Ordinary Working People Research Articles

Iraqi Unions and Their American Labor Allies

Since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, images of suicide bombings, religious violence, and general chaos have come to mind when most Americans have thought about Iraq. Counterposed are thoughts of US military efforts to separate the combatants and restore order. Whether one has supported or opposed the US actions in Iraq, the actual Iraqi people, almost all of them ordinary working people, remain remote and unknown.

Oh no--it's Donald Hunter!

Once upon a time the MRCP (London) was divided, like Gaul, into three parts: the compulsory essay questions and clinicals; the path viva (not confined to pathology); and the final viva before the President, Censors and senior examiners. Each step weeded out the majority, leaving a very nervous ∼10% for the final ordeal. And in the path viva there was the risk of meeting Donald Hunter. I only saw him once, as a student, when he came to give an invited lecture at our medical school; he was a big man and spoke impressively on the history of occupational diseases. His book on the subject became a classic and the British Journal of Industrial Medicine which he founded and edited remains, as Occupational and Environmental Medicine , a leader in its field. Although there are sporadic records of doctors commenting on work-related illness back to Roman times, diseases of ordinary working people were of little interest to doctors until Bernardino Ramazzini, professor of medicine in Padua, wrote his great work, De Morbis Artificium Diatriba , in 1715. Ramazzini made the first addition to medical history-taking since Hippocrates with his advice not to be too proud to sit down with a working man and ask about his job. The first description of a …

Working in the Asylum: Attendants to the Insane

Contemporary representations of nineteenth-century attendants were often negative, finding fault with both their character and conduct. Historians were inclined initially to agree, concluding that attendants were 'recruited from the dregs of society' and that asylum work was 'an occupation of last resort.' Other scholars argue that such conclusions rely too much on contemporary depictions. Taking Victoria as a case study, this article explores who attendants were and why they chose to do asylum work. Many of the attendants employed in Victoria's asylums were ordinary working people, recruited for their skills and experience, and for whom attending held considerable attractions. For some, indeed, attending became their life's work and an occupation whose reputation they felt was worth defending.

Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History

Allen Ginsberg's America (1956) playfully reminds us of importance of rhetorical mode. Self-reflection and political cri tique merge in poem as speaker manages simultaneously to assert his opposition to and his complicity with dominant world power of his day. This power happens to be his home country and discursive regime that?he is dismayed to realize?has formed his habits of mind in midst of cultural racism, Red Scare, and metastasizing pop-culture consumerism. Yet conversing with a personified America, speaker repeatedly asserts solidarity with ordinary working people across racial and ethnic boundaries, and poem is at least partly about remembering what abstraction of political has obscured: am America. For all his anger, horror, and sadness at U.S. internal and foreign politics, he finally asserts solidarity with people and, ironically adopting an American can-do work ethic, vows to put my queer shoulder to wheel in order to help get country back on right socialist path. Irony, self-reflexivity, and dialogic form enable Ginsberg to invert valences of what constitutes the in both culture and discourse; reflexively critique notion of poetics; and reaffirm and potentially reconstruct an organic political identifica tion with very people often most scorned by purveyors of abstraction and global power. Ginsberg's poem came to mind as I reread past few decades' academic conversation about literary history, which is strikingly serious in tone, analysis, and prognostication, and also decidedly monologic and top-down in its quest for proper subject of inquiry. Considering whether a global literary history is possible, I would like to consider an

A “WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE”: THE RHETORICAL PRESIDENCY IN HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONTEXT

ABSTRACT The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive‐Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez‐faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, were designed to facilitate “change” by finally giving the public the power to enact social reforms. The resulting political order has created systemic pressure for policy demagoguery in place of rational deliberation. Mass political mobilization seems to be better achieved by contests of grand principle that pit the well‐meaning supporters of obviously needed reforms against “villains and conspirators,” than by technical discussions of the possibly counterproductive effects of those reforms.

