American Labor Movement Research Articles

The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause

Reviewed by: The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause Jeff Wells Mark A. Lause, The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West. London: Verso, 2018. 304 pp. $29.95. The title of veteran working-class historian Mark A. Lause's The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West refers to an 1883 strike by cowboys in the Texas Panhandle. The book, however, is not as narrow as its title suggests. This is a broad history of the American labor movement during the 1880s. The Great Cowboy Strike will be of interest to scholars of the Midwest and a variety of other fields, including readers interested in agrarian and labor organizing, Populism, and violence in the West. Lause applies Marxist analysis to his subjects. For example, when he confronts the mythology of the cowboy as a rugged individualist, he describes cowboys instead as "grossly underpaid and overworked agricultural laborers" (vii). But—thanks to his dogged research in long-neglected newspapers and histories published more than a century ago—the results herein are far from predictable. Lause makes an intriguing contribution to the ongoing debates on the origins of the Knights of Labor, Farmers' Alliance, and the Populist movement [End Page 156] by rescuing the Industrial Brotherhood from obscurity. In contrast to previous scholars, who have paid little attention to the Industrial Brotherhood, Lause observes that it expanded from Jasper County, Missouri, to become the "primary national organization of American labor between 1874 and 1878." (30). Joshua A. Bodenhamer, the publisher of the People's Press in Carthage, Missouri, launched the organization in 1874 after the Grange refused to expand its membership or engage in politics. Andrew Warner St. John, a schoolteacher and farmer near Carthage, used his affiliation with the group to emerge as a national labor leader. The Industrial Brotherhood, Lause argues, inspired the reorganization and reinvigoration of the Knights of Labor. Scholars of Populism contest whether the earliest origins of the Farmers' Alliance arose from the Texas-based southern Alliance or from the northwestern Alliance. The latter was organized in upstate New York but promoted by Milton George's Chicago-based Western Rural newspaper. Lause finds the roots of both regional Alliances in the Kansas Settlers' Alliance. As the Industrial Brotherhood grew across the border, D. G. Campbell, a Greenback leader and recent arrival from New York, sent material on the Settlers' Alliance back to his old home. A Farmers' Alliance soon flourished there, and information about the group eventually found its way to the Western Rural. Lause contends that other participants in the Settlers' Alliance followed the cattle trails south to Lampasas County, Texas, where the Knights of Reliance, a precursor to the Alliance, formed in 1875. Lause links the violence that framed the emergence of the Alliance in central Texas with the labor unrest that occurred a few years later near the Panhandle town of Tascosa. In the early 1880s, the cowboys that drove cattle from ranches on the Texas Panhandle to railroad stockyards in Kansas and Nebraska or to ranches on the northern range earned about $30 a month. In early 1883, as the big ranchers prepared to round up and send herds north, two dozen cowboys signed a strike call and demanded that their employers agree to their terms by March 31. The cowboys sought a monthly wage of $50 for hands and $75 for wagon bosses. The strike lasted two and a half months. Although there is no evidence that the ranchers recruited or hired strikebreakers, reports circulated that the strikers threatened violence against replacement cowboys. Newspapers, repeating information provided by the ranch owners, alleged that the strikers planned to burn ranches and cut fences. The employers intended that such reports and allegations would justify the use of the state's armed power. [End Page 157] In the end, the state did not send troops to end the strike, and there was no violence associated with it. Reports indicated that the strikers settled for a wage increase to $42.50 a month for hands. A year later, wagon bosses earned $75 a month. Although...

