Book Description
A collection of essays on workers' efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to assert control over the processes of production in US. It describes the development of management techniques and includes discussions of various worker and union responses to unemployment.
Customer Reviews:
A Contemporary Classic.......2007-05-06
This is a wonderful book on the breakdown of workers control over both the shop floor and the production process in the United States. The story begins in the post-civil war era when skilled/craft produciton still held sway. Via the influence of craft unions (most notably Gompers' American Federation of Labor and its numerous national unions) workers in many industries (Montgomery focuses heavily on machinists here) were able to hold great influence over the production process. Due to their high level of skill, and knowledge of their craft - generated a kind of structural leverage - craft unions were able to develop "cooperative" relationship with captial. However, between the 1880s and the 1900s increasing capital competition led to an employer offensive on worker's influece of the production process as a means of reducing costs, gaining control over the workplace, and augmenting profits. Their main aim was then to take the knowledge of the produciton process that the workers possessed and rationalize it - that is break it down into simple units, deskilling the particular work of the given craft...and the story goes on.
This is a higly recommended piece of labor history, one that would be well read in addition to Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital."
Book Description
Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policiesâencouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and societyâproduced an economic boom that some have hailed as a âmiracleâ to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment.
Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economyâincluding textiles and copperâand industries that have expanded more recentlyâincluding fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chilesâone increasingly rich, the other still mired in povertyâthese essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.
Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn
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- The voice of a "descamisada"
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Doña María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Latin America Otherwise)
Daniel James , and
Daniel James
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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ASIN: 082232492X |
Book Description
In this remarkable book historian Daniel James presents the gripping, poignant life-story of Doña MarÃa Roldán, a woman who lived and worked for six decades in the meatpacking community of Berisso, Argentina. A union activist and fervent supporter of Juan and Eva Perón, Doña MarÃa’s evocative testimony prompts James to analyze the promise and problematic nature of using oral sources for historical research. The book thus becomes both fascinating narrative and methodological inquiry.
Doña MarÃa’s testimony is grounded in both the local context (based on the author’s thirteen years of historical and ethnographic research in Berisso) and a broader national narrative. In this way, it differs from the dominant genre of women’s testimonial literature, and much recent ethnographic work in Latin America, which have often neglected historical and communal contextualization in order to celebrate individual agency and self-construction. James examines in particular the ways that gender influences Doña MarÃa’s representation of her story. He is careful to acknowledge that oral history challenges the historian to sort through complicated sets of motivations and desiresâthe historian’s own wish to uncover âthe truthâ of an informant’s life and the interviewee’s hope to make sense of her or his past and encode it with myths of the self. This work is thus James’s effort to present his research and his relationship with Doña MarÃa with both theoretical sophistication and recognition of their mutual affection.
While written by a historian, Doña MarÃa’s Story also engages with concerns drawn from such disciplines as anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism. It will be especially appreciated by those involved in oral, Latin American, and working-class history.
Customer Reviews:
The voice of a "descamisada".......2003-01-09
In the famous musical EVITA, Eva Peron sings to her followers, the "descamisados" (Spanish for "the shirtless ones"). Dona Maria, the subject of DONA MARIA'S STORY, was a real life descamisada. She was a follower of Juan and Eva Peron. Therefore, I believe this is an important book because this is the first time an account of someone who was actually there - someone favorable to the Perons - has been the subject of a widely available book in the United States. As Dona Maria points out, very rarely do we in the United States hear anything positive about the Perons, especially where Evita is concerned.
DONA MARIA'S STORY is not always an easy read, however. That is due in part to the fact that it is mostly based on the author's interviews with Dona Maria, which were conducted in Spanish and then translated into English. As is almost always the case, some things are lost in the translation (Dona Maria refers to Evita's bravery and humanity, commenting that she was not afraid to visit the very poor in the slums "where everything was full of puss"). But what does come through vibrantly is the tight-knit working class community of Barisso that Dona Maria spent most of her life in, as well as the intense emotions that the "descamisados" had - and still have - for Juan and Eva Peron. The author mentions attending political rallies and seeing images of the Perons everywhere, and being both moved and a little frightened by the intensity of the emotion aroused.
The bittersweet aspect to the story is that the memory of the Perons, and therefore the rhetorical sweep of Peronism, is largely being relegated to the realm of nastalgia, being compressed into a mythic golden age (rather than having evolved into a present objective reality). The danger in this is that the younger generations are not as enthralled because they didn't experience the Perons firsthand. The author reasons that it was the job of the monuments to the Perons that stand in the town square to pass on the legacy of Peronist magic, but it may not be working. The younger generation of Argentines are perhaps as familiar with Madonna's version of "Evita" as they are with the real historical woman who at one time was the most powerful woman in their country and all of Latin America.
I was very moved by DONA MARIA'S STORY.
