Labor in America: A History

This book, designed to give a survey history of American labor from colonial times to the present, is uniquely well suited to speak to the concerns of today s teachers and students. As issues of growing inequality, stagnating incomes, declining unionization, and exacerbated job insecurity have increasingly come to define working life over the last 20 years, a new generation of students and teachers is beginning to seek to understand labor and its place and ponder seriously its future in American life. Like its predecessors, this ninth edition of our classic survey of American labor is designed to introduce readers to the subject in an engaging, accessible way. 

Preface

1. Conditions of Labor in Colonial America

Life and Labor in the Colonies

Workers, Politics, and Revolution

2. Varieties of Worker Resistance and the Emergence of the First Unions

Origins of Worker Organization

Early Unions

Law vs. Labor

Growth of Labor Organization

3. The Growth of the Market and Labor s Response

The Workingmen s Parties

Leadership

Political Action

4. Labor Organizing in the 1830s

Union Growth

A National Labor Movement?

An Urge to Strike

An Employer Counterattack

The National Trade Union

The Decline of Unionism

5. Free Labor in an Emerging Industrial Economy

Industrialism, Technological Change, and Reform

Rebuilding a Union Movement

The Coming of War

6. Toward National Organization

The National Labor Union

The NLU and Social Reform

Depression and Union Decline

7. An Era of Upheaval

Unrest and Conflict

The Great Railroad Strikes

The Haymarket Riot

8. The Rise and Decline of the Knights of Labor

Origins of the Knights of Labor

The Rise of the Knights

The Decline of the Knights

9.   The American Federation of Labor

Triumph of Business Unionism

Samuel Gompers and the New Union Model

Emergence of the AFL

AFL Principles and Policies

10. Labor Conflict and Economic Crisis in the 1890s

Worker Resistance and Industrial Conflict

Labor, Populism, and Socialism

Labor in Ebb Tide

11. The Labor Question in the Progressive Era

Employers and Unions Experiment with Accommodation

The Anthracite Coal Strike, 1902

Employers Fight Back

AFL Political Action and a Nascent Labor–Democratic Alliance

Organizing Immigrant Workers

12. The Rise and Repression of Labor Radicalism

The Rise of the Wobblies

The Spirit of the IWW

13. The Great War s Ambiguous Legacy

Postwar Labor Upheaval

The Last Throes of Postwar Labor Militancy, 1919–1922

14. Economic Change and Union Retreat in the Twenties

The American Plan and the Open Shop

Welfare Capitalism

The Failure of Insurgent Politics, 1922–1924

The AFL after Gompers

The Demoralization of Organized Labor

15. The New Deal

Section 7(A) and the Revival of Organizing

The Wagner Act

The New Deal Political Order

16. The Rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations

John L. Lewis and the CIO

The Impact of the CIO

17. Labor and the New Deal State

War, Lewis, and the Election of 1940

18. World War II

The National War Labor Board and Labor Politics

Wartime Racial Conflict

The Postwar Strike Wave, 1945–1946

A New Industrial Relations System

19. Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946–1955

Labor, Taft–Hartley, and Politics

The Purge of Labor s Left Wing

A United Labor Movement

AFL–CIO: A Sleepy Monopoly

20. Turbulent Years, 1955–1972

Onset of Organized Labor s Decline

Corruption and Deepening Conflict

Automation and Alienation

Labor, Civil Rights, and the Great Society

The Rise of Public Employee Unionism

War and Division

21. The Great Reversal: Workers and Unions, 1973 1994

Economic Crisis and Its Aftermath

Restructuring the Labor Force

The Rise of Conservative Politics and Neo–liberal Policy

Harbinger of Deepening Crisis: Mass production and Transportation

22.  Workers and Unions at the Millennium

Rising Resistance and Its Limitations

A Change of Direction for Labor

Economic Troubles, Political Setbacks, and War

Improvising in Difficult Times

Walmart, the Fissured Workplace, and Weakened Regulation

Dissension, Schism, and Political Breakthrough

23.  An Uncharted Path

Bailouts, Job Insecurity, and Lowered Labor Standards

Toward an Unequal Society

The Obama Presidency s Mixed Legacy

A Renewed Assault on Unions and Collective Bargaining

Death Throes or Birth Pangs?

Further Reading

Index

Melvyn Dubofsky,a historian of US working–class history whose body of work focuses on the 1870s to the present, is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at Binghamton University–SUNY.

Joseph A. McCartin, a historian of the US labor movement and 20th–century US social and political history, is a Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1999. His research focuses on the intersection of labor organization, politics, and public policy.