communities and achieve a measure of economic fairness and social justice. This is an indispensable book for students and scholars of labor history and history of the West, as well as labor activists and organizers.

Henry George (1839-1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume VI of this series presents A Perplexed Philosopher (1892), Henry George's devastating critique of Herbert Spencer's changing views on the land question after he achieved fame as the author of the "Synthetic Philosophy." Social Statics (1850), Spencer's first major work, affirms an equal right of all to the use of the earth. By the early 1890s, Spencer had recanted this view in such works as Justice (1891) and an abridged version of Social Statics (1892). This betrayal of principle by Spencer provoked George to write A Perplexed Philosopher. In this volume George's original text is supplemented by critical annotations and an extensive topical bibliography. A comprehensive index covers all six volumes in the series. The introductory essay by Dr. Joseph Milne, "Social Evolution and Moral Sophistry," provides the cultural and philosophical context for George's critical analysis of Spencer's tortuous abandonment of the principle of equal freedom with respect to its application to the use of nature and the furtherance of equal opportunity for all. In A Perplexed Philosopher, George employs his considerable logical acumen to reveal Spencer's multiple inconsistencies and confusions when it comes to the land question. Spencer did not respond in a systematic fashion to George's critique. The few comments that he did make show that his understanding of the movement which George inspired was quite limited. Henry George wrote A Perplexed Philosopher in order to correct the many confusions about the land question by a major nineteenth century philosopher. In doing so he made a significant contribution to such topics as the issue of compensation, when a wrongful entitlement is taken away from a privilege-holder, and tendency of towards materialistic positivism. A Perplexed Philosopher reveals some fundamental differences between George's philosophical outlook and other prevailing views in the nineteenth century. A Perplexed Philosopher is not only a major contribution to nineteenth century scholarship with regard to the relation between humanity and nature, but it also illuminates a stark contrast between George's animating philosophy of equitable reform and Spencer's philosophy of the status quo.

This is the second volume on the history of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), covering the period 1932 to 1945. In 1931, when the economic slump created mass unemployment, the TGWU was a large rambling union. The union lost members, struggled to hold its activists together, and split politically between communists and their allies and the right-wing labour leadership of Bevin. This spilled over to the struggle of the unemployed, the role of the state, and attitudes to the growth of fascism at home and abroad. By the late 1930s, an armament-inspired boom allowed the TGWU to negotiate industry-wide formal agreements in many of its strongholds - docks, passenger and commercial road transport, and general labourers. These deals favoured the weak but held back the strong such as the London bus workers who staged strikes based on rank-and-file organisation. These were matched by local strikes against a range of speed-up initiatives. The TGWU backed rearmament and the war when it came. The leadership put aside its anti-communism for the duration, and communist-inspired shop stewards played major roles in improving war-time productivity. The union grew and large numbers of women joined, forming their own groups and playing an increasing role in union affairs. At the same time the TGWU hesitantly supported liberation in the colonies. As the war came to an end, the union supported the welfare reforms of the Beveridge report and backed the election of a Labour Government.

Rose Summerfield: Australian Radical outlines the largely forgotten achievements of this overlooked labor union activist and socialist sympathetic to anarchist, feminist, and secularist ideas; a dynamic speaker, who eventually emigrated to Paraguay to live on a utopian commune called New Australia. In this first book-length study of Summerfield, Shone supplements existing scholarship with new information, revealing to full extent Summerfield's contributions to radical thought, documenting the substantial scope of her contributions to women's rights activism in New South Wales in the 1890's, a topic that has previously been almost completely ignored.

Surveys the relationships of workers and trade unions to the state in Egypt, bringing to light the often overlooked effect of workers' collective actions in shaping public policy.

