Download or read book New Immigrants Old Unions written by Héctor L. Delgado and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A steady depletion in the ranks of organized labor has often been blamed on the influx of undocumented immigrant workers. Their fear of apprehension and deportation by immigration authorities has fostered the belief that they "cannot be organized." Hector Delgado challenges this view in an intricate case study of a successful union campaign waged by undocumented workers in a Los Angeles waterbed factory. Relying on rich intensive interviews and personal observation, the author relates the story of a plant where undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America voted for union representation by a two-to-one margin. He describes how they negotiated a collective bargaining agreement in the face of stiff employer opposition. Despite conventional wisdom about the ability to organize such workers, Delgado finds that factors other than citizenship status determine the outcome of unionization efforts on behalf of undocumented workers. He cites the following as primary factors that promote or retard unionization: the commitment of unions to organize undocumented workers, their length of residency in the United States, their roots and social networks, the demand for their labor, and the relatively visibility of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles. New Immigrants, Old Unions contributes to our understanding of the experiences of contemporary American and Central American immigrants, their relationship to organized labor, and the meaning of undocumented status in their lives. Delgado's interviews with workers, labor organizers, and management reveal how and why this attempt to unionize was successful, and his findings confront the American labor movement's view of immigrant workers.
Download or read book Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development written by Gwendolyn Mink and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have American politics developed differently from politics in Europe? Generations of scholars and commentators have wondered why organized labor in the United States did not acquire a broad-based constituency or form an autonomous labor party. In this innovative and insightful book, Gwendolyn Mink finds new answers by approaching this question from a different angle: she asks what determined union labor's political interests and how those interests influenced the political role forged by the American Federation of Labor. At bottom, Mink argues, the demographic dynamics of industrialization produced a profound racial response to economic change among organized labor. This response shaped the AFL's political strategy and political choices. In her account of the unique role played by labor in politics prior to the New Deal, Mink focuses on the ways in which the organizational and political interests of the AFL were mediated by the national issue of immigration and links the AFL's response to immigration to its conservative stance in and toward politics. She investigates the political impact of a labor market split between union and nonunion, old and new immigrant workers; of dramatic demographic change; and of nativism and racism. Mink then elucidates the development of trade-union political interests, ideology, and strategy; the movement of the AFL into established state and party structures; and the consequent separation of the AFL from labor's social base.
Download or read book L A Story written by Ruth Milkman and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharp decreases in union membership over the last fifty years have caused many to dismiss organized labor as irrelevant in today's labor market. In the private sector, only 8 percent of workers today are union members, down from 24 percent as recently as 1973. Yet developments in Southern California—including the successful Justice for Janitors campaign—suggest that reports of organized labor's demise may have been exaggerated. In L.A. Story, sociologist and labor expert Ruth Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed for unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights. L.A. Story shatters many of the myths of modern labor with a close look at workers in four industries in Los Angeles: building maintenance, trucking, construction, and garment production. Though many blame deunionization and deteriorating working conditions on immigrants, Milkman shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Her analysis reveals that worsening work environments preceded the influx of foreign-born workers, who filled the positions only after native-born workers fled these suddenly undesirable jobs. Ironically, L.A. Story shows that immigrant workers, who many union leaders feared were incapable of being organized because of language constraints and fear of deportation, instead proved highly responsive to organizing efforts. As Milkman demonstrates, these mostly Latino workers came to their service jobs in the United States with a more group-oriented mentality than the American workers they replaced. Some also drew on experience in their native countries with labor and political struggles. This stock of fresh minds and new ideas, along with a physical distance from the east-coast centers of labor's old guard, made Los Angeles the center of a burgeoning workers' rights movement. Los Angeles' recent labor history highlights some of the key ingredients of the labor movement's resurgence—new leadership, latitude to experiment with organizing techniques, and a willingness to embrace both top-down and bottom-up strategies. L.A. Story's clear and thorough assessment of these developments points to an alternative, high-road national economic agenda that could provide workers with a way out of poverty and into the middle class.
Download or read book The Jewish Unions in America written by Bernard Weinstein and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.
