Labor Press Research Articles

Singlejack Solidarity Punching Out & Other Writings

WorkingUSAVolume 8, Issue 2 p. 233-238 Singlejack SolidarityPunching Out & Other Writings Steve Early, Steve Early Steve Early is International Representative of the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. Early has been active since 1972 as a labor journalist, lawyer, organizer, or union representative. He writes frequently about union issues for daily newspapers, political journals, and the labor press (official and unofficial).Search for more papers by this author Steve Early, Steve Early Steve Early is International Representative of the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. Early has been active since 1972 as a labor journalist, lawyer, organizer, or union representative. He writes frequently about union issues for daily newspapers, political journals, and the labor press (official and unofficial).Search for more papers by this author First published: 03 November 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-4580.2004.00014_1.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume8, Issue2December 2004Pages 233-238 RelatedInformation

‘More mighty than the waves of the sea’: toilers, tariffs, and the income tax movement, 1880–1913

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of social progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Walter Lippmann In the spring of 18...

Experience Counts: British Workers, Accident Prevention and Compensation, and the Origins of the Welfare State

This article examines the views of Britain's organized railway, mining, and engineering workers (machinists) and their union leaders about state involvement in workplace accident prevention (1876–97), accident compensation (1876–1911), and the 1911 National Insurance Act. The miners and the railwaymen left numerous comments on these topics because they labored in unusually hazardous trades. (Their unions were large and were relatively democratic.) After 1880, leaders of the miners and railwaymen concluded that it was problematic to rely solely on trade union workplace bargaining power to protect worker life and limb and to compensate injured workers for their economic losses. Faced with what was initially seen as a Hobson's choice between employer compulsion and state compulsion, after the mid-1880s these trade unionists began to lean toward the latter. Historical experience led the trade union leaders whose views are discussed in this article to trust increasingly the Labor Department of the Board of Trade and to endorse Liberal welfare-state programs proposed in 1908 and thereafter. In 1911 the rank-and-file machinists who expressed their views about National Insurance in letters to the labor press were suspicious of augmenting the power of the state, but they were unwilling to scuttle National Insurance, preferring to agitate to expand union rights of participation. Worker opposition tosomefeatures of state-mandated income maintenance programs, especially those with compulsory payroll deductions, should not be interpreted as rejection of the welfare state in principle.

From “La Mujer Esclava” to “La Mujer Limón”: Anarchism and the Politics of Sexuality in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile

From “La Mujer Esclava” to “La Mujer Limón”: Anarchism and the Politics of Sexuality in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile

Origins of the American Labor Press

As the United States entered the nineteenth century, the highly skilled artisans who had worked in their own homes to create customized items for individual patrons were replaced by largescale operations in which unskilled workers produced units in quantity and at lower cost By the mid-1820s, items such as clothing, furniture, carriages, barrels, cigars, and candy were all being produced in factories. At the same time, a growing supply of women, children, and recent immigrants depressed the wages being paid to workers, forcing them to toil longer hours. Only by pooling the earnings of husband, wife, and children could a family eke out even a bare subsistence; people who fell into debt would, like serfs from medieval times, be thrown into prison. new system of production created class distinctions that were inconsistent with the democratic principles laid down by the Founding Fathers only a few decades earlier. For in stark contrast to the multitudes of common laborers, there emerged a new class of merchant capitalists to reap the rewards available to the first generation of Americans who earned their livelihoods not by making goods but by hiring and managing workers, by selling the products at whatever price the market would bear, and by investing those profits to accumulate still more wealth. American laborers, suddenly confronted by developments that seemed beyond their control and feeling powerless in the hands of their increasingly prosperous employers, formed the nation's first trade unions. America's mainstream newspapers had scant regard for the struggling new movement launched by the laborers, siding instead with the merchant capitalists and the growth and progress that they symbolized as harbingers of what promised to be a full-scale Industrial Revolution. Refused access to established papers, the leaders of the fledgling Labor Movement founded the labor press. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, some fifty labor weeklies appeared, most of them in the industrializing Northeast. earliest and most important of the labor newspapers was the Mechanic's Free Press in Philadelphia, founded in the spring of 1828; although the paper survived only three years, ]it boasted a circulation of 2,000-no small feat during a time when even the largest New York daily claimed a circulation of only twice that figure.2 A second significant voice of labor was the Free Enquirer, a paper published in New York City from 1828 until 1835 to champion various types of reform initiatives. most long-lasting of the earliest voices of American Labor was the Working Man's Advocate, published in New York City from 1829 until 1849.3 common purpose of the publications was to ensure that American workers did not exist merely to enhance the power and abundance of the merchant capitalists. dissident labor papers, recognizing that theirs would be a difficult struggle, spoke with strength and defiance. The working class are the blood, bone, and sinew of the nation, the Mechanic's Free Press boldly stated, while the merchant capitalists were modem-day money changers.4 rise of a dissident press created by American laborers coincided with the democratic revolution credited to Andrew Jackson, the first self-made man to ascend to the presidency. In concert with the themes popularized by the rough-hewn Tennessean who was elected to the White House in 1828, the labor publications reflected the concerns of an awakened working class during a time of social, political, and economic turbulence. Newspapers that spoke on behalf of American laborers attracted a loyal following. Because many workers were illiterate, men and women with some education read the papers out loud on street comers and in churches, town halls, and other gathering places to crowds that often numbered 100 or more. Indeed, the fact that laborers came together to hear what the various editors had to say served to stimulate a sense of fraternity among the workers. …

