American Labor Movement Research Articles

HeinOnline’s Labor and Employment: The American Worker

HeinOnline offers a core digital library package that contains nearly 3,000 legal journals published in more than 60 different countries, including thousands of Australian, Canadian, and European legal materials and multiple international government publications. This vendor also has several other databases can be attached to this core collection, and “Labor and Employment: The American Worker” is one of them.It contains thousands of books, published from the early twentieth century to the present; hundreds of scholarly articles, ranging from 1904 to the present (with new articles added each month), on various topics, including labor contracts, collective bargaining, employment protections, and the history of the labor movement; and more than 10,000 subject-coded titles. Also available here are current reports on working conditions, legislative histories, Supreme Court case briefs, and a chart of landmark court cases in labor and employment (including the synopsis and full text of each case and an explanation of its significance in both jurisprudence and history), ranging between 1842 and 2018. When these and all the other categories of materials in this database are combined, it contains 10,984 titles, 14,659 volumes, and 5,244,894 pages.As with all databases that provide images of original documents, the readability of the materials here can vary, but thankfully none appear to be illegible. Navigating, rotating, enlarging, and reducing these documents can usually be done without difficulty. Database content can be browsed and/or searched for in numerous ways, all of which are understandable and which generally produce useful results. However, searches by title or description are often the least productive, while those in the full text are far more so. Pricing for this resource is vague, as it is determined by an institution’s location (i.e., in the United States or not), whether it has a law library, and other factors not specified by the vendor. Consortia discounts are also available. The content available here is impressive and will prove valuable to students and researchers of US labor history, especially those looking for case law, legislation, and other government publications on this topic. The licensing agreement for this database is too long, but is not unusual in its provisions, and should provide little cause for concern.

When Do Trade Unions Support Universal Demands? Organizational Context and Trade Union Strategies in the US and UK at the Turn of the 20th Century

AbstractWhen do labor movements come to support universal welfare policies? This article examines this question through a comparative account of the British and American labor movements at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on newspaper and meeting records from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), the Cigarmakers International Union (CMIU), and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (BLF) from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, it considers why, given a common tradition of exclusive benefits, the two movements diverged on the question of universal state health and pension schemes at the turn of the century—with the British labor movement abandoning its voluntarist orientation and the AFL preserving it.Complementing existing sociological accounts that emphasize state and party structure, sectoral composition, pace and quality of industrial change, and the demographic makeup of labor movements, this article builds on approaches from the sociology of organizations in centering the importance of organizational arenas in shaping trade union strategies and aims. In particular, it investigates the role of friendly and fraternal societies in structuring trade union interests over this period. The article demonstrates how changes within the friendly and fraternal society movement shaped the contextual significance and strategic value of benefit provision in each trade union over time. In doing so, it opens the way for a deeper reflection on the importance of organizational reasoning in shaping trade union organizing and the trajectory of welfare institutions.

THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE IN 1892 REVISITED: LABOR DISPUTES, CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL MACHINES IN THE GILDED AGE

The Homestead strike of 1892 was a pivotal event in American labor history. It demonstrated the explosive collision between workers and profit-minded industrialists to the public and politicians. This event also amply demonstrated the extreme lack of legal protection of labor rights in the United States in the late nineteenth Century, the tilting of the scales of government in favor of wealthy industrialists, and the dire consequences they could lead to. The event has helped update and improve the legal framework since then.

An Ephemeral Look at Russian Anarchist Life in the United States

Abstract: In September 1915, San Francisco resident Ernest Kundy received a picture postcard from an unnamed correspondent. Produced by the Anarchist Red Cross of Detroit, the postcard featured a depiction of the Bloody Sunday massacre which sparked Russia’s 1905 revolution and served as one of the most important episodes in the history of revolutionary martyrdom. By examining every aspect of the postcard this article reveals, layer by layer, its connections to Russian anarchist life in the United States. The article begins by analysing the image on the front, explaining how illustrations like the one in question by Fortunino Matania were turned into widely disseminated postcards that spread revolutionary messages well beyond Russian borders. Turning to the information on the back, the article next explores the history of the Anarchist Red Cross in the US and the role that it played in keeping anarchism alive for recent immigrants from Russia. Then the links between the sender’s handwritten message and an area of Chicago that features prominently in histories of immigrant life, the settlement movement and the US labour movement — Halsted Street — are considered. Finally, the connections between the recipient’s family and a 1915 bank robbery in California serve as a window into the history of Russian anarchist circles on the American West Coast.

