Chicago Labor Research Articles

Indiscriminate discrimination: A correspondence test for ethnic homophily in the Chicago labor market

Numerous field experiments have demonstrated the existence of discrimination in labor markets against specific minority groups. This paper uses a correspondence test to determine whether this discrimination is due to prejudice against specific groups, or a general preference for the majority group. Three groups of identical fabricated resumes are sent to help-wanted advertisements in Chicago newspapers: one with Anglo-Saxon names, one with African-American names, and one with fictitious foreign names whose ethnic origin is unidentifiable to most Americans. Resumes with Anglo-Saxon names generate nearly one third more call-backs than identical resumes with non Anglo-Saxon ones, either African-American or Foreign. We take this as evidence that discriminatory behavior is part of a larger pattern of unequal treatment of any member of non-majority groups, ethnic homophily.

Indiscriminate Discrimination: A Correspondence Test for Ethnic Homophily in the Chicago Labor Market

Numerous field experiments have demonstrated the existence of discrimination in labor markets against specific minority groups. This paper uses a correspondence test to determine whether this discrimination is due to prejudice against specific groups, or a general preference for the majority group. Three groups of identical fabricated resumes are sent to help-wanted advertisements in Chicago newspapers: one with Anglo-Saxon names, one with African-American names, and one with fictitious foreign names whose ethnic origin is unidentifiable to most Americans. Resumes with Anglo-Saxon names generate nearly one third more call-backs than identical resumes with non Anglo-Saxon ones, either African-American or Foreign. We take this as evidence that discriminatory behavior is part of a larger pattern of unequal treatment of any member of non-majority groups, ethnic homophily.

Chicago's Labor Trail: Labor History as Collaborative Public History

Historians of labor and working-class life face a powerful public amnesia; they seek to recover a past of struggle for economic security and dignity at work that is all too often obscured or even suppressed by consensual accounts of American history. Public historians necessarily work against similar lapses in popular memory. Historian Max Page has invoked the oppositional character of public history, which he asserts, “should by all rights be a radical undertaking. For, at its heart,” Page continues, “public history is about bringing history to a wider public, about challenging citizens out of complacency about their past and creating spaces for forgotten stories to be told.”

Dyn-o-Mite Fiends

In wars of revolution, monuments become one of the most likely targets. Weatherman Underground's repeated bombing of Chicago's Haymarket police statue in 1969 and 1970, despite its evocation of the Haymarket incident—a landmark event in the history of Chicago and national labor politics—has largely been a footnote to the more consequential violence of the late 1960s. Instead, we argue that the spatial politics surrounding Weatherman's Haymarket police statue bombings highlight a critical historical juncture in an ongoing tension between the enforcement of social stability and the promises of democracy in the United States.

The Commodification of Ethnicity in an Asian Indian Economy in Chicago

Sociological literature posits the. ethnic economy as a labor market that enables immigrants to procure employment through ethnic group membership. Recent scholarship documents employment practices that question this model of kinbased employment and ethnic loyalty and underscores the need to contextualize economic behavior within specific urban environments. The present paper contributes to this discussion by elucidating the role of ethnicity in an Asian Indian ethnic economy in Chicago. Data indicate that traditional forms of ethnic capital are less salient for employment than ethnic resources vital to maintaining an identity tied to commodity sectors distinctive to the Indian ethnic economy. [Asian Indian immigrants; Chicago labor market; ethnic capital; ethnic economy; immigrants]

The Unending Debate over Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations Fight

Writing in May 1920 for the Chicago labor paper the New Majority, editor Robert Buck characterized the debate over whether the United States should join the League of Nations as “a sham battle over fake issues.” Buck had grown disinterested in the partisan struggle over the Versailles Peace Treaty and League of Nations, not because he was an isolationist, but because he believed that U.S. foreign policy would likely follow roughly the same course whether the United States joined the League or not. Alluding to the upcoming presidential election, Buck suggested that “[I]f the crooked Democratic party should regain power and the treaty should be agreed to, the United States would join harder than ever in the imperialistic exploitation of the lesser peoples of the earth.” By contrast, “[I]f the crooked Republican party gets control at the next election [and] if it doesn’t ratify the league and treaty,… it will cook up some other equally rotten dish of imperialism and thievery to disgrace the United States further.”1

Asking for Bread, Receiving a Stone: The Rise and Fall of Religious Ideologies in Chicago's Eight-Hour Movement