Self-representation has a long, venerable history dating to biblical times and continuing through the common law, the colonial era, to the present. This book collects and analyzes the law, ethics opinions, and empirical studies about the wide range of issues surrounding Self-represented litigants (SRLs) in our justice system, including how much, if any, assistance should a judge provide, what duties do lawyers interacting with SRLs, and many others. Using recent empirical studies from both Civil litigation and criminal defense, Jona Goldschmidt argues that SRLs' cases cannot be fairly heard without a mandatory judicial duty of reasonable assistance. In order to maintain public trust and confidence in our justice system, self-represented parties must be guided and assisted. Courts and the legal profession should continue to adapt and meet the challenge of managing and interacting with those who choose or are compelled to self-represent. Only when self-represented litigants are embraced by the courts, they will finally receive "equal justice under law." This book would be of interest to those studying criminal justice and legal studies, specifically legal history and legal ethics, as well as judges, lawyers and other professionals in the field.

In Abusive Supervision in Government Agencies, Caillier uses both quantitative and qualitative survey data, a mixed-method approach, to argue that certain organizational norms and subordinate factors either increase or decrease the presence of abusive supervision in agencies and that when employees experience abusive supervision, their well-being and work attitudes are adversely affected. In addition, a mixed-method approach is used to contend that problems concerning the abusive supervision process are pervasive in agencies. More specifically, many targets of abuse supervision fail to report the incident, and for those who do, agencies seldom do anything to stop abusive supervisors and the overwhelming majority of targets experience some form of retaliation for reporting the abuse. The author also uses qualitative data to argue that many agencies still do not have a robust workplace aggression policy. The author concludes by identifying future directions for research concerning abusive supervision.

This book showcases the inequalities experienced between the Global North and the Global South by exploring the production and distribution model of goods and services worldwide through an analysis of why the structure, framework, and interconnectedness of global supply chains increases the persistence of worker rights' violations. The narrative explains the power relationships between multinational corporations, their subcontractors, governments, non-governmental organizations, labor unions, and workers. The text focuses primarily on competition between workers in the Global South and the Global North who are compelled to work in global supply chains for their survival and takes a macro-look at how global supply chains operate, how they are governed, who invests and why, and who wins and who loses. From the workers' perspective, the text highlights the millions of low-wage workers who suffer exploitation and abuse at the hands of greedy multi-national corporations who are able to distance themselves from any liability for workers' welfare through an institutional system created by national/state governments, trade agreements, and tax and investment strategies which protect property rights over workers' rights. The fragile plight of workers crescendos through examples of exploitation and abuse in the fishing, mining, apparel, electronic and manufacturing industries, focusing events of workplace disasters, and slave-like working conditions, then climaxes by providing strategies to help strengthen workers through legislative and policy initiatives, collective action, and social and public pressure.

This book explores the politics of localism, drawing on the work of groups in three communities in post-industrial Nottinghamshire. "Third Way" politics gave a high priority to local participation, seen as a way of rebuilding social networks, and shifting welfare provision from the state onto civil society. However, under increasingly difficult conditions of austerity, significant contradictions emerge between the aims of entrenching new markets for service provision, and reviving communities and democratic participation. Exploring in depth community organisers' understandings of political economy and its local effects, and the governance practices which set the frameworks for fiercely independent community groups, the book outlines the forms of politics which emerge. This includes a challenge to the dominant thinking of the 'neoliberal consensus', but also frustration and a sense of political communal loss which has left these communities alienated from both national politics and the often-unattainable benefits of global mobility - an alienation which makes the Brexit vote of 2016 explicable as the disruptive outcome of a slow-burning political crisis of long duration.

This is a collection of essays by an array of contributors from the Global Labour Column, which highlights and examines class struggle as the core of resistance against capitalism today. It provides insights into the dynamics of neoliberalism and its persistence and stimulates debates about the continued impact of the economic crisis, focusing on labour as both a victim and a crucial social force which can push for an alternative. Examples of the subjects it covers include the Indonesian Sportswear Industry, Chinese construction companies in Africa, mining in South Africa, job quality in Europe, globalised 'T-shirt economics' and the marketisation and securitisation of UK international aid, amongst many others. The Global Labour Column, managed by the Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development research programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, is part of the Global Labour University.