Rethinking the American Labor Movement by Elizabeth Faue

Rethinking the American Labor Movement by Elizabeth Faue

Reclaiming the role of labour environmentalism in Just Transitions

From its inception in the North American labour movement all the way to its inclusion in the Paris Agreement and current level of global proliferation, the concept of Just Transition has reached the pinnacle of global policy debates. Drawing on contributions to the Just Transition Research Collaborative (JTRC) project and a recently published volume1, we highlight the importance of historicising and rooting the Just Transition concept in the frontline communities and unions that are most directly affected and that initially imagined it. This, we believe, is key to ensuring that Just Transition is not simply a fashionable catchword but a concept that actually contributes to a socially just low-carbon transition. Just Transition: The Making and Globalisation of a Contested Concept The Origins of Just Transition: While the term ‘just transition’ was first used in 1995, it was part of an explicit strategy by unions and environmental justice activists in the USA and Canada that can be traced to the late 1980s. Drawing upon the US federal Superfund policy to clean up polluted sites, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union suggested a Superfund for Workers in chemicals, weapons, and other toxic industries. The strategy of the union envisioned a robust green industrial policy, strong occupational, health and environmental rights and standards, alongside universal health care and the formation of an independent labour party. During the 1990s, US and Canadian unions promoted the strategy in collaboration with the environmental justice and elements of the environmental movement and in the context of systematic discussions between unions and environmentalists2. Just Transition fell off the US and Canadian union and environmentalist agenda after 2001. The Globalisation of Just Transition: The concept survived, however, because global union organisations, in collaboration with a number of national unions, including in the UK, Spain, Australia and South Africa, globalised the concept from the late 1990s onwards (Rosemberg 2020). The Spanish Comisiones Obreras and the associated Sustainlabour and ITUC, played a critical role in the diffusion of labour environmentalism globally, mainstreaming the Just Transition concept within international climate and environmental debates and processes3. During the Great Recession, when proposals for green jobs and green growth became more popular nationally and amongst intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), these unions sought to ensure that Just Transition remained on the agenda. Just Transitions Everywhere: More recently, the uptake of Just Transition has accelerated. Global climate activists started seeing its value and some transferred it back to their national movements. The ILO adopted its Just Transition guidelines in 2015. The ITUC established the Just Transition Centre (JTC) in 2016 and has pursued close collaboration between labour and sympathetic business (Moussu 2020). Other IGOs are also engaging the concept, as are various philanthropic and civil society organisations. Just Transition policies have been adopted by countries, such as Canada and Spain, by subnational units, such as Colorado and Scotland and by cities, such as Longmont, Colorado, and Jackson, Mississippi (Akuno 2020). C40, the global network of megacities has expressed its commitment to Just Transition. The growing number of references to Just Transition has increased the range of understandings of what it should mean, from more conventional and mainstream corporate social responsibility proposals to more transformative ideas that confront the current neoliberal economic system. A necessary step, therefore, is to identify and reflect on the various meanings and operationalisations of Just Transitions. Unions and Just Transitions Today Despite its union origins, Just Transition remains a contested concept within the world of labour. Some unions, particularly in extraction and construction, oppose Just Transition, due to both concerns over the implications of a transition and ideological reasons. Other unions have engaged the strategy but emphasised the social aspects over the urgency of a green transition. There are good reasons for that when states, business and environmentalists focus on urgency without justice. Overall, Just Transition is high on the agenda of the world of labour and there are many instances of unions debating and promoting Just Transition. These include the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, various British and US unions and union related initiatives, the Alberta Federation of Labour in Canada, South African trade unions, Australian unions (Snell 2020) and others. But while some unions from the Global South...

Framing kids: children, immigration reform, and same-sex marriage

ABSTRACTChildren often have played crucial roles – both as political symbols and frontline activists – in the struggles of marginalized groups to secure basic membership rights. This was true of the African American civil rights movement and labor movement in earlier eras, and as this article illuminates, children are prominent in current battles for immigrant and LGBTQ rights. In particular, this article focuses on the ways children are framed in contemporary's policy debates over immigration reform and same-sex marriage to advance distinctive political interests and agendas. Employing original content analysis of how the media covered these two contentious issues, we find that both advocates and opponents of expanding the membership rights of undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ people regularly invoked child-centered frames in their public discourse but they do so in markedly different ways. These include striking contrasts in the construction of narratives about “real” versus “abstract” children and about “our kids” and “their kids.” More generally, this study underscores the need for more scholarship that considers how childhood status intersects with a variety of other critical identities in American political life.