A Thousand Years Of Model Letter-Writers

Starting from letter writing as a part of rhetoric, this article seeks to trace the development of model letter-writers in England from their origins in Latin and French formularies to the present day. The first letter-writers in England appeared in the thirteenth century but it was not until the sixteenth that they were written in English. Gradually, they became directed more towards the requirements of ordinary working people rather than towards scholars. There are two main types of model letter-writer: those intended for serious use and, a later development, those aimed at entertainment. The formulas for opening and closing letters, as well as some others are examined. Dating from the fourteenth century and earlier, these survived into the twentieth century among less educated writers. In conclusion there is a brief look at the continuing publication of model letter-writers today.

Changes in the role of the trade union in the Hungarian printing industry

PurposeThis paper sets out to describe the experiences of the Hungarian Trade Unions as they adapted to the political and economic changes of the post‐communist period. The paper lucidly explains how and why the trade union movement in Hungary made the transition from being a major player in every aspect of political, economic and social life in the old regime, to being a mere shadow of its former self in the early.Design/methodology/approachThe author paints a vivid picture of “how” and “why” the trade unions were perceived in the “golden age of Socialism”. He then explains why dissatisfaction and disillusionment of the workers grew as living standards and real income declined and Western Capitalism became more attractive. After the initial aphorism following the overthrow of communism, the Author analyses why many Hungarian workers by the late 90s yearned for a return to the securities and paternalism of the Kádár era.FindingsThis Paper systematically traces the steps from Socialism to Capitalism in Hungary and the impact this had on organized labour. The author notes the paradox that at exactly the time that trade unions were rationalizing and merging into mega trade unions in the West, the newly freed trade union movement in Hungary and elsewhere in the CEE countries fragmentized and formed a multitude of small unions many of which would fold in months rather than years. The point is made that the transition to a neo‐liberal economic and political system led almost immediately in Hungary to falling standard of living and rising job insecurity.Research limitations/implicationsThe account given in this paper of the changing nature of employee relations in Hungary spanning the communist and post‐communist periods provides researchers with a sound base to explore further the paradoxes to which the author has referred.Originality/valueThis paper provides a welcome, human account of what the changes and their consequences were for ordinary working people and their families and – most important – what they meant for organized labour in terms of its ability to enhance working peoples quality of life in Hungary.

A Day That Will Live In … ?

A Day That Will Live In … ?

Racism, the Realist Writers’ Movement and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Award

In their works on literary politics in postwar Australia, Susan McKernan (later Lever) and John McLaren mention the comparatively little known role played by the Realist Writers' movement and its journal Realist Writer (later The Realist). Ian Syson has offered an interpretation more in sympathy with the methods and achievements of this group: 'in terms of struggle for space in the cultural sphere for over a quarter of this century, the Realist Writers' movement stands as a courageous example of militant cultural practice' (Syson 334). He contends that the significance of the Realists lies primarily in the challenge that their collective organisation posed to individualist notions of literary production and value. Moreover, this collective structure distinguishes the literary achievements of its members from those of other working-class writers commonly absorbed into the bourgeois literary sphere. The Groups sought to provide a space for the intellectual and creative offerings of ordinary working people. At the same time they hoped to shape this space in such a way as to preserve the alternative nature of its cultural discourse, the collective, class identity of its writers. Further research, using the extensive collection of letters of Ray Verrills (who published under the pseudonym of Ray Williams and was the journal's editor from 1962 until its end in 1970) has helped to build a more comprehensive picture of the journal and the culture around it. One interesting story to emerge from the letters sheds light on Australian racism and the limitations of the movement's guiding philosophy of aesthetic and political realism.

Marxism, Morality and Ideology the Marxist Moral Paradox and the Struggle for Social Justice

AbstractThere is a certain paradox inherent in Marx's criticism of morality. On the one hand, he rejects morality as a form of bourgeois ideology which serves mainly to justify the status quo. The status quo in question is one which is mainly detrimental to ordinary working people, while favouring property owners as well as owners of the means of production. In this sense Marx's condemnation of morality resembles his condemnation of religion, which he saw as the opium of the people. On the other hand, Marx employs morally significant language to challenge what he regards as the evils of capitalism and their destructive effects on the working class. It becomes clear from all this that capitalism cannot be seen as purely an economic matter. Insofar as it affects the lives and well-being of people, it is also a moral issue and deserves to be judged accordingly. How Marx steers between his seeming rejection of morality and, at the same time, using it to criticise capitalism is the main concern of this article. In the process, Marx's concept of ideology is explained while the focus and motivation of his social critique is also briefly considered.