The Cat in the Bank: Consumption and Production in Cultural History

The Cat in the Bank: Consumption and Production in Cultural History Kathy M. Newman (bio) Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. By Robert E. Weems. New York: New York University Press, 1998. x + 195 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. By Lawrence B. Glickman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. x + 220 pages. $35.00 (cloth). $15.95 (paper). We have got to bring the cat out of hiding, and where he is hiding is in the bank. —James Baldwin In the fall of 1963, James Baldwin, as a member of “Actors and Writers for Social Justice,” urged African Americans to join in a boycott of consumer goods to take place during the Christmas shopping season. The purpose of the boycott was to demonstrate African American outrage over the bombing murders of four black girls in a Birmingham Sunday School class in September of 1963. In a speech promoting the boycott, Baldwin used the “hep” metaphor above to suggest that a Christmas boycott would attack the bottom-line of white corporate America, thus rousting the “cat” of racist hypocrisy from its hiding place in capital. [End Page 709] The Christmas boycott, if it had gone forward, might have been very powerful indeed: ten days after the bombing, a national poll of African Americans found that 89 percent would be willing to join in a boycott if it they were asked to participate by a “prominent Negro.” But the Christmas boycott, in the face of opposition by other civil rights leaders, did not go forward. On the other hand, as Robert Weems argues in Desegregating the Dollar, even the threat of such a boycott was taken seriously by white business leaders. So seriously, in fact, that white business leaders helped to ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an act which included specific provisions relating to consumer rights (67–68). I am drawn to Baldwin’s metaphor of the “cat in the bank” because it reminds us that working and marginal American can use their collective power as consumers to fight for political, economic, and social justice. Although over the last decade in American studies we have gained essential knowledge about how working and marginal peoples have consumed mass culture—everything from burlesque halls, vaudeville, Coney Island, Munsey’s, and dime novels, to film noir, Harlequin Romances, I Love Lucy, and rap—few of us, in our role as cultural historians have investigated the ways in which working-class and marginal Americans have consumed their daily bread, articulated their identity as consumers, and used their power as consumers to change their lives. Lawrence Glickman, with A Living Wage, and Robert Weems, with Desegregating the Dollar, go a long ways towards turning social and cultural history towards a consumer culture that goes beyond the realm of “leisure.” We can add their path-breaking studies to our small but growing shelf of cultural histories which look at consumer culture from the point of view of organized workers, women, and African Americans, such as Liz Cohen’s Making the New Deal, Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels, and Dana Frank’s Purchasing Power. 1 Like these scholars, Glickman and Weems do not equate consumer culture with passive audiences and de-politicized alienation. Rather, they are both interested in the potential for consumer culture to serve as a base for political, social and economic change. Moreover, they demonstrate that the realms of consumption and production are dialectically bound. And, finally, their work reflects a unique blend of labor history, consumer history, and cultural studies. A Living Wage offers an innovative, challenging, and unorthodox consumerist approach to labor history after the Civil War. Painstakingly, [End Page 710] Glickman traces the emergence and the evolution of the phrase “living wage,” in labor speeches, the labor press, main-stream newspapers, magazines, pulp-fiction, pamphlets, and legal documents of turn-of-the-century America. Glickman argues that working Americans, especially working-class white men, did not take the transition to wage labor lying down. Instead, he argues, workers contrasted the idea of “wage slavery” with the more liberating notion of a “living...