Fordism: a review essay

ABSTRACTFordism is a central concept in American labour history. This essay, the first survey of the range of historiographical and sociological approaches deployed to understand Fordism, suggests that Fordism and Americanism are inseparably intertwined. Previous scholarship has emphasised that the technological and managerial efficiency of Fordist practice were a hallmark of twentieth-century Americanism. Historians of labour have demonstrated that these aspects manifested as a relentless system of control in the workplace that paradoxically helped to unify worker resistance. Historians of capitalism have tended to used Fordism to refer to an ethos underpinning mid-twentieth-century capitalist development marked by a balance between mass production and mass consumption. They identify increased social provisions and class compromise between labour and management as features that made Fordism attractive to states rebuilding their economies following the Second World War. New transnational histories of Fordism have begun to bridge the gap between these two main interpretations to show how Fordist practice and ethos were exported together internationally as part of an ideological project to modernise nations in America’s image. This essay concludes by assessing the usefulness of Fordism to historians and suggesting avenues for future research.

Union Mergers; Some Questions Raised by a “Disorderly Breakup”

This essay discusses the 2004 merger between UNITE, a clothing workers’ union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union. Many labor scholars and union proponents believed that this merger would revive a dormant US labor movement and lead to great success in union organizing. Although much was expected, there was very little accomplished by this merger. While union mergers can either be amalgamations or absorptions, the UNITE-HERE merger took the former form. Although successful amalgamations usually occur when the two unions share a common jurisdiction, additional problems occur when the unions are dissimilar in size and type of members. The UNITE-HERE merger displayed none of these three above-mentioned characteristics. This essay also discusses issues of the centralization/decentralization of union mergers, the negotiation and promotion of such combinations, local union and national union mergers while concluding with a discussion of whether union mergers are an appropriate strategy for dealing with a struggling US labor movement early in the twenty-first century.

The Lessons of TPP and the Future of Labor Chapters in Trade Agreements

The agenda to link labor standards to trade agreements, in the hopes of improving working conditions in developing countries and preventing unfair labor competition for workers in rich countries, reached its culmination in TPP. Beginning with NAFTA and over a span of twenty-five years, labor standards became fully included in trade agreements and their violation subject to trade sanctions as means of enforcement. Thus, proponents of TPP offered it as the “gold standard” of globalization. This chapter argues that the debate about TPP, and the US labor movement’s opposition to it, made clear that this was not a story of success but of disenchantment. Unions in the US criticized TPP’s labor chapter for not going far enough, substantially and procedurally. But they also turned the focus to other chapters of TPP that may be just as or more important to workers in the US than the labor chapter: investment, rules of origin, procurement and currency manipulation. These areas have become the new frontier for labor advocates in trade agreements and they highlight the need to rebalance the treatment of capital and labor. The chapter argues that a significant, though overlooked achievement of TPP, was to encourage several TPP parties to enact domestic labor reforms using labor side agreements and US pressure. More than any ideal labor chapter, it was these domestic reforms that held the most promise for improving working conditions in Vietnam and Mexico. The US withdrawal of TPP has set those reforms back. Opposition to TPP has also made clear that the expected losses from trade in the form of job loss and wage decline will not be made palatable in the absence of effective safety nets and compensatory mechanisms at the domestic level. In fact, international trade reputation will continue to suffer and opposition to it harden without them. To the extent that the debate about TPP was a referendum about liberal globalization as we know it, opposition to TPP in the US has given a resounding no. A pressing question is whether there is an alternative to the nationalist retrenchment embraced by the Trump administration. The revival of TPP without the US, unfortunately, does not seem to chart a different path.

Collective Action and the Origins of the American Labor Movement

This article examines the relationship between collective action and the size of worker and employer groups in the United States. It proposes and tests a theory of union formation and strikes. Using a new county-by-industry level dataset containing the location of unions, the location of strikes, average establishment size, and the number of establishments around the turn of the twentieth century, I find that unions were more likely to form and strikes were more likely to occur in counties with intermediate-sized worker groups and large employer groups.