Book Description
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State brings together new research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago have gathered both well-known and emerging scholars to demonstrate how the actions and ideas of rural workers, peasants, migrants, and women formed an integral part of the growth of the export economies of the era and to examine the underacknowledged impact such groups had on the shaping of national histories.
Responding to the fact that the more common, elite-centered ânationalâ histories distort or erase the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, popular consciousness, and identity, contributors to this volume correct this imbalance by moving these previously overlooked issues to the center of historical research and analysis. In so doing, they describe how these marginalized working peoples of the Hispanic Caribbean Basin managed to remain centered on not only class-based issues but on a sense of community, a desire for dignity, and a struggle for access to resources. Individual essays include discussions of plantation justice in Guatemala, highland Indians in Nicaragua, the effects of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador, banana workers in Honduras, sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico, the Cuban sugar industry, agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, and finally, potential directions for future research and historiography on Central America and the Caribbean.
This collection will have a wide audience among Caribbeanists and Central Americanists, as well as students of gender studies, and labor, social, Latin American, and agrarian history.
Contributors. Patricia Alvarenga, Barry Carr, Julie A. Charlip, Aviva Chomsky, Dario Euraque, Eileen Findlay, Cindy Forster, Jeffrey L. Gould, Lowell Gudmundson, Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Francisco Scarano, Richard Turits
Book Description
Between 1802 and 1902, over 2000 Irish emigrants, mainly Catholics from Ulster, relocated to northern Delaware, where they found steady employment in E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company's black powder yards. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts, perhaps best described as sincere paternalists, provided a host of benefits, including assisted migration, free or low-cost housing, interest-bearing savings accounts, and widows' pensions. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same.
These generally peaceable labor relations underscore Mulrooney's innovative exploration of cultural identity. Employing a wide array of sources, she turns away from worksite and instead turns to the domestic sphere as, "broadly defined to include everything from labor relations, emigration patterns, religious beliefs, and gender roles to attitudes about housing, consumer goods, yards, and foodways." Her research reveals that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.
Customer Reviews:
Can working class solidarity reemerge?.......2000-09-23
For the author the working class for its own wellbeing must be unified against the predations and exploitations of employers. The book focuses on the historical existence and effectiveness of worker solidarity as primarily exercised through unions.
The need for working class solidarity arose as formerly independent craftsmen were forced into a factory system producing for an expansive capitalistic market and in the process lost control of their economic lives. Worker organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the Wobblies, and craft-based unions attempted to address this transformation and the accompanying brutal working conditions. Le Blanc clearly outlines their struggles: the extreme cyclic nature of late 19th century capitalism undercut worker militancy; racial, ethnic, religious, gender and skill differences undermined solidarity; employers mounted intense and often violent opposition with state support.
A main theme of the book is the effect on worker solidarity when union bureaucrats seek accommodation with business or rely on the state for survival. Gompers, first president of the AFL, eschewed worker militance in cooperating with the National Civic Federation and then the Wilson administration during WWI. Later, New Deal labor legislation as elaborated and implemented by the War Labor Board of WWII essentially prohibited workers from any exercise of power on shop-floors. Union leaders demonstrated a willingness to purge dissidents, pandering to red-scare mania, and to enforce contracts that traded economic gains for union members in exchange for unchallenged management control of workplaces - an unspoken social compact that has been shredded in the era of globalization.
The author points to some recent developments within and outside the labor movement as a result of the recognition of the poverty of post-WWII labor leadership. But a weakness of the book, since it purports to discuss the working class, is any real feel for the general citizenry's views on the need for worker activism. What have been the effects of consumerism and of the stunted and stilted information provided by media giants on the American public? Overall the book is a reasonably good introduction as to how the working class has fared over the last 150 years. Though not a fault of the author, the future of the working class emerges from this book as a very precarious project.
Too short, but great bibliography.......2000-04-12
As a grad student in American History, I hoped this book would give me a brief but useful overview of the role of labor in history. While this is definitely a "short" work, it highlights late 19th and early 20th century labor movements at the expense of early material. Indeed, he only devotes 20 pages for the colonial period, Revolution, and all pre-Civil War developments! How stingy!
My disappointment is partially a measure of my interest in Revolutionary history and the shift from artisans to wage laborers. This early material is both fascinating and relevant for all sorts of later trends. If you share my interests, I recommend you run an Amazon search on authors such as Bruce Laurie, Merritt Roe Smith (a bit later but really interesting), Charles Dew, and Gordon Wood, to name a few. If you are interested in post-Civil War developments, this book may be just right for you: it is concise and easy to read, in spite of more than a few small errors. This is no more than an introduction and survey, but it can bring you up to speed on basic concepts very quickly.