Download or read book Immigration and American Unionism written by Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 2000 the AFL-CIO announced a historic change in its position on immigration. Reversing a decades-old stance by labor, the federation declared that it would no longer press to reduce high immigration levels or call for rigorous enforcement of immigration laws. Instead, it now supports the repeal of sanctions imposed against employers who hire illegal immigrants as well as a general amnesty for most such workers. In this timely book, Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., challenges labor's recent about-face, charting the disastrous effects that immigration has had on union membership over the course of U.S. history.Briggs explores the close relationship between immigration and employment trends beginning in the 1780s. Combining the history of labor and of immigration in a new and innovative way, he establishes that over time unionism has thrived when the numbers of newcomers have decreased, and faltered when those figures have risen.Briggs argues convincingly that the labor movement cannot be revived unless the following steps are taken: immigration levels are reduced, admission categories changed, labor law reformed, and the enforcement of labor protection standards at the worksite enhanced. The survival of American unionism, he asserts, does not rest with the movement's becoming a partner of the pro-immigration lobby. For to do so, organized labor would have to abandon its legacy as the champion of the American worker.
Download or read book New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor 1914 1924 written by Thomas Mackaman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were by 1914 doing the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in America's mines, mills and factories. The next decade saw major economic and demographic changes and the growing influence of radicalism over immigrant populations. From the bottom rungs of the industrial hierarchy, immigrants pushed forward the greatest wave of strikes in U.S. labor history--lasting from 1916 until 1922--while nurturing new forms of labor radicalism. In response, government and industry, supported by deputized nationalist organizations, launched a campaign of "100 percent Americanism." Together they developed new labor and immigration policies that led to the 1924 National Origins Act, which brought to an end mass European immigration. American industrial society would be forever changed.
Download or read book The Jewish Unions in America written by B. Ṿaynshṭeyn and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers' organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers' rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein's descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal's readable translation makes Weinstein's Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat written by Ruth Milkman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immigration has been a contentious issue for decades, but in the twenty-first century it has moved to center stage, propelled by an immigrant threat narrative that blames foreign-born workers, and especially the undocumented, for the collapsing living standards of American workers. According to that narrative, if immigration were summarily curtailed, border security established, and ""illegal aliens"" removed, the American Dream would be restored. In this book, Ruth Milkman demonstrates that immigration is not the cause of economic precarity and growing inequality, as Trump and other promoters of the immigrant threat narrative claim. Rather, the influx of low-wage immigrants since the 1970s was a consequence of concerted employer efforts to weaken labor unions, along with neoliberal policies fostering outsourcing, deregulation, and skyrocketing inequality. These dynamics have remained largely invisible to the public. The justifiable anger of US-born workers whose jobs have been eliminated or degraded has been tragically misdirected, with even some liberal voices recently advocating immigration restriction. This provocative book argues that progressives should instead challenge right-wing populism, redirecting workers' anger toward employers and political elites, demanding upgraded jobs for foreign-born and US-born workers alike, along with public policies to reduce inequality.
Download or read book Enrique s Journey written by Sonia Nazario and published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a boy who sets out with absolutely nothing to find his mother who went to the US from Honduras to look for work.
Download or read book Special Interest written by Terry M. Moe and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are America's public schools falling so short of the mark in educating the nation's children? Why are they organized in ineffective ways that fly in the face of common sense, to the point that it is virtually impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom? And why, after more than a quarter century of costly education reform, have the schools proven so resistant to change and so difficult to improve? In this path-breaking book, Terry M. Moe demonstrates that the answers to these questions have a great deal to do with teachers unions—which are by far the most powerful forces in American education and use their power to promote their own special interests at the expense of what is best for kids. Despite their importance, the teachers unions have barely been studied. Special Interest fills that gap with an extraordinary analysis that is at once brilliant and kaleidoscopic—shedding new light on their historical rise to power, the organizational foundations of that power, the ways it is exercised in collective bargaining and politics, and its vast consequences for American education. The bottom line is simple but devastating: as long as the teachers unions remain powerful, the nation's schools will never be organized to provide kids with the most effective education possible. Moe sees light at the end of the tunnel, however, due to two major transformations. One is political, the other technological, and the combination is destined to weaken the unions considerably in the coming years—loosening their special-interest grip and opening up a new era in which America's schools can finally be organized in the best interests of children.