Connecticut Labor History in the Classroom

In May 2015, the Connecticut General Assembly passed Public Act No. 15 – 17, encouraging local school districts to teach the history of the American labor movement. This was the culmination of years of advocacy by teachers, union activists, and supportive legislators. Spearheaded by Steve Kass, a retired teacher, member of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and vice-president of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association (GNHLHA), this effort followed naturally from GNHLHA activities on the local level to document union history. As Kass testified before the General Assembly Education Committee, “The purpose of this legislation is to get labor’s untold story told,” citing a recent national poll finding that 54 percent of adults know “little” or “not much” about unions in the United States. Also, for the past several years, AFT Connecticut Secretary-Treasurer Ed Leavy testified in support of similar legislation at the state capitol. “Life as we know it today would be impossible without the contribution of organized labor,” Leavy told the legislature’s Education Committee in February 2015. “The men and women who struggled against deplorable working conditions, bias, and abuse deserved the right to be remembered,” he said.The key to this success was persistence in submitting the legislation each year and building allies over the years. “It took five legislative sessions, five years starting in 2010 and ending in June 2015,” noted Kass. The final version of the legislation needed to satisfy Republican legislators who wanted a “balanced perspective,” so the title of the bill was amended to “An Act Concerning a Labor and Free Market Capitalism Curriculum.” The added language called for “the history and economics of free market capitalism and entrepreneurialism, and the role of labor and capitalism in the development of the American and world economies.” This was an easy concession for labor historians, as recent scholarship has emphasized that the history of labor cannot be told without attention to the history of capitalism. This legislation added this subject to the list of other recommended topics, including the Holocaust and genocide education, the Irish Great Famine, African American history, Puerto Rican history, and Native American history.This act is not binding on school districts, but it does require the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) to provide teaching materials on these topics. Kass assembled a committee of labor historians and teachers to produce the materials. I wrote a short summary of the history of the Connecticut working class and the labor movement, and other committee members provided labor history materials for the CSDE. Steve Thornton, retired union organizer and compiler of Hartford local history through his website “The Shoeleather History Project,” delivered other Connecticut materials, while Professor Troy Rondinone of Southern Connecticut State University provided input. Stephen Armstrong, Social Studies Consultant for CSDE, prepared these materials for posting on the CSDE website. Together, the three presented teacher workshops on the topic at the Spring 2018 Connecticut Council on Social Studies conference. It is an ongoing project to inform teachers about labor history topics and suggest ways to embed those topics in the standard US history survey classes they teach.A key goal of the CSDE Social Studies curriculum is to use Connecticut examples of national history to allow students to appreciate where they live. Crucial to this effort is the ongoing work of historians to gather materials on local events. GNHLHA has been a local pioneer in this endeavor, aided in the beginning by Yale University’s David Montgomery and his crew of graduate students. It created and maintained a local archive of labor records curated by Joan Cavanagh, carried out oral-history projects, and mounted traveling exhibitions on New Haven garment workers and on the Winchester Repeating Arms Company factory. The Winchester exhibit is an excellent example of public history, telling the story of one employer and one factory and its interaction with the African American Newhallville neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century. See the Greater New Haven History Association’s website.LAWCHA itself is aiding these efforts on the national level, with its committee Teaching Labor’s Story, chaired by Professor Emerita Nikki Mandell, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. See its website, which includes a link to Professor Rosemary Feurer’s “Labor History Links,” including a comprehensive labor history chronology, bibliographies, and other teacher resources. LAWCHA urges everyone to use these resources and contribute to them, if possible.

Labor under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979 by Timothy Minchin

Labor under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979 by Timothy Minchin

Bread and Butter or Bread and Roses? Experimental Evidence on Why Public Sector Employees Support Unions

Despite their decline, unions, and especially public unions, remain important associations. Yet we do not have a good understanding of why workers voluntarily support and join unions. We report on a field experiment conducted during a 2017 Iowa teachers union recertification election. We randomly assigned union members voting in the election to receive emails describing union benefits and measured effects on turnout effort (N=10,461). Union members were more likely to try to vote when reminded of the professional benefits — but not legal protections or political representation — their union offered. A follow-up survey identified the specific benefits that members most valued and why. In a context where union membership and support is voluntary, our findings emphasize the importance of selective professional benefits. Our results have broader implications for understanding the American labor movement and civic participation. They suggest that public-sector unions may face a tension between political activities and offering excludable workplace benefits.

Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies Part 2

AbstractRecent scholarship demonstrates the enduring richness of labor historiography, but its overall popularity has declined in recent years compared to other areas of study. Part one of this two‐part study describes the industrial relations origins of labor historiography in the Progressive Era, the ways New Left scholars in the '60s, '70s, and '80s broadened its meaning to include the study of working class people both in and outside of workplaces, and the several controversies over how labor historians have, or have not, incorporated gender and race into their studies from the '80s to roughly the present. It demonstrated that labor historians remained committed to intersectional examinations of the past while deepening our understanding of workers' experiences in a variety of different settings, including factories, mines, service sector jobs, and homes. Moreover, part one illustrates that some of the most innovative approaches to the past—“history from the bottom up,” instances of militant rank‐and‐file activism, gendered divisions of labor, the challenges, failures, and successes of interracial unionism, and “whiteness” studies—were developed by labor historians. Part two examines important scholarly developments and political controversies since the late 1980s. It points out that some one‐time labor historians have shifted slightly to the right politically. Many have explicitly distanced themselves from the New Left generation's style of writing labor history. However, many continue to demonstrate enormous creativity, releasing studies focusing on public sector employees, unfree workers, sexuality, environmentalism, religion, race, international and comparative studies, and precarious labor. Given the escalating levels of poverty, widening inequality, and the insidious nature of exploitation in our society, labor historians continue to have a critical role to play in helping students make sense of the roots of many of society's most far‐reaching problems.

Resource Mobilisation and Precarious Workers’ Organisations: An Analysis of the Chilean Subcontracted Mineworkers’ Unions

Despite the poor working conditions, between 2003 and 2007 Chilean miners organised the longest and largest strikes in the country since the 1980s, obtaining one of the most important recent victories of the Latin American labour movement. This article uses this experience to illustrate the importance of the links between precarious workers and political activists. Drawing on 18 months of extensive fieldwork conducted at several mining sites in Chile, the article contends that the analysis of precarious workers’ organisations needs to consider workers’ access to different organisational resources, and the role that political parties’ militants play in such access, particularly in the Global South.

Faue, Elizabeth (2017) Rethinking the American Labor Movement, Routledge, New York, NY.

Faue, Elizabeth (2017) Rethinking the American Labor Movement, Routledge, New York, NY.