THE EMERGENT R/ANTIWORK REVOLUTION AND MANAGERIAL ALLIES

The subreddit r/Antiwork and the eponymous movement it launched has introduced phrases like ‘Quiet Quitting’ and ‘Act your Wage’ into the media lexicon and garnered the attention of businesses from Goldman Sachs to Kellogg’s for its threat to labor force participation. Heralded by some as the successor to #OccupyWallSt, Antiwork is the other side of the Great Resignation for those who cannot afford to leave their livelihood. Yet it differs from #OccupyWallSt in its scope, which critiques capitalism as a whole rather than money in politics; its scale, with 2.7M members globally on Reddit alone; its longevity, ongoing for ten years; and its varied demographics whereas Occupy protesters tended to be educated white men. As Occupy sought collective mobilizations at government buildings, Antiwork fosters individual, less public forms of resistance to capitalism. James Scott referred to such ‘infrapolitics’ as weapons of the weak, as the lack of capital of the oppressed in all its forms often precludes more direct forms of protest. In this paper, drawing from digital ethnography and interviews, I examine the potency of r/Antiwork for impacting workplace behaviors among community members who are managers in their professional lives. In doing so, I explore the possibility of a broader class consciousness with an historically unlikely ally that transcends the traditional Marxist proletariat-capitalist binary and portends greater efficacy for the American labor movement than in the past 50 years.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Anti-Communist Solidarity: US-Brazilian Labor Relations during the Dictatorship in Cold-War Brazil (1964–1985)