The Ergonomics Society The Society's Lecture 1997: The ethical turn and the workplace

It is proposed that we are now in the West experiencing a turn back to ethics. Reasons for this include the growth in ethical investments and ethical consumerism, and the rise of business ethics as a discipline. Drawing later on contributions to the social science of ethics, on three sets of empirical studies of ordinary working people (rank and file practical 'intuitive experts'), as ethical agents in action at work, it is suggested that there are grounds for optimism. There is a growing body of evidence testifying to responsible ethical conduct in the workplace, although individual ethical intentions are sometimes compromised by organizational impediments. Such blocks may take a professional form. The paper concludes with ideas for the skills development of the 'theoretical' professional expert such as the ergonomist, as a potential ethical agent in the postmodern world.

A rugged pair of philanthropists: the Frows and The Working Class Movement Library

Details the creating of a library by Edmund and Ruth Frow. Describes the initial partnership and the gradual transition to a library representing the ideals, trials and tribulations of ordinary working people. Summarizes the scope of the present collection of over 30,000 items and gives details of a number of rare books and documents.

Environment of transition: new and old positive and negative trends in the post‐Soviet marketplace

The fragmentation of the Soviet Union has left its citizens tired of promises and hungry for positive results. However, while the current transitional period in the former Soviet states (FSS) from the command economy to the market economy has added enormous hurdles for ordinary working people and retirees, newly‐emerged post‐Soviet rich and famous enjoy fabulous wealth and power. Describes the roots of their climb to wealth and power, gives tips regarding how to mitigate the risk of being caught up in the crime tide, underlines the importance of tailoring products to the local markets, and makes other recommendations for businesses involved in the FSS market.

Race and Labor in Western Copper: The Fight for Equality, 1896-1918.

This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners. Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose. They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists. Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.

A. P. Giannini: Banker of America.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Amadeo Peter Giannini brought California into the twentieth century. Extending credit to ordinary working people, creating a financial empire through his branch banks, this son of Italian immigrants enabled California to advance faster than any other state in the decades before World War II. But who was A. P. Giannini? Felice A. Bonadio's superior biography reveals the founder of Bank of America in his many roles, most notably that of a bold, ruthless financial genius keenly aware of his minority status in a world dominated by the eastern Protestant elite. Yet this is more than the success story of an underdog. Bonadio profiles a man of immense talent who was relentlessly eager to serve 'the people'. Hard-driving, obsessive about defending his empire against its enemies, Giannini could be both a good hater and a good friend. He was one of the first American businessmen to promote employee ownership and profit sharing, and when he died in 1949 at age 79, nearly forty percent of B of A's shares were owned by its employees. Little interested in personal wealth, Giannini's own estate was modest at the time of his death. Much of Bonadio's research is from the private papers of Federal Reserve Bank officials and confidential Bank of America archives. Recollections of Giannini family members and former bank executives are also here, lending historical resonance and color to this portrait of a man whose influence endures many years after his death. Giannini prided himself on his compulsive work habits, which he justified with one of his frequently repeated aphorisms, 'Be first in everything'. Once, on horseback to solicit a consignment order from one of the valley's biggest growers, he suddenly spotted a competitor's team in the distance headed in the same direction. Remembering a deep slough that stood between him and the farm, he quickly cut across the field, tethered his horse to a tree, and swam to the other side. Then he ran the rest of the way to the farmhouse. By the time the other merchant had arrived, Giannini was negotiating a deal with the grower.

Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (review)

Reviews367 Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. Richard J. Powell. National Museum of American Art, 1991. 255 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Reviewed by Jessie Poesch, professor emerita of art history at Tulane University. She is the author ofThe Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560-1860, and Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for Southern Women, 1895-1940. The last twenty years or so have seen a growing number of substantial studies devoted to African American art, necessary since so much of this work has been virtually ignored in earlier surveys of American art. Richard Powell's study of the life and work of William H. Johnson is one of these. It is well written, thoroughly documented, and beautifully illustrated . His interpretations of individual paintings are particularly fine. Johnson (1904-70) grew up in Florence, South Carolina, within the segregated but secure black community of the time. In 1918 he migrated to New York. In 1921, aspiring to become a newspaper cartoonist, he was admitted to the conservative National Academy of Design. But instead of pursuing a career in journalism, he developed great skill as an academic painter; a beautiful still life, a self-portrait, and some landscapes survive. Upon graduation , his mentor, Charles W. Hawthorne, raised money for Johnson to study for a year in Paris, a mecca for artists. Hawthorne also felt Johnson would suffer discrimination in the U.S., although the young painter apparently enjoyed some camaraderie with fellow artists of various ethnic backgrounds at the academy. The stay abroad lasted from 1926 to the fall of 1929. During a 1929-30 visit to the U.S. Johnson was awarded the Harmon Foundation Gold Medal for Excellence in Fine Arts. His work in a short-lived exhibit of American Negro Art was praised for "blazing a new trail in Negro art" and simultaneously criticized by others for too much influence of French modernism. He then visited his hometown for the first time in twelve years, was honored with a one-day exhibit at the local YMCA, and did a few paintings of relatives and familiar landscapes. (Powell refutes the myth that Johnson was arrested while painting out-of-doors.) He also met Alain Locke in Washington , D.C., staying several days with the distinguished advocate of the New Negro arts movement. He returned to Europe, where he married the Danish textile artist and weaver, Holcha Krake, whom he had met the year before. Johnson's second stay in Europe lasted eight years, from 1930 to 1938. The villages where he and his wife lived in Denmark and Norway accepted the couple's mixed-marriage . Johnson's style underwent subtle changes, with boldly defined forms becoming ever more colorful. Most paintings were of landscapes; his figure subjects were of ordinary working people. In 1938, after Johnson's artist brother-in-law lost his job in Hitler's Germany for work deemed "degenerate," and with the shadow of the Nazis looming large, the couple moved to New York. For a time in 1939 Johnson secured a job with the WPA's local Federal Art Project, an agency that in general advocated American scene painting. He was assigned to teach at the Harlem Community Center. After his 1929-30 visit Johnson had maintained some contact with the Harmon Foundation and Locke, but now he was immersed in the articulate, self-consciously aware Negro culture that had evolved in Harlem's black community during the late 1920s and the 1930s. At the same time he and Holcha were part of the international community of artists based in Greenwich Village, includingJohn Gra- 368Southern Cultures ham, the Russian-bom artist, collector, dealer in African art, and curiously seminal figure in the history of abstract expressionism. As a result of this confluence of experiences and influences, Johnson further modified his style and subject matter. Using African American figure subjects, he created a simple , seemingly naive style of bold, strong outlines, sometimes with exaggerated gestures and proportions, and with almost flat areas of bright colors. These oil paintings include some gutsy, insouciant depictions, full of vitality, of rather flashy characters such as those in Cafe and Street...

Challenges Facing Social Economists in the Twenty-First Century: A Radical Democratic Perspective

