Download or read book Workers of the World Undermined written by Beth Sims and published by South End Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book blows the lid off the AFL-CIO's international efforts to forestall the formation of independent worker's organizations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe--an effort that harms workers both in this country and overseas.
Download or read book Making the World Safe for Workers written by Elizabeth McKillen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this intellectually ambitious study, Elizabeth McKillen explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's administration. McKillen highlights the major fault lines and conflicts that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. As McKillen shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.
Download or read book On the Job written by Celeste Monforton and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and leading the fight for today's workers For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface. On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country's most vulnerable—but essential—workers. Noted public health expert Celeste Monforton and award-winning journalist Jane M. Von Bergen crisscrossed the country, speaking with workers of all backgrounds and uncovering the stories of hundreds of new, worker-led organizations (often simply called worker centers) that have successfully achieved higher wages, safer working conditions and on-the-job dignity for their members. On the Job describes ordinary people finding their voice and challenging power: from housekeepers in Chicago and Houston; to poultry workers in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Springdale, Arkansas; and construction workers across the state of Texas. An inspiring book for dark times, On the Job reveals that labor activism is actually alive and growing—and holds the key to a different future for all working people.
Download or read book Civil Rights Unionism written by Robert R. Korstad and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.
Download or read book Industrial Workers of the World written by Industrial Workers of the World and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Solidarity for Sale written by Robert Fitch and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2006-01-23 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American labor unions have been, it turns out, shot through with corruption from their very inception. They never really had a Golden Age. From "Big Jim" Colosimo, the patron saint of Chicago's Mafia, to Brooklyn's Sammy "The Bull" Gravano a century later, organized crime has controlled huge swaths of the mainline labor movement. It still does. Impassioned, revelatory, prodigiously researched and reported, and thoroughly convincing, Solidarity for Sale shows how the American labor movement's decent ends are continually undermined by its tawdry means — a diet of daily corruption longer than the menu at a Long Island diner. By telling the untold histories, uncovering the covered-up scandals, and even recommending a way forward, Robert Fitch builds a devastating indictment and goes beyond it to show that union corruption, stagnation, and decline are not our national destiny. Labor could regain its needed place in American life. But it would require a set of reforms deeper than anything now being proposed; nothing less than a revolutionary overthrow of its culture of corruption and its replacement by a civic culture of accountability and consent.
Download or read book Making a New Deal written by Lizabeth Cohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how ordinary factory workers became unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s.
Download or read book Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies written by Seth M. Holmes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a substantive new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a current examination of the challenges facing farmworkers and the lives and resistance of the protagonists featured in the book.
Download or read book Can the Working Class Change the World written by Michael D. Yates and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of how the working class can mobilize as a force for change in the present day One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.
Download or read book A New Labor Movement for the New Century written by Gregory Mantsios and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays offers an inside view of the current state of American unions. Most of the contributors are prominent activists in the AFL-CIO, and their writings assess the state of the movement in the late 1990s.
Download or read book Institutions Unbound written by David Brunsma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutions--like education, family, medicine, culture, and law--, are powerful social structures shaping how we live together. As members of society we daily express our adherence to norms and values of institutions as we consciously and unconsciously reject and challenge them. Our everyday experiences with institutions not only shape our connections with one another, they can reinforce our binding to the status quo as we struggle to produce social change. Institutions can help us do human rights. Institutions that bridge nation-states can offer resources, including norms, to advance human rights. These institutions can serve as touch stones to changing minds and confronting human rights violations. Institutions can also prevent us from doing human rights. We create institutions, but institutions can be difficult to change. Institutions can weaken, if not outright prevent, human rights establishment and implementation. To release human rights from their institutional bindings, sociologists must solve riddles of how institutions work and determine social life. This book is a step forward in identifying means by which we can loosen human rights from institutional constraints.
Download or read book Democracy Promotion National Security and Strategy written by Robert Pee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the relationship between democracy promotion and US national security strategy through an examination of the Reagan administration’s attempt to launch a global campaign for democracy in the early 1980s, which culminated in the foundation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, and through an analysis of the early political interventions of the Endowment until 1986. A case study of the formation and early operations of the National Endowment for Democracy under the Reagan administration, based on primary documents from both the national security bureaucracy and the private sector, shows that while democracy promotion provided a new tactical approach to the conduct of US political warfare operations, these operations remained tied to the achievement of traditional national security goals such as destabilising enemy regimes and building stable and legitimate friendly governments, rather than being guided by a strategy based on the universal promotion of democracy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US Foreign Policy, Democracy Promotion and for those seeking to gain a better understanding of the Reagan Administration.
Download or read book U S Foreign Policy in Perspective written by David Sylvan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the long-term nature of American foreign policy? This new book refutes the claim that it has varied considerably across time and space, arguing that key policies have been remarkably stable over the last hundred years, not in terms of ends but of means. Closely examining US foreign policy, past and present, David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski draw on a wealth of historical and contemporary cases to show how the US has had a 'client state' empire for at least a century. They clearly illustrate how much of American policy revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them, representing a peculiarly American form of imperialism. They also reveal how clientilism informs apparently disparate activities in different geographical regions and operates via a specific range of policy instruments, showing predictable variation in the use of these instruments. With a broad range of cases from US policy in the Caribbean and Central America after the Spanish-American War, to the origins of the Marshall Plan and NATO, to economic bailouts and covert operations, and to military interventions in South Vietnam, Kosovo and Iraq, this important book will be of great interest to students and researchers of US foreign policy, security studies, history and international relations. This book has a dedicated website at: www.us-foreign-policy-prespective.org featuring additional case studies and data sets.
Download or read book Tough Liberal written by Richard D. Kahlenberg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard D. Kahlenberg offers a narrative on the man who would become one of the most important voices in public education and American politics in the last quarter century - Albert Shanker.
Download or read book Impasse in Bolivia written by Benjamin Kohl and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a study of the obstacles encountered by neoliberalism and market democracy in Bolivia. This book explores the problems faced by governments in reproducing global strategies at the national level, the tensions between markets and democracy, state restructuring, citizenship and property rights.
Download or read book Labor Politics in Latin America written by Paul W. Posner and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to remain competitive in the face of increasing globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers’ rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility—the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed—which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. In-depth case studies show how flexibilization as well as privatization, trade liberalization, and economic deregulation have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, leading to the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people’s interests effectively in the future.
Download or read book The Bolsheviks Come to Power written by Alexander Rabinowitch and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations in the West, Cold War animosity blocked dispassionate accounts of the Russian Revolution. This history authoritatively restores the upheaval's primary social actors-workers, soldiers, and peasants-to their rightful place at the center of the revolutionary process.
