Download or read book African Americans Labor and Society written by Patrick L. Mason and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past twenty-five years, union participation has declined among the nation as whole. Coupled with increasing racial tensions, cutbacks in public programs at the federal, state, and local levels, and a shift in the distribution of wealth, these changes have undermined the standard of living for American workers' families, especially African American families, as they created greater wealth for the American elite. African Americans, Labor, and Society examines these changes, in particular their effects on the entire African American community, and suggests a move toward a more egalitarian future. This collection of essays, written by legal scholars, professional organizers, and economists, suggests integrating civil rights and labor laws to strengthen both anti-discrimination and union-organizing efforts. The volume demonstrates the negative effects for union workers of arbitration agreements that undermine civil rights legislation in the workplace. It also provides a detailed case study of the nature and extent of racial conflict within a major industrial union, and analyzes and suggests policy changes that would increase the political and economic power of American workers as a whole, while aggressively attacking racism in social, economic, and political institutions. African Americans, Labor, and Society presents strategies for creating better opportunities for African Americans through private sector employment that will appeal to legal, union, and labor students and scholars, as well as economists.
Download or read book Black and Blue written by Paul Frymer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline. The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement. From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
Download or read book Workers on Arrival written by Joe William Trotter and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class."—The Nation From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces the complicated journey of black workers from the transatlantic slave trade to the demise of the industrial order in the twenty-first century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America’s economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today.
Download or read book Black Americans and Organized Labor written by Paul D. Moreno and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Americans and Organized Labor, Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do -- control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions. Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. He traces changing attitudes and practices during the simultaneous black migration to the North and consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Maneuvering across a wide span of time and a broad array of issues, Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions. He impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.
Download or read book A Working People written by Steven A. Reich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, historian Steven A. Reich examines the economic, political and cultural forces that have beaten and built America’s black workforce since Emancipation. From the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights Movement and Great Recession, African Americans have faced a unique set of obstacles and prejudices on their way to becoming a productive and indispensable portion of the American workforce. Repeatedly denied access to the opportunities all Americans are to be afforded under the Constitution, African Americans have combined decades of collective action and community mobilization with the trailblazing heroism of a select few to pave their own way to prosperity. This latest installment of the African American HistorySeries challenges the notion that racial prejudices are buried in our nation’s history, and instead provides a narrative connecting the struggles of many generations of African American workers to those felt the present day. Reich provides an unblinking account of what being an African American worker has meant since the 1860s, alluding to ways in which we can and must learn from our past, for the betterment of all workers, however marginalized they may be. A Working People: A History of African American Workers Since Emancipation is as factually astute as it is accessibly written, a tapestry of over 150 years of troubled yet triumphant African-American labor history that we still weave today.
Download or read book Race Work and Family in the Lives of African Americans written by Marlese Durr and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family and work are major, integrally related dimensions of social life which affect the well-being and success of family members. As social institutions, family and work are also avenues where social inequality may be understood as a major element in the distribution of social, cultural, and economic resources and sites where inequality is perpetuated, negotiated, and contested. In this book, editors Durr and Hill focus on African Americans, navigating the terrain of race, work, and family, and examining persistent barriers to equality and ways in which Blacks have sought to become an integral part of the American economy.
Download or read book American Work written by Jacqueline Jones and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Jones's] painstakingly researched volume is an invaluable antidote to those who argue that our shameful past has no relevance to our perplexing present." --David Kusnet, Baltimore Sun
Download or read book Hirelings written by Jennifer Hull Dorsey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hirelings, Jennifer Dorsey recreates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities. As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers’ control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.
Download or read book To Joy My Freedom written by Tera W. Hunter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.
Download or read book Race and Labor Matters in the New U S Economy written by Joseph Wilson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful new work, Marable, Ness, and Wilson maintain that contrary to the popular hubris about equality, race is entrenched and more divisive than any time since the Civil Rights Movement. Race and Labor in the United States asserts that all advances in American race relations have only evolved through conflict and collective struggle. The foundation of the class divide in the United States remains, while racial and ethnic segregation, privilege, and domination, and the institution of neoliberalism have become a detriment to all workers.
Download or read book Slavery Freedom and Culture Among Early American Workers written by Graham Russell Hodges and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text consists of six chapters, all on the related subjects of black revolt, slavery, freemanship and labour. A short introduction organizes the collection and argues its importance for historians of early American labour, slavery, black studies and general history.
Download or read book Labor in America written by Melvyn Dubofsky and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gold standard of American labor history references, updated to include the latest political, social, and economic developments of the 2020s Labor in America: A History, Tenth Edition, is a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of the U.S. labor movement from the colonial era to the 2020s. Authors Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin have expanded and updated their landmark text, incorporating significant recent events and their implications for American labor. The book addresses the continuing and evolving challenges faced by American workers, critical developments in U.S. labor history, the impact of economic and political changes, and more. Dubofsky and McCartin offer nuanced analyses of workers’ collective actions, the formation of unions, and the role of labor in shaping American society. They provide a rich historical context and a detailed narrative of labor history for students, scholars, and laypersons alike. The authors also explain the likely impact of major contemporary trends on workers, including the rise of the gig economy, and discuss the most critical influences on modern U.S. labor. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and future of labor in the United States, Labor in America: A History will undoubtedly remain the gold standard in the field for years to come.
Download or read book Black Americans and Organized Labor written by Paul D. Moreno and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Americans and Organized Labor, Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do -- control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions. Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. He traces changing attitudes and practices during the simultaneous black migration to the North and consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Maneuvering across a wide span of time and a broad array of issues, Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions. He impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.
Download or read book How Blacks Built America written by Joe R. Feagin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Blacks Built America examines the many positive and dramatic contributions made by African Americans to this country over its long history. Almost all public and scholarly discussion of African Americans accenting their distinctive societal position, especially discussion outside black communities, has emphasized either stereotypically negative features or the negative socioeconomic conditions that they have long faced because of systemic racism. In contrast, Feagin reveals that African Americans have long been an extraordinarily important asset for this country. Without their essential contributions, indeed, there probably would not have been a United States. This is an ideal addition to courses race and ethnicity courses.
Download or read book Free Labor written by Mark A. Lause and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War. Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness. In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.
Download or read book Negro Labor in the United States 1850 1925 written by Charles Harris Wesley and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lessons from the Black Working Class written by Lori Latrice Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-10-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enables readers to better understand, explain, and predict the future of the nation's overall economic health through its examination of the black working class—especially the experiences of black women and black working-class residents outside of urban areas. How have the experiences of black working-class women and men residing in urban, suburban, and rural settings impacted U.S. labor relations and the broader American society? This book asserts that a comprehensive and critical examination of the black working class can be used to forecast whether economic troubles are on the horizon. It documents how the increasing incidence of attacks on unions, the dwindling availability of working-class jobs, and the clamoring by the working class for a minimum wage hike is proof that the atmospheric pressure in America is rising, and that efforts to prepare for the approaching financial storm require attention to the individuals and households who are often overlooked: the black working class. Presenting information of great importance to sociologists, political scientists, and economists, the authors of this work explore the impact of the recent Great Recession on working-class African Americans and argue that the intersections of race and class for this particular group uncover the state of equity and justice in America. This book will also be of interest to public policymakers as well as students in graduate-level courses in the areas of African American studies, American society and labor, labor relations, labor and the Civil Rights Movement, and studies on race, class, and gender.
