In 1950 John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and leading operators representing the entire softcoal industry negotiated the first National Bituminous Wage Agreement. It was a triumphant moment for Lewis, culminating an entire career …
In this age of widespread ideological disenchantment, it is fashionable for political theorists to declare the demise of transhistorical “foundations” in political inquiry: to proclaim our rootedness in particular locales and to deny that it is possible to justify universal …
The events set off by Mikhail Gorbachev were welcomed by some and caused vexation to others. Among the latter were politicians, journalists, and scholars for whom the external fixity of communism was something of an article of faith. Gorbachev’s reforms, …
American management has always been vehement in its opposition to unions. This book demonstrates convincingly that whatever the reasons for this, the impact of unions on economic performance is not among them. America’s economic performance has declined relative to that …
It is easy to forget that there are still places like Hamlet, North Carolina . . . until something tragic happens to put them on our mind.” So the Washington Post informed its readers several days after a September 1991 …
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), contends Steven Fraser, “was a quintessentially political creature whose origins and fate were entirely bound up with the rising and receding of the `second New Deal.’” The career of Sidney Hillman provides Fraser, who …
What else does a man do besides keep house .. .and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work for fourteen months?” Harvey Swados asked in these pages in 1961, in his essay “The Miners: Men Without …
The economic reform urged upon the Soviet Union by the great international financial institutions reduce to three elements— macroeconomic stabilization, freeing of all but a few prices, and ownership reform. These are discussed in The Economy of the USSR, a …
After fifteen years in the trenches, one union organizer summed up management’s present attitude toward unions with tongue in cheek: “They’re mean to us.” As a description of the past decade, that’s a grand understatement. A great many employers in …
In the new television series “Sisters,” one of the main characters spends most of his time around the house in his bathrobe. He is not sick. He is not crazy. He is unemployed. Years ago, we would have imagined Archie …
A year ago almost everyone I knew in Boston was agonizing over how to be liberal when it seemed no longer really an option. Two men were running for governor of the only state that voted for George McGovern. One …
Over the last fifteen years American corporations have remained as competitive as ever. Their share of global exports has not significantly changed from what it was during the Carter years. The same cannot, however, be said of the competitiveness of …
It has been a rough few months for George Bush. Last summer the administration believed that the recession was caused by jittery consumers who quit spending because of the Gulf War. But the economic slowdown was not related to the …
Constitutionally entrenched individual rights have long been the subject of conservative ire. This is hardly surprising. Conservative notions of “law and order” and “family values” clearly favor the state at the expense of the individual. Buy why do we recently …
American unions have traditionally responded to changing circumstances. If sometimes belatedly, they have transformed themselves over the past one hundred years from craft-centered organizations with guildlike characteristics to powerful enterprises for organizing mass-production and semiskilled workers into huge industrial unions. …