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Working for Justice, which includes eleven case studies of recent low-wage worker organizing campaigns in Los Angeles, makes the case for a distinctive "L.A. Model" of union and worker center organizing. Networks linking advocates in worker centers and labor unions facilitate mutual learning and synergy and have generated a shared repertoire of economic justice strategies. The organized labor movement in Los Angeles has weathered the effects of deindustrialization and deregulation better than unions in other parts of the United States, and this has helped to anchor the city's wider low-wage worker movement. Los Angeles is also home to the nation's highest concentration of undocumented immigrants, making it especially fertile territory for low-wage worker organizing.

The case studies in Working for Justice are all based on original field research on organizing campaigns among L.A. day laborers, garment workers, car wash workers, security officers, janitors, taxi drivers, hotel workers as well as the efforts of ethnically focused worker centers and immigrant rights organizations. The authors interviewed key organizers, gained access to primary documents, and conducted participant observation. Working for Justice is a valuable resource for sociologists and other scholars in the interdisciplinary field of labor studies, as well as for advocates and policymakers.

This book explains how the success of attempts to expand the boundaries of the postwar welfare state in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom depended on organized labor's willingness to support redistribution of risk and income among different groups of workers. By illuminating and explaining differences within and between labor union movements, it traces the historical origins of 'inclusive' and 'dual' welfare systems. In doing so, the book shows that labor unions can either have a profoundly conservative impact on the welfare state or act as an impelling force for progressive welfare reform. Based on an extensive range of archive material, this book explores the institutional foundations of social solidarity.

This history of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo, analyses a period much neglected in historical research: from the end of the civil war in 1939 to the period of democratic change from 1976 to 1979, when the organisation was reconstructed after Francos death. The Franco years were characterised by extraordinary division within the CNT and by the bureaucratisation and ossification of the organisation now part in exile in France. The decimation of the Spanish CNT in 1947 by draconian repression enhanced the role of the exiled CNT, which was now the sole representative of the historic Anarchist movement in Spain. The moribund notion of Anarchism held by the exiled organisation could not attract recruits, and thus new forces drawn to Anarchism in 1960s Spain came through different routes, related, in large part, to the crisis within Marxism. Some of these local activists became convinced of the possibility for a reconstructed CNT, but only if the organisation were renewed. However, the exiled CNT opposed such ideas and used all possible means to undermine the movement for a new CNT. Although the reconstruction of the CNT from 1976 was characterised by the struggle between these two principal forces, the Spanish CNT captured the feelings and enthusiasm of Spanish youth, after the long dark night of Francoism. The libertarian boom was short-lived however, and by 1978 the CNT was in deep crisis, calling for the dissolution of the exiled organisation. The latter, and its allies in Spain, could not allow such a development and organised the Congress of 1979 to prevent this happening. The subsequent irrevocable division of the CNT sheds lights on the political, social and economic fractures that Spain still experiences today. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, LSE

This book has been written by an academician who provided the concept, articulated the changed dynamics in the global arena in trade unionism and has been delineated by a professional who had keenly observed a new situation which has compelled management to seek the cooperation of trade union functionaries; paving the way for a mutual benefit instead of the old paradigm of commensal context prevailing before this win-win situation. The authors have brought out a unique blending of the emerging co-operational co-existence of both the entitie, ie: management and trade unions coming together for a mutual and sublime relationship from concept to completion of the pot-pourri. On the one hand, this book provides the model and framework for ensuring the continuation of this conviviality; on the other hand, this book provides step by step actions leading to the superb roadmap which will help the readers to implement this theory in their organization if they happen to be professionals handling the delicate balance between management and trade unions. The other category of readers academicians and scholars will be able to comprehend the deeper meaning in principles and theories.