The last decade has witnessed a crusade by the Brazilian Right, losers of four consecutive presidential elections, to seize power through extralegal means. At the center of this was Operação Lava Jato, which used politicized corruption allegations to discredit the center-left Workers' Party and culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the imprisonment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the election of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro. Although it has only gradually become clear, the United States played a key role through efforts to influence Brazilian prosecutors and judges via training programs and informal collaborations.Larissa Rosa Corrêa's monograph on US efforts to influence Brazilian trade unionism during the 1964–85 military dictatorship is thus remarkably timely. Anti-Communist Solidarity sheds light on the softer forms of power used by US empire. In the 2010s, US efforts to influence the Brazilian judiciary had little to do with eliminating corruption and everything to do with restoring US hegemony in an emerging oil-producing and diplomatic power. Similarly, as Corrêa conclusively demonstrates, efforts to bring collective bargaining to Brazil were less about empowering the Brazilian working class than weakening communists. These efforts were carried out by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), whose goals under George Meany were inextricably linked to those of US empire.Despite their history of mobilization against the military coups of the 1960s and the Central American wars of the 1980s, in recent decades US Latin Americanist scholars have de-emphasized explanations focused on empire. Thus, it is unsurprising that this vital book was written by a Brazilian, as Brazilian scholars have remained more attuned to the deleterious effects of US imperialism. This focus on US policy by a non-US historian is the book's greatest strength, not only in terms of theoretical orientation but also in terms of the sources consulted. As Alex Lichtenstein points out in his perceptive foreword, through her close examination of Portuguese sources produced by Brazilian trade unionists Corrêa complicates narratives that might assert a unidirectional flow of power from North to South. Despite AIFLD attempts to convince Brazilians of the superiority of the US model of collective bargaining, even some of the most conservative Brazilian trade unionists continued to assert the superiority of their own corporatist labor structure, particularly the labor courts.This final point emerges clearly over the course of the narrative, whose chapters unfold roughly across the administrations of four Brazilian presidents. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the AFL-CIO sought to promote a US trade union model as an antidote to the perceived communist sympathies of the labor movement during the turbulent years preceding the 1964 coup. Chapter 2 shows how US labor ideals were given their fullest expression under the pro-American government of Humberto Castelo Branco, the first military president. In chapter 3, we see how AIFLD began to clash with more nationalist currents in the Brazilian regime that questioned the assumption that a US model was directly applicable to Brazil. After a close analysis of Brazilian labor leaders' oft-critical reactions to the US labor model in chapter 4, chapter 5 shows how AFL-CIO influence in Brazil diminished in the 1970s, as the repression of the “years of lead” closed off opportunities for even capitalism-friendly, US-style labor mobilization.Despite the title, which indicates that Corrêa's book covers 1964–85, the narrative closes in 1974. This decision can be attributed to the fact that US influence over Brazilian unionism waned under more nationalist Brazilian governments. In addition, one set of sources vital to the book—the records of the US Department of State—had, as of the time of Corrêa's research, only been declassified until 1976. However, this means that the most obvious question—the relationship of North American “free and democratic unionism” to Brazil's “new unionism” that appeared in 1978—ultimately remains unanswered. How to explain the fact that Lula and a new generation of left-wing unionists advocated for direct collective bargaining and a weakening of corporatist labor relations—precisely the values AIFLD attempted to inculcate among Brazilian unionists? To what extent did the United States attempt to influence the new unionism led by Lula? These provocative questions will have to remain for future scholars.In addition, two issues may limit the book's impact on an Anglophone audience. First, while the original edition of the book is written in excellent academic Portuguese, the excessively literal translation results in awkward, clunky English that is not particularly readable. Second, the $97.99 price point may be prohibitive to all but the most dedicated specialists. This would be unfortunate because Anti-Communist Solidarity is a must-read not only for historians of Brazilian and Latin American labor history but also for those interested in US labor history, US–Latin American relations, and the strategies of modern-day empires to protect their interests.

Dana M. Caldemeyer. Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age.

In Union Renegades, Dana M. Caldemeyer provides a novel and engaging examination of a perennial question that plagues both the American labor movement and historians of America’s working class: why do so many workers, seemingly against their own interests, oppose or refuse to join labor unions? Drawing on underutilized sources, she focuses on midwestern miners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly during the 1890s, when the newly formed United Mine Workers (UMW) struggled to secure a stable membership and base of support. Although some of Caldemeyer’s claims are paradoxical or underdeveloped, this provocative book is an important contribution that is sure to influence scholarship for many years to come. Most of the evidence presented in Union Renegades comes from a uniquely rich archive of writing by miners themselves: the letters and reports published in mine workers’ newspapers. In particular, Caldemeyer notes, the United Mine Workers’ Journal printed any and all letters submitted during its first three years of publication, which “offer a unique window into workers’ lives and are crucial to understand how and why rank and file support for workers’ organizations like the UMW ebbed and flowed in the Gilded Age” (16). What these texts show, she compellingly argues, is that few workers were simply “union” or “non-union.” Rather, they usually supported and joined specific unions when they believed that those unions were responsive to their needs and goals and abandoned those unions when this no longer appeared to be the case. In other words, miners did not automatically join “the union” in response to dire working conditions or a sense of class solidarity; they joined, left, or stayed aloof from specific labor organizations based upon their analysis of those organizations’ words and deeds. This deceptively simple observation is a reminder to scholars that union membership cannot be used as an unproblematic sign of or shorthand for class consciousness and workplace discontent. Miners who fully, even militantly, supported “unionization” in the abstract might refuse to join the UMW or end their membership in it when it appeared to abandon or ignore them. This was the case, for example, when at the last minute, the UMW called off a nationwide miners’ strike in 1891. Many of its midwestern members “abandoned the UMW not because they had grown disillusioned with organized labor but because they believed the UMW leaders had turned away from their original goals” (69).

