Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora Nancy L. Green, ed. University of California Press, 1998, 256 pp., $14.95 Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York by Nancy L. Green Duke University Press, 1997 …
Nothing characterizes the private-sector labor market in the United States more clearly than the ability to fire employees at will. “Sorry, you’re no longer needed here” sounds like the refrain of a classic American song. Those Europeans who oppose the …
Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison Century Foundation, 2000, 345 pp., $25 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison are two icons that progressive economists of my generation looked to …
Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II by Joshua B. Freeman The New Press, 2000, 393 pp., $35 I’m sitting here in sunny California poring over short-term rentals in downtown Manhattan. My wife stops short at a …
Hector Cuatepotzo, a waiter at the upscale Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, California, and an active member of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union, lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with his wife, Maria, six-year-old daughter, Ashley, and …
Four years after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, many government and media reports have declared welfare reform a success. They measure success by reduction in the number of those receiving welfare checks and to some …
Jack Metzgar’s Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, an excerpt from which appears below, is a combination of memoir, labor history, and meditation on the importance of unions in transforming the lives of industrial workers in the 1950s. It is the story …
The bastardized curse “may you live in interesting times” has a special poignancy for any organizer living in uninteresting ones. An “interesting time,” for better or worse, is one of upheaval—a period when large movements of ordinary people can create …
Just about every aspect of collegiate life can be leased for corporate profit these days. Increasingly, universities subcontract to large companies services they used to provide themselves; on campuses nationwide, corporate logos are becoming as ubiquitous as backpacks, as Barnes …
The Clinton administration’s 1993 decision to establish a Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations has opened a far-ranging debate about the U.S. collective bargaining system. Organized labor generally argues that its priority should be strengthening workers’ rights to organize …
Notwithstanding the vigorous economic upswing that began early in 1983 and continues at this writing, if at a slower pace, the American labor movement remains on the defensive. Its wage settlements have shrunk—in 1984, major collective bargaining contracts provided the …
A new cant phrase—”special interest”—has entered our political language. Politicians gravely declare themselves against it; television commentators toss the phrase about as if its meaning were transparent; and in this moment of spiritless conservatism there seems to be general agreement that the …
Political parties,” Gary Hart told the Alabama Legislature during the primary season, “must free themselves from the grasp of the special interests and once again address the country’s national interests.” There is no doubt that he struck a sympathetic chord …
In 1959, Congress passed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act, after extensive hearings into the corruption, dictatorship, and racketeering that existed in some major unions. The congressional goal, according to Senator McClellan, chairman …
in the autumn of 1935 President John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, recognizing that the political climate had created a unique opportunity for the unionization of the mass-production industries—and despairing of persuading the AFL craft unions to relinquish their …