Download or read book Integration Nation written by Susan E. Eaton and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Eaton has done invaluable work in documenting the revitalization of communities across the U.S. by immigrants and refugees” (David Bacon, author of Illegal People). In recent years, politicians in a handful of local communities and states have passed laws and regulations designed to make it easier to deport unauthorized immigrants or to make their lives so unpleasant that they’d just leave. The media’s unrelenting focus on these ultimately self-defeating measures created the false impression that these politicians speak for most of America. They don’t. Integration Nation takes readers on a spirited and compelling cross-country journey, introducing us to the people challenging America’s xenophobic impulses by welcoming immigrants and collaborating with the foreign-born as they become integral members of their new communities. In Utah, we meet educators who connect newly arrived Spanish-speaking students and US-born English-speaking students, who share classrooms and learn in two languages. In North Carolina, we visit the nation’s fastest-growing community-development credit union, serving immigrants and US-born depositors and helping to lower borrowing thresholds and crime rates alike. Giving a voice to people who choose integration over exclusion, who opt for open-heartedness instead of fear, Integration Nation is a desperately needed road map for a nation still finding its way beyond anti-immigrant hysteria to higher ground. “This useful book provides models for civic organizations that want to tackle immigration challenges, and it paints a vivid picture of some real successes.” —Publishers Weekly “Presents in discrete essays an array of compelling and persuasive regional efforts across the country . . . From Indiana to Georgia to Maine, these intelligent model programs should inspire others.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Immigrant Nations written by Paul Scheffer and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A defence of the meaning and function of borders and their necessity in the face of authoritarian attitudes to multiculturalism
Download or read book State of the Union written by Nelson Lichtenstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.
Download or read book Undocumented Migration written by Roberto G. Gonzales and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undocumented migration is a global and yet elusive phenomenon. Despite contemporary efforts to patrol national borders and mass deportation programs, it remains firmly placed at the top of the political agenda in many countries where it receives hostile media coverage and generates fierce debate. However, as this much-needed book makes clear, unauthorized movement should not be confused or crudely assimilated with the social reality of growing numbers of large, settled populations lacking full citizenship and experiencing precarious lives. From the journeys migrants take to the lives they seek on arrival and beyond, Undocumented Migration provides a comparative view of how this phenomenon plays out, looking in particular at the United States and Europe. Drawing on their extensive expertise, the authors breathe life into the various issues and debates surrounding migration, including the experiences and voices of migrants themselves, to offer a critical analysis of a hidden and too often misrepresented population.
Download or read book The Jewish Unions in America written by B. Ṿaynshṭeyn and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book New Labor in New York written by Ruth Milkman and published by ILR Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York City boasts a higher rate of unionization than any other major U.S. city—roughly double the national average—but the city's unions have suffered steady and relentless decline, especially in the private sector. With higher levels of income inequality than any other large city in the nation, New York today is home to a large and growing "precariat": workers with little or no employment security who are often excluded from the basic legal protections that unions struggled for and won in the twentieth century. Community-based organizations and worker centers have developed the most promising approach to organizing the new precariat and to addressing the crisis facing the labor movement. Home to some of the nation’s very first worker centers, New York City today has the single largest concentration of these organizations in the United States, yet until now no one has documented their efforts. New Labor in New York includes thirteen fine-grained case studies of recent campaigns by worker centers and unions, each of which is based on original research and participant observation. Some of the campaigns documented here involve taxi drivers, street vendors, and domestic workers, as well as middle-strata freelancers, all of whom are excluded from basic employment laws. Other cases focus on supermarket, retail, and restaurant workers, who are nominally covered by such laws but who often experience wage theft and other legal violations; still other campaigns are not restricted to a single occupation or industry. This book offers a richly detailed portrait of the new labor movement in New York City, as well as several recent efforts to expand that movement from the local to the national scale. Contributors: Benjamin Becker, CUNY Graduate Center; Marnie Brady, CUNY Graduate Center; Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer; CUNY Graduate Center; Kathleen Dunn; Loyola University; United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2013; Harmony Goldberg; CUNY Graduate Center; Peter Ikeler, SUNY College at Old Westbury; Martha W. King, CUNY Graduate Center; Jane McAlevey, CUNY Graduate Center; CUNY Graduate Center; Susan McQuade, CUNY Graduate Center and New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health; Erin Michaels, CUNY Graduate Center; Ruth Milkman, CUNY Graduate Center and Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, CUNY School of Professional Studies; Ed Ott, Murphy Institute, CUNY School of Professional Studies; Ben Shapiro, New York Communities for Change; Lynne Turner, Murphy Institute, CUNY School of Professional Studies.
Download or read book At the Edge of a Dream written by Lawrence J Epstein and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2007-08-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Lower East Side Tenement Museum book."
