This history of New York transit workers from the Great Depression to the monumental 1966 transit strike shows how, through collective action, the men and women who operated the world's largest transit system brought about a virtual revolution in their daily lives. Joshua Freeman's detailed descriptions of both transit work and transit workers, and his full account of the formation and development of the Transport Workers Union provide new insight into the nature of modern industrial unionism. Freeman pays particular attention to the role of Communists and veterans of the Irish Republican...

I didn't want to remain a hick from the mountains... In my cultural naivete I saw McDonald's as a place somehow where modern culture capital could be dispensed. Keeping these memories in mind as years later I monitored scores of conversations about the Golden Arches in the late 1990s, it became apparent that McDonald's is still considered a marker of modern identity.

An important history of the way class formed in the US, "The Rule of Racialization" offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work. Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a...

Presents the history of the way class formed in the US. This work offers a look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.

At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, more than a thousand people line up for breakfast and lunch five days a week. During the twelve-year era of welfare reform, William DiFazio observed the daily lives of poor people at St. John's and throughout New York City. In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, DiFazio presents the results of welfare reform?from ending entitlements to diminished welfare benefits?through the eyes and voices of those who were most directly affected by it. Ordinary Poverty concludes with a program to guarantee...

Presents an account of the rise of Jimmy Hoffa. This book argues that Hoffa was compelled by a variety of social forces to place the economic interests of his union members over broad ideological concerns. It is aimed at students of labor history and American studies.

America searched for an answer to "The Labor Question" during the Progressive Era in an effort to avoid the unrest and violence that were the rule in the early 20th Century. In the ladies' garment industry, an experiment in industrial democracy brought together labor, management the public. Led by Louis Brandeis, a group of industrial democrats sought to solve the labor problem through a labor agreement, the Protocols of Peace. In the midst of this experiment, 146 mostly young, immigrant women died in the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. As a result of the Fire, New York's Factory Investigating...

Challenges our notion of the connections between labour, business, and the state.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movementOCoespecially the Congress of Industrial OrganizationsOCoand with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration. He argues that tensions within the labor...

In this, the first broad overview of labor in the United States in twenty years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. In language that is clear and unpretentious, Labor's Story in the United States looks at American labor from the perspective of institutions and people: the rise of unions, the struggles over slavery, wages, and child labor, public and private responses to union organizing; all of these events and more are covered with a focus on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of...