Networks of Migrants’ Narratives: A Post-authentic Approach to Heritage Visualisation

Digital tools, technologies, and infrastructures have increasingly shaped how knowledge is understood, created, managed, maintained, and shared. In sectors such as cultural heritage, for example, curators and scholars now widely apply computer science approaches to their collections for tasks such as enriching content and providing users with visual access. Although there has been an increasing interest in critical digital visual design and cultural heritage, what still seems to be largely missing is a problematised and critical approach to the application of these techniques. Drawing on critical posthumanities, in this article I propose a new critical framework, the post-authentic framework to digital objects and cultural heritage. The framework advocates transparency and openness as well as the active and reflexive participation of the scholar/curator in the process of knowledge production. To exemplify how the post-authentic framework may be applied to digital research, I explore two use cases: critical visualisation design and critical digital heritage research. For the first use case, I examine the design choices for developing the tool DeXTER, an interactive visualisation app that allows users to explore enriched cultural heritage material interactively. I specifically emphasise the challenges facing product design, with a focus on visualising the ambiguities and uncertainties of Network Analysis and Sentiment Analysis. For the second use case, I explore the potential of DeXTER for testing hypotheses on large textual collections, for example by accessing the layers of meaning attached to referential entities. The use case is the Italian American labour movement from 1898 to 1936. The article concludes with key concepts and methods for applying the post-authentic framework to digital heritage practices and knowledge creation more widely.

Toward a Field of Labor Activism

A recent upsurge in organizing by workers in the United States presents an opportunity to reconsider the state and fate of the US labor movement. We argue that the conceptual apparatus of strategic action fields offers a tool to contextualize this development. In particular, it shines light upon categorization struggles, delegation of labor within the field, relationships among labor organizations, and strategies to change the rules of the field-game. Interpreting the trends reported by the Worker Empowerment Research Network through the lens of field theory cannot predict the future but can make sense of present obstacles and opportunities.

Structure and Solidarity

Two strikes serve as bookends for the heyday of the twentieth-century American labor movement: the 1936–37 sit-down strike of the fledgling United Auto Workers (UAW) against what was then the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors, and the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) against the Federal Aviation Administration, a government agency. The successful UAW strike led not only to the unionization of General Motors; it opened the door to the unionization of basic industry across the U.S. economy, from auto, steel, and textiles to important components of transportation, food production, and communications. The PATCO strike, broken by President Ronald Reagan, led not only to the demise of that union; it marked the start of a period during which industrial unions were decimated and strikes in the United States dwindled to a mere handful.

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Networked Unionism: Reframing the Labour Movement and Starbucks Workers United’s Hybrid Organising Practices

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Union organising is surging in the United States, especially among younger workers in the service industries. This article examines this uptick in labour organising through a case study of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU). I studied this campaign from March to December 2022 using a variety of online and offline methods: conducting twenty-three in-depth interviews with SBWU organisers; attending strikes, direct actions, and planning meetings; and following these groups on social media. This study addresses two main questions: How are SBWU organisers communicating unionisation with their co-workers and to broader publics? And, how are social media influencing workers’ organising practices? Despite claims that social media are “a great radicalier”, this study demonstrates how workers were politicised by their material conditions in an industrialising workplace. While media helped organisers amplify their messages and recruit new members, the social relationships among organisers were central to SBWU’s early growth. By detailing how organisers navigated the contradictions within networked media, this study shows how worker-led campaigns like SBWU are reshaping the structure and composition of the US labour movement.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement?

A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US labor law together imply that workers need to overcome substantial collective action problems at work in order to win union recognition and collective bargaining agreements. These barriers make dense social networks and high levels of social capital at work a prerequisite for unionization. Labor organizing can build this social capital, but faces an uphill battle without policy changes that extend collective bargaining across employers and up the value-chain and make unionization easier. Partnering with labor unions, researchers can study theoretical problems of collective action while also getting a window into what strategies of a renewed labor movement may work.

Who's Working Class? Centering Women in US Labor History

Who's Working Class? Centering Women in US Labor History

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times