Download or read book Tramps Trade Union Travelers written by Kim Moody and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of On New Terrain, a historical examination of why American workers never organized in early industrial America and what it means today. Why has there been no viable, independent labor party in the United States? Many people assert “American exceptionalist” arguments, which state a lack of class-consciousness and union tradition among American workers is to blame. While the racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class have created organizational challenges for the working class, Moody uses archival research to argue that despite their divisions, workers of all ethnic and racial groups in the Gilded Age often displayed high levels of class consciousness and political radicalism. In place of “American exceptionalism,” Moody contends that high levels of internal migration during the late 1800s created instability in the union and political organizations of workers. Because of the tumultuous conditions brought on by the uneven industrialization of early American capitalism, millions of workers became migrants, moving from state to state and city to city. The organizational weakness that resulted undermined efforts by American workers to build independent labor-based parties in the 1880s and 1890s. Using detailed research and primary sources, Moody traces how it was that “pure-and-simple” unionism would triumph by the end of the century despite the existence of a significant socialist minority in organized labor at that time. “Terrific . . . An entirely original take on . . . why American labor was virtually unique in failing to build its own political party. But there’s much more: in investigating labor migration and the ‘tramp’ phenomenon in the Gilded Age, he discovers fascinating parallels with today's struggles of immigrant workers.” —Mike Davis, author of Prisoners of the American Dream

Download or read book In Solidarity written by Kim Moody and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the leading intellectuals of the labor movement” explores the state of unions in the United States, as well as evaluating the forces working against them (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe). In this thorough collection of inspiring and informed essays, Kim Moody, one of the world’s most authoritative and recognized labor writers, asks key questions: What has happened to union organizing in the United States? Is there an alternative to the strike? How does the increased presence of immigrant and women workers change the balance of forces? What strategies can workers use to counteract company “union avoidance” campaigns and bureaucratic “business unionism”? What is the role of socialists in the labor movement? Drawing on his own background as a working-class radical, the works of Karl Marx, and the everyday experiences of nurses, miners, autoworkers, and more, Moody sketches a comprehensive picture of the state of US labor—and points the way forward for a rank-and-file union movement that can win real change. Praise for Kim Moody “One most of the most experienced working-class organizers in the US over the past few decades.” —Monthly Review “[His] books and articles have for more than forty years provided essential analysis and strategy for the labor left.” —New Politics

Download or read book The Tramp Printers written by Charles Overbeck (Printer) and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Carrying a union journeyman’s card, a few basic tools, and little else, these 'itinerant' or 'tourist' typographers criss-crossed the continent for more than a century, train-hopping from newspaper to newspaper, following the railroad tracks.... The tramps helped each other over the hard places and spread the craft of printing along the way. And by standing strong in solidarity, journeymen printers fought for the eight-hour day — and won." -- Publisher website.

Download or read book On New Terrain written by Kim Moody and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A detailed and provocative study of how capital has changed since the 1980s and its effects on the working class and political parties in the USA.” —Scottish Left Review On New Terrain challenges conventional wisdom about a disappearing working class and the inevitability of a two-party political structure as the only framework for struggle. Through in-depth study of the economic and political shifts at the top of society, Moody shows how recent developments in capitalist production impact the working class and its power to resist the status quo. He argues that this transformed industrial terrain offers new possibilities for organization in the workplace and opens doors for grassroots, independent political action strengthened by reemerging labor and social movements. From the logistics revolution to the unprecedented concentration of business and wealth in the hands of the one percent, On New Terrain examines the impact of the current economic terrain on the working class in the United States. Looking beyond the clichés of precarity and the gig economy, Moody shows that the working class and its own self-activity are essential in the global battle against austerity. “[A] masterful and much-needed book.” —Solidarity “Immediately shakes the reader by offering a hard hitting, concrete and sober analysis of the transformation of both the capitalist and working classes of the USA.” —Bill Fletcher, Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided “He explodes myths about the gig economy and the potential to transform the Democratic Party. Readers will put the book down convinced that there is a way for workers to win.” —LaborNotes