I was very pleasantly surprised by Le Blanc's 22 page bibliographic essay and 19 page glossary. (He also includes a timeline and chronology, if you're into that sort of thing.) These sections are very useful as a quick reference while reading the book and afterward. The bibliographic essay points you to a broad spectrum of movies, documentaries, and books that should satisfy anyone's interests and needs (I can't wait to rent "On the Waterfront" and "Roger and Me" -- they sound great).
Book Description
This book analyzes the relationship between Peronism and the Argentine working class from the foundation of the Peronist movement in the mid 1940s to the overthrow of Peron's widow in 1976. It presents an account of such crucial issues as the role of the Peronist union bureaucracy and the impact of the Peronist ideology on workers. Drawing on a variety of untapped sources, Daniel James confronts many of the dominant myths that have surrounded the movement. He argues that its role in containing working-class militancy cannot be explained solely in terms of manipulation, corruption, or union gangsterism.
Customer Reviews:
Blurring the line between Unions and the National State.......2000-05-05
Peronism managed to control the Union movement in Argentina. Working from the national state, Perón moved to legalize long-sought rights of Argentine workers (like paid yearly vacations). He also took the time to crush or isolate any dissent with him within the Union movement. And guaranteed to the Union "bosses" some privileges (like having only one Union legalized for each kind of workers).
The book tells the story.
Average customer rating:
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By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America
Nicholas K. Bromell
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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ASIN: 0226075559 |
Book Description
The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, and the challenge to slavery fueled an anxious debate about the meaning and value of work in antebellum America.
In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Bromell argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labor of writing and such bodily labors as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering, and farming. Combining literary and social history, canonical and noncanonical texts, primary source material, and contemporary theory, Bromell establishes work as an important subject of cultural criticism.
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Samuel G. Freedman traces the story of three families to show how America moved from supporting New Deal policies to cheering the end of big government. It's an effective vehicle that brings a real-life, personal look to a generational sweep of American politics. The families started out as hard-working immigrants--one Irish, one Italian, one Polish--and became, by the third generation, professionals active in conservative politics. How does a family make the transformation from one that couldn't have survived the Great Depression without the W.P.A. or bought a house without the G.I. Bill to one that has turned against welfare? Read this fascinating account and find out.
Customer Reviews:
One of the best books on American political history. .......2007-07-28
The Wall Street Journal publishes a list of Five Best Books every Saturday. On 30 June 2007, they asked David Gelernter, an author who has written about American history, to name five of the books he felt were representative of the best histories about our nation. The Inheritance was one of the five, and I am very impressed with the depth and breadth of the author's research on the subject of political change. The character studies are excellent, and he brings many diverse thoughts and movements together to show how politics has changed America. I have learned more about American politics in this book than in many others, and I am very interested in it. I can't tell whether the author is liberal or conservative, because he skewers both political parties with equal relish. The other books listed by Mr. Gelernter are: 1. On Two Wings, by Michael Novak; 2. Fields of Battle, by John Keegan; 3. The Religion of Abraham Lincoln, by William J. Wolf; 4. The Two-Ocean War, by Samuel Eliot Morrison; and lastly, 5. The Inheritance, by Samuel G. Freeman. Having read every one of them now, I think these are quite representative of the American character and history.
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The New Women's Labor History (Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas)
Eileen Boris
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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ASIN: 0822366584 |
Book Description
The New Women’s Labor History, a special issue of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, offers the newest scholarship in the field of women’s labor history. The product of a spirited international conference on women’s labor history held at the University of Toronto in 2005, the issue suggests new directions for labor historyâones that address the study of gendered bodies at the intersections of politics of class, race, and citizenship.
Contributors to this issue include some of the field’s most respected senior scholars, as well as younger ones who represent the future of the field. The issue includes a âkeynoteâ theoretical essay on the intersections of class, gender, and consumerism by renowned labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Another essay highlights the effects of work on laboring female bodies and promotes women’s work in both rural and service industries. Other essays cover both new and reinterpreted topics, addressing indigenous women’s labors; flight attendant unionism; the relationship among gender, class, and illness; the gendered meaning of disability in a working-class community; and the origins of the civil rights movement in African American women’s job struggles during World War II.
Contributors. Kathleen M. Barry, Eileen Boris, Cortney Davis, Nancy M. Forestell, Laurie B. Green, Esyllt Jones, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paige Raibmon
Books:
- A History of the Federal Reserve, Vol. 1: 1913-1951
- A Nation at Work: The Heldrich Guide to the American Workforce (The Rutgers Series in Employment Policy)
- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
- Age Works: What Corporate America Must Do to Survive the Graying of the Workforce
- Age Works: What Corporate America Must Do to Survive the Graying of the Workforce
- Airline Deregulation and Laissez-Faire Mythology
- AMERICA, WHY I LOVE HER : " United We Stand, divided We Fall, were Americans, and that says it all" John Wayne
- At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict
- Beauty For Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing (Revised Edition)
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