Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century

ISBN-13: 9780521483803 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 204 str.

David Montgomery

Opis

In the 1990s, democracy and market freedom are often discussed as though they were synonymous or interchangeable. What the experience of workers in the United States actually reveals is that as government became more democratic, what it could do to shape daily life became more restricted. This original and significant work examines the relationship between workers and government by focusing not on the legal regulations of unions and strikes, but on popular struggles for citizens' rights. The extent and failures of workers' efforts to exercise power through political parties provide insights from the nineteenth century to guide our thinking about the twenty-first.

Recenzje

"...it is a seedbed for the eventual flowering of people's culture." Ray B. Browne, Journal of American Culture

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Wage-Labor, Bondage and Citizenship: 1. The Right to Quit; 2. Free Labor in the Shadow of Slavery; 3. Quitting and Getting Paid; 4. Citizenship and the Terms of Employment; Part II. Policing People for the Free Market: 5. The Definition and Prosecution of Crime; 6. The Privatization of Poor Relief; 7. The Crime of Idleness; 8. Arms and the Man; 9. Police Powers and Workers' Homes; Part III. Political Parties: 10. Black Workers and Republicans in the South; 11. Industrial Workers and Party Politics; 12. Workers and Tammany Hall; 13. Labor Reform and Electoral Politics; 14. Citizenship and the Unseen Hand; Bibliography.