Download or read book American Vanguard written by John Barnard and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences. In this thorough and engaging narrative, John Barnard not only records the controversial issues tackled by the UAW, but also lends them immediacy through details about the workers and their environments, the leaders and the challenges that they faced outside and inside the organization, and the vision that guided many of these activists. Throughout, Barnard traces the UAW's two-fold goal: to create an industrial democracy in the workplace and to pursue a social-democratic agenda in the interest of the public at large. Part one explores the obstacles to the UAW's organization, including tensions between militant reformers and workers who feared for their jobs; ideological differences; racial and ethnic issues; and public attitudes toward unions. By the outbreak of World War II, however, the union had succeeded in redistributing power on the shop floor in its members' favor. Part two follows the union during Walter P. Reuther's presidency (1946-1970). During this time, pioneering contracts brought a new standard of living and income security to the workers, while an effort was made to move America toward a social democracy-which met with mixed results during the civil rights decade. Throughout, Barnard presents balanced interpretations grounded in evidence, while setting the UAW within the context of the history of the U.S. auto industry and national politics.

Download or read book Inside the Ford UAW Transformation written by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the partnership between Ford and the UAW, forged through more than fifty pivotal events, transformed their capacity to combine good jobs with high performance. In 2009, the Ford Motor Company was the only one of the Big Three automakers not to take the federal bailout package. How did Ford remain standing when its competitors were brought to their knees? It was a gutsy decision, but it didn't happen in isolation. The United Auto Workers joined with Ford to make this possible—not only in 2009, but in a series of more than fifty pivotal events during three decades that add up to a transformation that simultaneously values work and delivers results. The pivotal events—some planned and some unplanned; some at the facility level and some at the enterprise level –were not all successful. All had the potential, however, to further the transformation, and all provide insight into how large-scale system change really happens. The authors—each with years of experience with Ford, the UAW, and the industry—provide an unprecedented inside look at how core operating assumptions are shifted and at the emergence of integrated operating systems for quality, safety, and other aspects of the enterprise. It is a transformation built on a foundation of dignity and mutual respect, guided by a vision of combining good jobs with high performance.

Download or read book Not Automatic written by Sol Dollinger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sol Dollinger's remembrance of UAW's early days are juicy and provocative. His recall of those goofy internecine political battles within the union is tragic-comic. Yet they, united, even though hollering at each other, made GM, Ford, et al,recognize the union. The sequence involving Genora Johnson Dollinger, the heroine of the 1937 sit-down strike, is deeply moving and inspiring." --Studs Terkel "Should be read by every labor person who takes the principles of trade union history seriously. . . . Brings the history of the UAW up for a new survey of the events to include the men and women who would otherwise be unsung heroes or written out of history totally." --David Yettaw President, UAW Buick Local 599, 1987-1996 This story of the birth and infancy of the United Auto Workers, told by two participants, shows how the gains workers made were not easy or inevitable-not automatic-but required strategic and tactical sophistication as well as concerted action. Sol Dollinger recounts how workers, especially activists on the political left, created an auto union and struggled with one another over what shape the union should take. In an oral history conducted by Susan Rosenthal, Genora Johnson Dollinger tells the gripping tale of her role in various struggles, both political and personal.

Download or read book The Company and the Union written by William Serrin and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Built in Detroit written by Robert K. Morris and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1935. In the middle of the Great Depression, after months of unemployment, Ken Morris found a job at the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the toughest auto company in Detroit. He would eventually play a pioneering role in building one of the cleanest, most socially progressive labor unions the world has known-the United Automobile Workers. Bob Morris, Ken's son, tells not only his father's story, but also the UAW's story: the battles with companies, the struggles within the union, and then the vicious attacks on Detroit labor leaders in the late 1940s. He also provides portraits of early auto industrialists, their companies, their henchmen and the gangsters they hired to destroy the labor movement.

Download or read book American Automobile Workers 1900 1933 written by Joyce S. Peterson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1987-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. It covers changes in the kinds of workers who staffed the auto factories, developments in the labor process and in overall conditions of work, daily life outside the factories, informal responses of workers to routinized, monotonous, and highly structured work, and automobile worker unions before the creation of the United Automobile Workers. Although the 1920s were seen at the time as a period of peaceful and cooperative labor relations, author Joyce Peterson looks beneath the surface to discover the many ways in which auto workers expressed their displeasure with and attempted to fight against working conditions. The book also examines the Briggs strike of 1933, the first strike to significantly register the impact of the Great Depression upon the automobile industry and to mark the end of the pre-union era. The automobile industry was a model of twentieth century mass production techniques, of managerial organization, and of labor relations. Studying automobile workers in their historical and social setting explains a great deal about the nature of modern industry—how it affects the daily life and work of employees and how workers see themselves as individuals and members of a working class.

Download or read book The CIO 1935 1955 written by Robert H. Zieger and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) encompassed the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history. Robert Zieger charts the rise of this industrial union movement, from the founding of the CIO by John L. Lewis in 1935 to its merger under Walter Reuther with the American Federation of Labor in 1955. Exploring themes of race and gender, Zieger combines the institutional history of the CIO with vivid depictions of working-class life in this critical period. Zieger details the ideological conflicts that racked the CIO even as its leaders strove to establish a labor presence at the heart of the U.S. economic system. Stressing the efforts of industrial unionists such as Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray to forge potent instruments of political action, he assesses the CIO's vital role in shaping the postwar political and international order. Zieger's analysis also contributes to current debates over labor law reform, the collective bargaining system, and the role of organized labor in a changing economy.

