Rights Contact Login For More Details
More About This Title Labor in America: A History, Eighth Edition
English
Even since the last edition of this milestone text was released six years ago, unions have continued to shed members; union membership in the private sector of the economy has fallen to levels not seen since the nineteenth century; the forces of economic liberalization (neo-liberalism), capital mobility, and globalization have affected measurably the material standard of living enjoyed by workers in the United States; and mass immigration from the Southern Hemisphere and Asia has continued to restructure the domestic labor force.
Yet even in the face of anti-union legislation, a continuing decline in the number of organized workers, and the fear of stateless, if not faceless terrorism—the shadow of “911” in which we still live, in preparing this new edition of his classic text Professor Dubofsky has hewn to the lines laid out in the previous seven in seeking to encourage today’s students of labor history to learn about those who built the United States and who will shape its future.
In addition to taking the narrative right up to the present, a recent history that includes the election of 2008 as well as the tumultuous blow suffered by the U.S. and world economy in 2008-09, this eighth edition features an entirely new (fourth) bank of photographs and, in light of the avalanche of new scholarly work over the last decade, a complete overhauling of the book’s extensive and critical Further Readings section in order to note the very best works from the profuse recent scholarship that explores the history of working people in all its diversity.
English
Preface ix
1. Colonial America 1
Life and Labor in the Colonies 6
Workers, Politics, and Revolution 15
2. The First Unions 20
Early Unions 23
Law vs. Labor 28
Growth of Labor Organization 30
3. The Workingmen’s Parties 33
Leadership 37
Political Action 42
4. Labor Strength in the 1830s 48
Union Growth 49
A National Labor Movement? 53
An Urge to Strike 54
An Employer Counterattack 57
The National Trades Union 60
The Decline of Unionism 64
5. The Impact of Industrialism 66
Industrialism, Technological Change, and Reform 69
Rebuilding a Union Movement 79
6. Toward National Organization 85
The National Labor Union 90
The NLU and Social Reform 95
Depression and Union Decline 99
7. An Era of Upheaval 102
Unrest and Conflict 103
The Great Railroads Strikes 106
The Haymarket Riot 110
8. The Rise and Decline of the Knights of Labor 114
Origins of the Knights of Labor 116
The Rise of the Knights 125
The Decline of the Knights 131
9. The American Federation of Labor 135
Triumph of Business Unionism 136
Samuel Gompers and the New Unionism 138
Emergence of the AFL 141
AFL Principles and Policies 145
10. Homestead and Pullman 149
The Great Pullman Strike and Boycott 154
Labor, Populism, and Socialism 161
Labor in Ebb Tide 164
11. The Progressive Era 166
Employers and Unions: A New Understanding 168
The Anthracite Coal Strike, 1902 170
Employers Fight Back 175
AFL and Political Action 180
Organizing Immigrant Workers 185
12. Thunder on the Left 189
The Wobblies 190
The Spirit of the IWW 194
The Lawrence Strike 195
Repressing the IWW, 1913-1919 199
The Meaning of the IWW 202
13. The First World War – and After 204
Postwar Labor Upheaval 209
Year of Strikes, 1919 219
Labor Militancy 218
14. Labor in Retreat 221
The American Plan and the Open Shop 225
Welfare Capitalism 229
Labor and Insurgent Politics 233
The AFL after Gompers 235
The Demoralization of Organized Labor 237
15. The New Deal 242
Section 7 (a) 243
A New Unionism and Its Limits 245
The Wagner Act 264
The New Deal Political Order 264
16. The Rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations 264
John L. Lewis and the CIO 268
The Impact of the CIO 281
17. Labor and Politics 286
War, Lewis, and the Election of 1940 292
18. The Second World War 303
The National War Labor Board 313
The 1945-1946 Strike Wave 317
A New Industrial Relations System 323
19. From Taft-Hartley to the Merger of the AFL and the CIO 325
AFL and the CIO 325
Labor, Taft-Hartley, and Politics 329
A United Labor Movement 337
AFL-CIO: A “Sleepy Monopoly” 342
20. Disappointed Hopes 344
Labor’s Decline 345
Corruption, Politics, and Labor’s Travail 348
Race, War, and Agricultural Workers 361
A Satisfied Labor Movement 364
21. Hard Times: Workers and Union, 1973-2000 365
An End to Economic Growth? 366
Restructuring the Labor Force 370
The Rise of Public Employee Unionism 374
Labor and Politics 377
The Crisis of Unionism 385
Lane Kirkland and Dashed Hopes 389
Union Troubles in Mass-Production Industries 392
Deregulation and Union Decline in Transportation 395
A Mixed Bag 397
A New Labor-Left Alliance 401
A Dim Future for Labor? 403
22. Hope and Despair: Workers and Unions Since 2000 405
Labor and Politics 405
A New Unionism 410
Hard and Dangerous Work 412
A New War Economy 414
Toward an Unequal Society 415
The Wal-Mart Effect 418
Labor’s Travails Cause Dissension 420
Triumph and Tribulation 425
Whither Labor? 433
Further Reading 435
Index 463
Photos Following Pages 32, 188, 324, 364
English
“However grim the present may seem for workers and the labor movement, their future—as the last half-century testifies—remains open. As has happened several times in the past, a revitalized labor movement may yet emerge in the course of the twenty-first century.”
—Melvyn Dubofsky