"El fruto envenenado del arbol capitalista": Women Workers and the Prostitution of Labor in Urban Chile, 1896-1925

This article examines the phenomenon of female prostitution in early-twentieth-century urban Chile through the lens of the labor press, in which the growth of female prostitution was consistently linked to industrial employers and their factories. Labor movements appropriated the symbol of the working-class prostitute for the rhetoric of class struggle and buttressed organizers' promise of a future in which women sold neither their labor nor their bodies for economic survival. Labor's primary concern was not with prostitutes themselves, but with the prostitution of labor: the usurpation of masculine roles and responsibilities by the agents of industrial capitalism.

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.

Land reform, community‐building and the labor press in Antebellum America and Britain

Land reform, community‐building and the labor press in Antebellum America and Britain

A historical examination of the use of accounting-based incentive plans in the structuring of labor-management relations

In this paper we examine organized labor's involvement with accounting-based incentive plans, and the role this involvement played in labor-management relations. More specifically, this research examines differences between organized labor's response to engineering versus accounting measures of productivity, and how these differences affected union support for, or opposition to, incentive systems. We also explore labor's ability and willingness to confront accounting representations. Our study of these issues involves an extensive review of the labor press, and case studies of profit-sharing plans implemented at three firms—Parker Pen, Kaiser Steel, and American Motors—in the 1950s and early 1960s. The paper concludes that both local and national unions were centrally concerned about their ability to manage incentives so that they could obtain other union objectives. However, the construction of both labor's objectives, and the way these objectives were pursued and legitimized, was limited by the circumscribed nature of U.S. unionism during this period. Thus, these episodes suggest that the local particularities of profit sharing cannot be understood without placing these episodes in the larger context of labor processes.

The New labor press: journalism for a changing union movement

The New labor press: journalism for a changing union movement

Pizzigati, Sam, and Fred J. Solowey, eds. The New Labor Press. Journalism for a Changing Union Movement

Pizzigati, Sam, and Fred J. Solowey, eds. The New Labor Press. Journalism for a Changing Union Movement. An article from journal Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations (Volume 48, Number 3, 1993, pp. 407-612), on Érudit.

Society for French Historical Studies

Labor history was alive and well at a conference of Society for French Historical Studies held at Ohio State University on March 29-31, 1990. In two panels and one plenary session?a total of nine papers?French labor historians examined a variety of issues ranging from representations of labor and workers in socialist thinking, labor press, and labor congresses, to workers' reactions to portrayal of work and labor in Paris Exhibition of women in unions, and managerial strategies in controlling women workers in Paris metal trades. Recently, French labor historians have examined disjuncture between representations of work in France on one hand, and workers' own vision and experience of work and labor organization on other. (See, for example, essays in excellent collection edited by Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp, Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice [Ithaca and London, 1986]). Two papers at conference focused on this theme. Joy Hall (Auburn University), in Worker and Socialist Responses to Social Economy Exhibit at Paris Exposition of 1889, argued that exhibit, designed to further solidarist ideals of social peace between workers and employers and to promote mutualism for its moral as well as its economic benefits, proved to be a disappointment for workers. Their voices were lost in reformers' efforts to promote management-oriented reform; no place was given to demonstrating realities of workers' experience. K. Steven Vincent (North Carolina State University), in Representations of Labor and Workers in Nineteenth-Century French Socialist Thought, traced ambiguity of French socialist thinking on work from Lafargue's defense of the right to be lazy to Fourier's argument that work could be liberating if not fulfilling and Proudhon's idea that a committed, creative labor force, conscious of its moral obligation, could save society from decadence. Vincent argued that socialists idealized worker-as-hero even when reality suggest ed differently?although it is true that, as Steven Zdatny (Rice University) pointed out in his comments, socialists' overidealizing of workers' potential for action was not unusual or unique: all political parties did this. This moralizing tendency spilled over into discussions of women, where socialists praised virtues of femme au foyer. They were less concerned with exploitation of women in workplace than they were with problem of demise of home.