LAWCHA Approaches Its Twentieth Anniversary

Twenty years ago, LAWCHA started to come together. The field of labor history had been operating for decades without a professional organization in part because of the many state and regional labor history associations already active. But the times demanded something more. The AFL-CIO had made a left turn, and many scholars were looking for ways to bring activism and labor history together. A meeting was called for the October 1998 North American Labor History Conference in Detroit, which approved a constitution and bylaws that had been drafted by Roger Horowitz and Cecilia Bucki. An organizing committee set to work, and a year later LAWCHA held its first official conference and elected officers led by President Jacquelyn Hall and Vice President Joe Trotter.I have a couple of reasons for flagging this approaching anniversary. First, LAWCHA now has an official archive. The Reuther Library in Detroit is processing the first donation of records, covering our early years. I hope those who have saved correspondence and other relevant materials will contact Tom Klug about adding to the collection. Second, the twentieth anniversary is a good time to take stock and think about what has been accomplished and where we want to go next. Our website features a brief history of LAWCHA by Shel Stromquist and Bucki. I am borrowing from it.The past twenty years have been complicated both for labor movements and for academia, the two institutional complexes we represent; but LAWCHA has more than proved the wisdom behind its foundation. The founding mothers and fathers made key commitments that made the organization different in tone and reach from other historical societies. They defined the field broadly, understanding that labor and working-class history encompasses so much more than the history of unions. They adopted a strategy of collaborating with regional labor history organizations and supporting their conferences. And they made special efforts to support graduate students and young scholars, understanding that the future unfolds with them.Other decisions strengthened the organization. In 2004 this journal was founded by Leon Fink and others, and Labor quickly established a reputation for publishing top-quality articles and field-defining forums. In 2008 we began awarding the Herbert Gutman dissertation prize, and Cornell ILR School asked LAWCHA to cosponsor the Phillip Taft book award. After David Montgomery’s death in 2011, LAWCHA members raised the endowment funds for a second labor history book prize in his name that is cosponsored with the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Meanwhile, our website had become a scholarly and organizing resource featuring Rosemary Feuer’s Labor History Links bibliography and resources for teaching labor history in the schools. In 2012 Ryan Poe and Feuer began remaking our communication systems, adding the dynamic blog LaborOnline and a Facebook page and expanding listserv capacities.LAWCHA’s reach extends far beyond its membership, thanks to the culture of activism that has been our secret sauce since the beginning. Hundreds of labor historians make their voices heard both through scholarship and through public service. We are active in the OAH, the American Historical Association, the Urban History Association, Western and Southern History Associations, African American Intellectual History Society, and other professional organizations. We are active online, producing public labor history resources that are used by millions. We are active in our communities, writing op-eds and working on social justice initiatives. And we are active on our campuses, fighting to preserve workplace rights, academic freedom, and a model of liberal education that is a cornerstone of democratic societies.The dual scholar-activist model was sharply apparent this year when LAWCHA members collected a basketful of book and distinguished scholar prizes at OAH in addition to LAWCHA’s own awards. The list of prizes shows how their work has won the respect of scholars in multiple fields of history and rises to the very pinnacle of professional accomplishment. Congratulations to Eileen Boris, Linda Gordon, LaShawn Harris, Max Krochmal, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ryan Patrick Murphy, Heather Thompson, and Katherine Turk.LAWCHA has much to celebrate as the twentieth anniversary approaches and much to do. New initiatives by the Contingent Faculty Committee and the ad hoc committee working with independent scholars will be important. As will the Global Affairs Initiative and our evolving relationship with the International Association of Labour History Institutions. I write this in August, six months before you are reading it, so I have no idea what new challenges the Age of Trump will bring. But I do know that we will be busy doing what LAWCHA was designed to do: bringing past and present, scholarship and activism together, understanding that the struggles of working people in the past and around the world can be a guide and inspiration as we meet the challenges of the present.