This article examines religious ideology construction, transformation, and decline across three protest campaigns (1867, 1886, 1890) of the movement in nineteenth-century Chicago. I explore the ways four characteristics of movement ideologies (cultural resonance, contested discourse, frame correspondence, and instrumental credibility) are shaped by the internal dynamics of the movement and the changes in external circumstances that resulted from protest activity. Data are derived from Chicago's labor, religious, and secular presses, from pamphlets, and from speeches given by eight-hour proponents from three representative factions within the movement: the craft-based Chicago Trade and Labor Assembly, the Knights of Labor, and the radical Central Labor Union. Movement leaders transformed working-class religious culture into an ideological discourse because they believed religion could help them achieve concrete industrial reform. When religious ideologies did not resonate with intended audiences, build the movement's resource base, achieve political victories, or assist in building coalitions, they were discarded and replaced by other ideologies. This article contributes, then, to an understanding of the forces that both facilitate and constrain religion in collective action contexts.

Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-1897

This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike.

Labor and urban politics: class conflict and the origins of modern liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97

This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike.

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924.

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924.

A Paper for Those Who Toil: The Chicago Labor Press in Transition

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJon BekkenJon Bekken is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications and Journalism at Suffolk University.

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924.

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924.

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924

Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924

Chicago labor and the quest for a democratic diplomacy, 1914-1924

Chicago labor and the quest for a democratic diplomacy, 1914-1924

Eric L. Hirsch. <italic>Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement</italic>. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1990. Pp. xvii, 253. $39.95

Eric L. Hirsch. Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1990. Pp. xvii, 253. $39.95 Get access Hirsch Eric L.. Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1990. Pp. xvii, 253. $39.95. Lisa M. Fine Lisa M. Fine Michigan State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 96, Issue 4, October 1991, Pages 1306–1307, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/96.4.1306 Published: 01 October 1991

Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement

Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American historythe late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements. Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities. In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German backgrounddenied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machinesformulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.

Intra-Metropolitan Variation in Earnings and Labor Market Discrimination: An Econometric Analysis of the Atlanta Labor Market

One of the most enduring debates concerning racial differences in earnings is whether housing segregation within metropolitan areas adversely affects the employment opportunities of urban blacks. Two possible negative effects can be listed. First, the decentralization of lower-skilled jobs, combined with the suburban residential exclusion of low income households, may have caused wage rates within the suburban labor market to rise above those paid within the central city. If this is the case, and if housing market discrimination restricts the relative ability of blacks to offer their labor supply to suburban employers, then at least part of the racial difference in earnings can be attributed to housing segregation.' Second, housing segregation may cause private sector labor market discrimination to be more severe within the central city in comparison to suburban areas. As suggested by Becker's taste-for-discriminating model [3], a relatively large black labor supply within the central city may require a lower black-to-white earnings ratio in order to induce prejudiced employers to hire large numbers of black workers. With the workforce of most central cities becoming increasingly black, this may be an important factor in explaining racial differences in earnings. Surprisingly, while variation in discrimination among occupations, regions, industries, and sectors have been examined in some detail, spatial differences in discrimination between the central city and suburbs have largely escaped analysis. In this paper the earnings of private sector workers broken down by occupation, race, and sex are compared between worksite areas encompassing the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia. While an extensive literature can be found on interregional differences in earnings, little evidence exists on the spatial variation in wage rates within metropolitan regions. In fact, virtually nothing has been done on this issue since the classic study of the Chicago labor market by Rees and Shultz [19].

Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Estimating Demand and Supply Functions for Differentiated Products

In choosing the level of quality to purchase, the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product. Hence, in general, the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares. Market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers. This matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics. The paper develops these issues. A stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed, identification results are presented, and estimation procedures are outlined.

“We Can't Get Them to Do Aggressive Work”: Chicago's Anarchists and the Eight-Hour Movement

In the last month before the Haymarket Riot, Chicago's labor movement staged two grand demonstrations as it prepared to inaugurate the Eight Hour Day on May 1. The Knights of Labor and the Trade and Labor Assembly arranged the first on April 10, the International Working Peoples' Association (IWPA) and the Central Labor Union (CLU) arranged the second, two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, April 25. The two demonstrations shared a common purpose—to rally the city's labor movement around shorter hours—but they could not have been more different.

A Model of Declining Health and Retirement

The declining U.S. average retirement age has been difficult to reconcile with cross-section evidence that poor health is a primary cause of early retirement. This paper reconciles those observations by building a Grossman-type model of investment in health, distinguished from its predecessor by a more formal treatment of initial conditions. A discontinuous mid-life increase in health investment (retirement) is shown, in general, to be part of the optimal investment strategy. Time-series productivity increases are shown to lower the optimal retirement age, while varying health endowments and depreciation rates are shown to be able to account for cross-section retirement age variations.