Download or read book Save Our Unions written by Steve Early and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they’re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor’s past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book’s insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform.
Download or read book Teacher Unions and Social Justice written by Michael Charney and published by Rethinking Schools. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.
Download or read book State of the Unions How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class Improve Our Economy and Regain Political Influence written by Philip Dine and published by McGraw-Hill. This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From steel workers, Teamsters, and coal miners to teachers, actors, and civil servants, union members once accounted for more than one third of the American workforce. At a mere 12 percent, union membership today is a shadow of what it once was. What happened to organized labor in America and what can be done to restore it to its role of the defender of middle-class values and economic well-being? Award-winning investigative reporter Philip M. Dine takes us on a riveting journey through America's cities and back roads, its factories and union halls, to answer those questions. From the health care crisis to massive job flight overseas, from rampant home foreclosures to illegal immigration, he clearly shows how virtually every major economic, political, and social trend impacting our way of life is tied to the state of America's unions. Combining a compelling narrative with expert analysis, Dine offers firsthand accounts of the union members striving to make their voices heard in a political landscape increasingly shaped by corporate interests, including how: The women of Delta Pride-a major player in the multi-billion dollar catfish industry-went up against generations of racial and economic prejudice Iowa's firefighters union flexed its collective muscle to score a major political victory in the 2004 caucus The American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO played a key role in bringing down the Iron Curtain The Teamsters enlisted community support to temporarily stop a move by Mr. Coffee to relocate to Mexico and saved nearly 400 manufacturing jobs in the Cleveland area A reporter who has covered labor for two decades, Dine not only details where labor has gone wrong, but he also offers sage advice on how it can adapt to a global economy to recover the ground it lost over the last quarter century.
Download or read book What Unions No Longer Do written by Jake Rosenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have explained the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do shows the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. For generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. What Unions No Longer Do details the consequences of labor's decline, including poorer working conditions, less economic assimilation for immigrants, and wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, resulting in a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.
Download or read book Plunder written by Steven Greenhut and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book More Perfect Unions written by Rebecca L. Davis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-31 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being. Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong. Americans care deeply about marriages—their own and other people's—because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.
Download or read book Organizing Matters written by Guy Mundlak and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.
Download or read book Union by Law written by Michael W. McCann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in the early 1900s, many thousands of native Filipinos were conscripted as laborers in American West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. There, they found themselves confined to exploitative low-wage jobs in racially segregated workplaces as well as subjected to vigilante violence and other forms of ethnic persecution. In time, though, Filipino workers formed political organizations and affiliated with labor unions to represent their interests and to advance their struggles for class, race, and gender-based social justice. Union by Law analyzes the broader social and legal history of Filipino American workers’ rights-based struggles, culminating in the devastating landmark Supreme Court ruling, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). Organized chronologically, the book begins with the US invasion of the Philippines and the imposition of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. The narrative then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they mobilized for many decades within and against the injustices of American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored in rejecting their longstanding claims. This racial innocence in turn rationalized judicial reconstruction of official civil rights law in ways that significantly increased the obstacles for all workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism and sexism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, Union by Law also tells a story of noble aspirational struggles for human rights over several generations and of the many ways that law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work.
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 Union written by Colin Woodard and published by Viking. This book was released on 2020 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge, for the first time, an American nationhood. Tells the dramatic tale of how the story of America's national origins, identity, and purpose was intentionally created and fought over in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Download or read book Why Unions Matter written by Michael Yates and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.
Download or read book There Is Power in a Union written by Philip Dray and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the nineteenth-century textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for the American bounty has shaped our national experience. In this stirring new history, Philip Dray shows us the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. His epic, character-driven narrative not only restores to our collective memory the indelible story of American labor, it also demonstrates the importance of the fight for fairness and economic democracy, and why that effort remains so urgent today.
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 Unions in America written by Gary Chaison and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2005-11-09 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unions in America provides a concise and current introduction to what America′s labor unions do and why they do it. In this engaging text, author Gary Chaison portrays America′s unions as complex, self-governing organizations that are struggling to regain their lost membership, bargaining power, and political influence. This accessible textbook offers an impartial overview of American unions that ranges from the struggle for recognition from employers in their earliest years to their present-day difficulties. Key Features: Provides a clear and unbiased view of unions, to present readers with an impartial perspective Offers readers a current assessment of unions with recent examples and descriptions of emerging or continuing trends in organizing, collective bargaining, and political action Provides a concise overview of unions that introduces readers to fundamental union activities without overwhelming them with too many details about alternative process, outcomes, and legal issues Covers a wide-range of important topics such as the evolution of unions; union structure and growth; union government and administration; the union as bargaining agent; union political activities; proposals for union revival, and insight on the future of unions Unions in America is an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate students studying unions and labor relations in a variety of fields including Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management, Economics, and Sociology. It will also be a valuable resource for workers, managers, or anyone else looking for a foundation for understanding the state of unions in America.
Download or read book Basic Guide to the National Labor Relations Act written by United States. National Labor Relations Board. Office of the General Counsel and published by U.S. Government Printing Office. This book was released on 1997 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Labor Unions written by Helen Marot and published by New York : H. Holt. This book was released on 1914 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Standing Up to Goliath written by Rebecca Friedrichs and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on Fox & Friends! Rebecca Friedrichs tells real-life stories that expose state and national teachers’ unions as the money and muscle behind the degradation of America’s schools and culture. In a book that’s both accessible and enlightening, Rebecca Friedrichs recounts her thirty-year odyssey as an elementary school teacher who comes face-to-face with the forces dividing and corrupting our schools and culture—state and national teachers’ unions. An exciting true story that features real life testimonies of teachers, parents, and kids, as well as political and social commentary, Rebecca’s journey leads her to the realization that the only hope for America’s schools and families is returning authority to parents and teachers while lessening the grip of state and national unions that: • Promote a culture of fear and bully teachers and parents into silence. • Undermine parents’ authority by sexually, socially, and politically indoctrinating kids. • Use the apple-pie image of the PTA as a “front” to promote a partisan agenda. These insights and more led Rebecca and nine other teachers to the US Supreme Court where their case, Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, et al., sought to restore the First Amendment rights of all teachers and government employees. They argued no one should be forced to pay fees to abusive, politically driven unions, and were poised to change the very landscape of American education—until tragedy struck. Saddened but unbowed, Rebecca started a national movement, For Kids and Country, leading the charge of servant leaders who believe Judeo-Christian values (including kindness) and restoration of the teaching profession—possible only by rejecting state and national unions and forming “local only” associations—are the answers to America’s woes. She invites you to join them. “America’s teachers, parents, and kids deserve better,” Rebecca writes. “If we want freedom, we’re going to have to fight for it.”