Worthless Promises in Silicon Valley

10 | International Union Rights | 25/3 FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 Today Silicon Valley remains the fortress of the country’s most anti-union industry. High tech industry dominates every aspect of life. Its voice is largely unchallenged on public policy, because the workers who have created the valley’s fabulous wealth have no voice of their own. Corpora¬tions like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and National Semiconductor told their workers and communities for years that healthy bottom lines would guarantee rising living standards and secure jobs. Economists still paint a picture of the industry as a massive industrial engine fuelling economic growth, benefiting workers and communities alike. The promises are worthless. Today many giants of industry own no factories at all, having sold them to contract manufacturers who build computers and make chips in locations from China to Hungary. In the factories that remain in the valley, labour contractors like Manpower have become the formal employers, relieving the big brands of any responsibility for the workers who make the products bearing their labels. While living standards rise for a privileged elite at the top of the workforce, they’ve dropped for thousands of workers on the production line. Tens of thousands of workers have been dropped off the lines entirely, as production was moved out of the valley to other states and countries. Apple Corp. has cash reserves in excess of $1 billion, while San Jose voters are told that there is no money to pay for the pensions of workers who’ve spent their lives in public service. The productivity of industry in the valley went up in the 2000s by 42 percent. But at the same time, average annual employment went down 16 percent. The upper income stratum of the valley benefited from this productivity growth, but there was no corresponding growth in jobs. Between 2000 and 2010 the number of households with incomes under $10,000 more than doubled, from 11,556 to 26,310. But despite obstacles, for its entire history Silicon Valley has been as much a cauldron of resistance and new strategies for labour and community organising as it has been for the production of fabulous wealth. High-tech builds its anti-union model and workers respond The anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and ‘50s bred a fratricidal struggle in the US labour movement. This led to the expulsion of the union founded to organise workers in the electrical industry—the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). While the new high-tech industry was growing in the Santa Clara Valley, the union that could have organised it, had it retained its strength and members won in the 1930s, was severely damaged. In the rest of the labour movement, support for workers organising unions in the expanding plants virtually disappeared. From the beginning of the electronics industry in the late 1960s, high tech workers faced an industrywide anti-union policy. “Remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies… The great hope for our nation is to avoid those deep, deep divisions between workers and management”, said Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp. The expanding electronics plants were laboratories for developing personnel-management techniques for maintaining ‘a union-free environment’. Some of those techniques, like the team-concept method for controlling workers on the plant floor, were later used to weaken unions in other industries, from auto manufacturing to steelmaking. A co-inventor of the transistor and founder of an early Silicon Valley laboratory, William Shockley, espoused theories of the genetic inferiority of African-Americans. As Shockley, Noyce and others guided development in the Valley, they instituted policies that effectively segregated its workforce. In electronics plants women were the overwhelming majority, while the engineering and management staff consisted overwhelmingly of men. Immigrants from Asian and Latin American countries were drawn to the Valley’s production lines. Engineering and management jobs went to white employees. AfricanAmerican workers were frozen out almost entirely. Starting in the early 1970s, workers began to form organising committees affiliated to the UE in plants belonging to National Semiconductor, Siltec, Fairchild, Siliconix, Semimetals, and others. Most of these were semiconductor manufacturing plants, or...

Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies Part 1

AbstractTwentieth Century labor history is far reaching and has had a major influence on the historical profession. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most labor historians were economists, scholars responsible for describing industrial relations and labor as a movement. Beginning in the 1960s, twentieth century labor scholars, most of whom were trained as historians and influenced by the Civil Rights, anti‐war, and labor movements, began focusing on the working classes more broadly, highlighting the ways a wide range of workers, including men, women, and African Americans, lived their lives both on the shop floor and in their communities. Politically, most labor historians in this period wrote as leftists or liberals, and many sought to reach audiences beyond university seminar rooms. But labor historians, especially Marxist types, have faced many attacks from critics for supposedly paying insufficient attention to gender and racial issues. In general, these critics have overstated their cases, failing to appreciate the many pioneering studies by labor historians that examine gender and racial relations without losing sight of class divisions and struggles.

The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns

AbstractThe North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the $15 minimum wage to ground the analysis. By problematizing the place of the South in US labor, this article contributes to efforts to complicate the geographic imaginaries of the South and to our understanding of the contemporary labor movement's expansionary projects. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, I trace the abstract circulation of organizational resources, strategies, and tactics of the $15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.

In the footsteps of Counter Cultures: a study in productive interaction

ABSTRACTThis is a review of the literature that covers both American retail and American labor history, particularly focusing on the work of authors Susan Porter Benson, Nelson Lichtenstein, Peter Ikeler, Minna Ziskind, and Traci Parker. It argues that Lichtenstein, Ikeler, Ziskind, and Parker all drew upon Benson’s insight that retail and labor history have important intersections, and that by engaging with Benson’s work, all four historians made major contributions to our understanding of both disciplines.

Unions, workers, and wages at the peak of the American labor movement

We study a novel dataset compiled from archival records, which includes information on men's wages, union status, educational attainment, work history, and other background variables for several cities circa 1950. Such data are extremely rare for the early post-war period when U.S. unions were at their peak. After describing patterns of selection into unions, we measure the union wage premium using unconditional quantile methods. The wage premium was larger at the bottom of the income distribution than at the middle or higher, larger for African Americans than for whites, and larger for those with low levels of education. Counterfactuals are consistent with the view that unions substantially narrowed urban wage inequality at mid-century.