Introduction The Cold War--that great, defining phenomenon of the post-World War II era--is now over. As we approach the twenty-first century, super-power rivalry between the USA and USSR need no longer serve, as it for several decades, to obfuscate our understanding of economic relationships or to constrain our imaginations concerning social reform and reconstruction. Social economics face multiple challenges in the twenty-first century. One over-arching challenge for our discipline is to reassess, in a post-Cold War context, the social meaning o the contest between contending systems of economy and to identify some of the leading guideposts for and elements in prospective social change. This essay explores some of the major issues in this project. It is taken here as axiomatic that such reassessment of the past and formulatio of guidelines for the future entails a significant normative component. Values are themselves social facts (Elliott, 1980) and do not cease to be so by virtue of being ignored or by being ceremoniously evicted, so to speak, from the front door of one's argument only to re-enter surreptitiously by the rear. The ethica perspective presupposed here postulates three central goals of public life and discourse--liberty, equality, and community (Elliott 1987; 1987a). The paper's working hypothesis is that construction of authentically democratic institution and processes, throughout society and economy as well as politics, is now requisite, not only for enhanced and balanced achievement of these fundamental public goals, but for sustainable, broad-based prosperity in economic life as well. Whether the context is former existing socialist or contemporary western industrialized capitalist societies, substantially enhance democratization is the way forward. Has Socialism Failed? By the late eighties-early nineties, it had become clear that if the western powers, notably the United States, had not won the Cold War, the Communist powers had lost it. Moreover, this central fact accompanied by radical political change and the potential for social and economic transformation. Communist rule over East Europe overturned. The Communist Party of the former USSR shattered, and its assets have confiscated. A Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) substituted for the old Soviet system. Plans and proposals for economic decentralization, marketization, and privatization have formulated and, partially, implemented. Many Western observers make even stronger claims. It is common to encounter the view that recent experiences in East Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrate systemic in central planning, the failure of and the triumph of capitalism, even the end of history (see Fukuyama 1989; Heilbroner 1989).(1) Succeeding comments offer an alternative reassessment. The view adopted here is that recent crises in Soviet and Soviet-dominated societies cannot plausibly be attributed to because socialism, at least in the pre-World War I sense of the term, never emerged in the Soviet Union or under Soviet auspices in East Europe. Although it is commonly asserted that has tried and failed, what actually been tried and failed is not but history's first serious attempt to introduce socialism (Sweezy, 1993, pp. 5-6). Perhaps the most compelling discordance between socialist vision and Soviet practice was the failure to establish a thorough-going working-class democracy, wherein ordinary working people, through cooperative democratic processes, (1) elect their own managers and directly oversee their own work and production, an (2) elect their own accountable and responsible governmental leaders and thereb indirectly control policies affecting their collective lives. Both the totalitarian rule of Stalin (Hilferding, in Howe, 1971) and the authoritarianis of his successors were characterized by centralized Party and state power and control over political and economic life (statism in Horvat's, 1982, terminology). …

PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA AND THE ORDINARY WORKING PERSON

Psychologically traumatic experiences can arise out of apparently normal, everyday situations, can affect perfectly ordinary working people, and may only involve one or two individuals. Four case illustrations are given of unsuspecting employees who found their lives thrown into extreme turmoil by the experience of a traumatic event. These included a railway suicide, an acid‐throwing attack, an explosion in an apartment block, and a rape by a work colleague. The nature of psychological trauma is examined, and then the benefits of early intervention in such cases, and the need for employers to provide a counselling service which is sophisticated enough to cater for problems of this kind is considered.

Participation: The Shopfloor View

Section 1 of the 1982 Employment Act requires companies to provide a report on the efforts and progress made in increasing employee involvement. The project described in this article sets out to find what, if anything, did ordinary working people actually want or expect in regard to participation at work. The methods and findings are described.

Aristocratic Landowners and the Industrial Revolution: The Black Country Experience C. 1760–1840

In his famous book published twenty years ago, Edward Thompson observed that he was seeking to rescue ordinary working people from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. There has been little need for the landed aristocracy to be rescued from similar obscurity in respect of historians' interest in their role during the Industrial Revolution. Rather has it been a case of establishing the question of the degree of significance exerted by their class. Some would argue that the landowners' role in industrial development was probably of equal significance to the part they played in the course of agricultural change between 1700 and 1870, while others would maintain that landowners' investment in industry has been exaggerated. Nevertheless, there is an assertion that the social attitudes and economic responses of landowners were obviously closely linked and that together, ‘they played a decisive role in the pattern and timing of British industrialization’. The link between political and social structure and England's early ‘take-off’ has been recently re-affirmed but so has the query concerning the ‘precise nature of the direct economic role played by this ruling class in the promotion of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and improved communication’. It is the purpose of this article to attempt an analysis of the direct involvement of landed aristocratic estates in the economic affairs of the nascent and burgeoning Black Country during the period 1760–1840.