Download or read book Buy American written by Dana Frank and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2000-04-07 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the election of Donald Trump, economic nationalism has re-emerged as a patriotic rallying cry. But are imports and “foreigners” really to blame for the disappearance of good jobs in the United States? Tracing the history and politics of economic nationalism from the American Revolution to the present, historian Dana Frank investigates the long history of “Buy American” campaigns and their complexities. This entertaining story is full of surprises, including misguided heroes, chilling racism, and more than a few charlatans. Frank helps reframe the debate between free trade, on the one hand, and nationalism on the other, to suggest alternative strategies that would serve the needs of working Americans—instead of the interests of corporations and economic elites—and that don’t cast “foreigners” or immigrants as our “enemies.”

Download or read book Autoworkers Under the Gun written by Gregg Shotwell and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The veteran autoworker and author of the pro-labor newsletter Live Bait & Ammo offers a blow-by-blow analysis of workers’ rights under attack. Greg Shotwell was a machine operator at General Motor’s Delphi division during its tragic spinoff from GM and eventual bankruptcy. He watched from a front-row seat as the United Auto Workers Union collaborated with antilabor policies that led to plant closings and cuts to wages and benefits. A dissident member of the UAW, Shotwell made a name for himself chronicling the outrages and absurdities of corporate managers and corrupt union leaders in his popular shop-floor newsletter, Live Bait & Ammo. Autoworkers Under the Gun collects Shotwell’s essential writings during that fateful period. These LB&A fliers quickly grew legs of their own, distributed by rank-and-file workers in auto plants across the United States and cited by industry analysts. Spanning a decade of autoworker resistance, this body of work stands as a call to action for a new generation of workers coming of age in recession-wracked America.

Download or read book The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 1945 1968 written by Kevin Boyle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UAW engaged in these struggles in an attempt to build a cross-class, multiracial reform coalition that would push American politics beyond liberalism and toward social democracy. The effort was in vain; forced to work within political structures - particularly the postwar Democratic party - that militated against change, the union was unable to fashion the alliance it sought. The UAW's political activism nevertheless suggests a new understanding of labor's place in postwar American politics and of the complex forces that defined liberalism in that period. The book also supplies the first detailed discussion of the impact of the Vietnam War on a major American union and shatters the popular image of organized labor as being hawkish on the war.

Download or read book Maurice Sugar written by Christopher H. Johnson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Johnson chronicles the life of Maurice Sugar, from his roots in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through his resistance with Eugene V Debs to World War I, and on to the struggles of the early 1930s to bring the union message to Detroit. It was Maurice Sugar, labor activist and lawyer for the United Auto Workers, who played a key role in guiding the newly-formed union through the treacherous legal terrain obstructing its development in the 1930s. He orchestrated the injunction hearings on the Dodge Main strike and defended the legality of the sit-down tactic. As the UAW's General Council, he wrote the union's constitution in 1939, a model of democratic thinking. Sugar worked with George Addes, UAW Secretary-Treasurer, to nurture rank-and-file power. A founder of the National Lawyers' Guild, Sugar also served as a member of Detroit's Common Council at the head of a UAW "labor" ticket. By 1947, Sugar was embroiled in a struggle within the UAW that he feared would destroy the open structures he had helped to build. He found himself in opposition to Walter Reuther's bid to run the union. A long-time socialist, Sugar fell victim to mounting Cold War hysteria. When Reuther assumed control of the UAW, Sugar was summarily dismissed. Christopher Johnson chronicles the life of Maurice Sugar, from his roots in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through his resistance with Eugene V. Debs to World War I, and on to the struggles of the early 1930s to bring the union message to Detroit. Firmly grounded on the historiography of the UAW, Johnson shows the importance of Sugar and the Left in laying the foundation for unionizing the auto industry in the pre-UAW days. He documents the work of the Left in building a Black-labor coalition in Detroit, the importance of anti-Communism in Reuther's rise to power, and the diminution of union democracy in the UAW brought about by the Cold War. Maurice Sugar represents a force in American life that bears recalling in these barren years of plant closings.

Download or read book United We Stand written by Thomas L. Weekley and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1996 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two top executives--one from the powerful United Auto Workers union and one from auto titan General Motors--offer a fascinating inside look at labor-management relations that profiles the most creative approach yet to TQM: a "Quality Network" that has revitalized both camps and holds promise for any unionized workplace. 25 illustrations.

Download or read book Race Against Liberalism written by David M. Lewis-Colman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit examines how black workers' activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. Tracing substantive, longstanding disagreements between liberals and black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action, David M. Lewis-Colman shows how black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working-class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. This chronicle of the black labor movement in Detroit begins with the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s, in which black workers' workplace activism crossed over into civic unionism, challenging the racial structure of the city's neighborhoods, leisure spaces, politics, and schools. By the mid-1960s, a full-blown black power movement had emerged in Detroit, and in 1968 black workers organized nationalist Revolutionary Union Movements inside the auto plants, advocating a complete break from the labor establishment. By the 1970s, the tradition of independent race-based activism among Detroit's autoworkers continued to shape the politics of the city as Coleman Young became the city's first black mayor in 1973.

Download or read book The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions written by Roger Keeran and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Communists and American labor raises three questions. Were the Communists legitimate (or good) trade unionists? Were they an important influence in the labor movement? Were they good Communists? These questions involve matters that go beyond the history of Communists in the auto industry. Consequently, this work does not provide the last word on them. Yet, raising these questions has a point. It enables the expression of views on these questions that differ from others that have been written about Communists and labor and what assumptions lie behind this work. Finally, this book refutes some commonly held ideas about Communists and labor. The introduction also discusses several problems of method: the identification of Communists and the reliability of Communist sources and oral history.

Download or read book Beaten Down Worked Up written by Steven Greenhouse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick

Download or read book The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford written by Beth Tompkins Bates and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

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