Download or read book An Injury to All written by Kim Moody and published by Verso. This book was released on 1988-11-17 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO’s conservative ideology of “business unionism” effectively disarmed unions in the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its post-war gains. With extraordinary attention to the viewpoints of rank-and-file workers, Moody chronicles the major, but largely unreported, efforts of labor’s grassroots to find its way out of the crisis. In case studies of auto, steel, meatpacking and trucking, he traces the rise of “anti-concession” movements and in other case studies describes the formidable obstacles to the “organization of the unorganized” in the service sector. A detailed analysis of the Rainbow Coalition’s potential to unite labor with other progressive groups follows, together with a pathbreaking consideration of the possibilities of a new “labor internationalism.”

Download or read book Citizen Hobo written by Todd DePastino and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

Download or read book Tramp Ships written by Roy Fenton and published by Seaforth Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 300 stunning photographs, this pictorial history of tramp trade ships illustrates the evolution of these charming, itinerant merchant vessels. The tramp ship was the taxi of the seas. With no regular schedules, it voyaged anywhere and everywhere, picking up and dropping off cargoes, mainly bulk cargoes such as coal, grain, timber, china clay and oil. Older and slower vessels tended to find their way into this trade, hence the tag 'tramp'—but new tramps were also built for the purpose. In this beautiful volume featuring 300 photographs, Roy Fenton illustrates the Tramp Ship’s evolution over the course of more than 100 years, from the 1860s, when the steam tramp developed from the screw collier, until it was largely replaced by the specialist bulk carrier in the 1980s. Fenton offers fascinating background information on the design and building of tramps. He describes the machinery, from simple triple-expansion turbines to diesel engines. Their operation and management and the life of the officers and crews are also covered. This illustrated history journeys through the last years of the 19th century, the two world wars, and the postwar years. Photo captions provide each ship’s dimensions, owners, and builder. Each ship’s career is outlined with notes on trades and how they changed over a ship's lifetime.

Download or read book The Long Deep Grudge written by Toni Gilpin and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles

Download or read book Walking to Work written by Eric H. Monkkonen and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 The Selected Works of Eugene V Debs written by Eugene Victor Debs and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extensive compilation of articles, speeches, press statements, and open letters by American socialist Eugene V. Debs, this book is the first in a five volume series that assembles much of Debs's work for the first time in a single place. The collection makes readily accessible approximately 150 documents by one of the pivotal figures in the labor movement. Illuminating nineteenth century working-class history, particularly the complex and shifting situation in the transportation industry, this volume provides a basis for deeper understanding of Debs and his role later during the glory days of the Socialist Party of America.

Download or read book The Train and the Telegraph written by Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.

Download or read book A Time of Gifts written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.

Download or read book Prisoners of the American Dream written by Mike Davis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study of class struggle in America asks: Why has there never been a mass working class party in the U.S.? “One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written—brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.” —Village Voice Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Download or read book The Cold Millions written by Jess Walter and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most captivating novels of the year.” – Washington Post NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg | Boston Globe | Chicago Public Library | Chicago Tribune | Esquire | Kirkus | New York Public Library | New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) | NPR's Fresh Air | O Magazine | Washington Post | Publishers Weekly | Seattle Times | USA Today A Library Reads Pick | An Indie Next Pick From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century. An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war? Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).

Download or read book Lonesome Traveler written by Jack Kerouac and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Beat writer, Jack Kerouac’s unique collection of personal travel writing, now reissued following his centenary celebration In his first directly autobiographical book, Jack Kerouac relates the exhilarating stories of the years he spent restlessly traveling and writing his acclaimed novels. He journeys from the California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City, and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. With echoes of landscapes that appear in his other novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, and featuring his distinctive exuberant style and “jazzy impressionistic prose” (New Yorker), Lonesome Traveler is a unique addition to Kerouac’s body of work. Show Additional Fields

Download or read book City of Refuge written by Marcus Peyton Nevius and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.