Sealskin and Shoddy: Working Women in American Labor Press Fiction, 1870-1920

Introduction Our Sealskin and Shoddy: Sensational Story of Labor's Wrongs by W.H. Little from The Journal of United Labor of the Knights of Labor - July 19, 1988 The Show by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies's Garment Worker - February, 1911 The Pig-Headed Girl by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies' Garment Worker - April 1912 In the Jacket Shop by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies' Garment Worker - April, 1910 At the Shirt Waist Factory by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies' Garment Worker - May, 1910 This Style: Six Twenty-Nine by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies' Garment Worker - May, 1913 The Living Skeleton and the Stout Reformer by Gertrude Barnum from The Ladies' Garment Worker - July, 1980 The Idealists by Gertrude Barnum Equal Rights by Abraham Reisin from The Ladies' Garment Worker - November, 1917 Recognized by Wiener from The Ladies' Garment Worker - February, 1918 Regina's Disappointment by Bertha Levy from The Ladies Garment Worker - September, 1913 Mr. Skinner Climbs Down: The Story of a Girl's Strike and its Success from The Ladies' Garment Worker - February, 1913 Reporting Her Own Trial by Max Danish from The Ladies' Garment Worker - November, 1913 Not on Speaking Terms by Max Danish from The Ladies' Garment Worker - April, 1914 Angelina's Wisdom by Max Danish from The Ladies' Garment Worker - August, 1914 Tangled in the Shadows by Sonia Ureles from The Ladies' Garment Worker - September, 1913 Pilgrim's Progress in a Cigar Factory by A Pilgrim from Life and Labor of the Women's Trade Union League - June, 1920 Sarah Jane Appleton's Strike by Lucy Foster Madison from The Shoe Workers Journal - November, 1905 Golf Skirt by Theodora Bliss from American Federationist - December 1907 Her Birthday Gift by Lizzie Homes from American Federationist - March, 1913 Judge Newcomb's Retribution by Lizzie Homes from American Federationist - February, 1902 Mary Shaugnessy by Felix Benquiat from WHY? of the Industrial Workers of the World - June, 1913 Working Girls and Pet Dogs by Josephine Conger from The Butcher Workman - May, 1917 Suggestions for Further Reading Index

Sealskin and shoddy: working women in American labor press fiction, 1870-1920

Sealskin and shoddy: working women in American labor press fiction, 1870-1920

The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s: An Annotated Bibliography. Vol. I: Migrants from Northern Europe

The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s: An Annotated Bibliography. Vol. I: Migrants from Northern Europe

Labor Press Demands Equal Education in the Age of Jackson

Labor Press Demands Equal Education in the Age of Jackson

Review: The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-70s: An Annotated Bibliography edited by Dirk Hoerder

Review: <i>The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-70s: An Annotated Bibliography</i> edited by Dirk Hoerder

The Role of the Labor Press in the Acculturation of Working-Class Immigrants 1880s to 1930s in the Atlantic Economies

This conference, on the Role of the Labor Press in the Acculturation of Work ing-Class Immigrants, took place in Frankfurt February 12-15, 1985. At tended by more than thirty participants from eleven different countries in Europe and North America, it was hosted by Dirk Hoerder of the University of Bremen. It was sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation, which has for several years provided funding for the working-class Newspaper Preservation Project. This project seeks to establish a comprehensive bibliography, as well as to set up microfilmed collections, of non-English labor newspapers in both the United States and Canada. It focuses particularly on the press of the new immigrant groups who came to north America between the 1880s and the 1920s, whose culture and way of life has until recently received less attention from historians than that of the older immigrant groups from northern and western Europe. Collaborative efforts to aid in this project, as well as other ethnic press collecting programs, were reported on at the beginning of the con ference by Hoerder, by Rudolph Vecoli of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and by Varpu Lindstrom-Best of York University in Canada. The consensus seemed to be that although a promising start had been made, much remains to be done, especially at a time when sup port funds for projects of this kind are drying up. Methodological questions on how best to use as research tools both these papers and private letters written back home by immigrants occupied the first day of the meeting. Wolfgang Helbich of Bochum reported on his German im migrant letter-gathering project, in which he is analyzing more than 4,000 let ters written back to Germany by emigrants to North America in the nineteenth century. As an offshoot of this, Ulrike Sommer, also of the University of Bochum, reviewed the content of some of the letters written by women, but found little on such matters as female emancipation or the suffrage. This find

The Labor Press

The Labor Press