Labor Relations

The government constantly attacks unions, CEOs devote endless time and resources to undermining them, and many unions themselves are stuck in the past. Despite this, inspiring work is happening all the time, from fast food strikes and climate change campaigning to the modernization of unions for the digital age. Speaking to academics, experts and grassroots organizers from TUC, UNISON, ACORN, IWGB and more, Eve Livingston explores how young workers are organizing to demand fair workplaces, and reimagines what an inclusive union movement that represents us all might look like.

Workers talk about the lives they lived, the battles they fought, the union they built, and the history they made. The United Auto Workers' Ford Local No. 600 was not only the biggest local union in the world, it was also one of the most militant, radical, yet democratic unions in the United States. Talking Union gives us the exceptional opportunity to hear members of this local tell about their activism as they experienced it.

When Wisconsin became the first state in the nation in 1959 to let public employees bargain with their employers, the legislation catalyzed changes to labor laws across the country. In March 2011, when newly elected governor Scott Walker repealed most of that labor law and subsequent ones - and then became the first governor in the nation to survive a recall election fifteen months later - it sent a different message. Both times, Wisconsin took the lead, first empowering public unions and then weakening them.

Linda Chavez, President George W. Bush’s original choice for Secretary of Labor and a former union official, is one of the foremost authorities on America’s labor unions. Now, in the explosive new book Betrayal, she and fellow union expert Daniel Gray expose the corrupt bargain between the labor movement and the Democratic Party.

To ArcelorMittal Steel, Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the listener inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place.

The movement for a shorter workweek that once defined the labor movement in the United States was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the changes that occurred within organized labor and traces their influence on the decline of the shorter hour's movement.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement - especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations - and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration.

You can't have a healthy economy with an unhealthy work force. Work Less proposes ways to reduce work hours and keep workers happier, healthier, and more productive.

"Lavoro: cambia tutto." Quante volte lo abbiamo sentito dire sulla scia delle grandi trasformazioni che hanno investito il mondo produttivo. Eppure in Italia le dinamiche del rapporto lavorativo restano ancorate a vecchi concetti padronali, anche quando non di padroni/proprietari si parla ma di capi, capetti, manager e direttori delle risorse umane, che della mentalità e dei comportamenti padronali hanno preso tutto il peggio.

Wie wollen und werden wir zukünftig arbeiten? Die tradierten Modelle funktionieren nicht mehr: Während die einen von ihrer Erwerbsarbeit kaum leben können, leiden viele Bereiche unter Arbeits- und Fachkräftemangel. Arbeit ist zudem eine Frage der Solidarität: Der Applaus für "systemrelevante Berufe" war von kurzer Dauer, die Care-Arbeit - vor allem von Frauen - hält das System am Laufen, wird aber weder angemessen entlohnt noch gesellschaftlich gewürdigt. Für die "Generation Z" zählt Work-Life-Balance mehr als die 40-Stunden-Woche.

Die erste umfassende kritische Darstellung von Bill Gates und seiner Stiftung. Der Imagewechsel vom skrupellosen Kapitalisten und rücksichtslosen Microsoft-Chef zum wohltätigen Gutmenschen ist Bill Gates mit Bravour gelungen. Eine fundierte kritische Berichterstattung über den vermeintlich größten Philanthropen unserer Zeit und seine Stiftung, die »Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation«, gibt es jedoch nicht. In seinem Enthüllungsbuch räumt der Journalist Tim Schwab mit dem Bild von Bill Gates als Wohltäter auf.

The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism.

The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide paid family leave at the national level for either men or women. In the more than two decades since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to expand family leave benefits nationally. However, in the United States, it is common for innovations in family policies to arise at the state level.

The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America?

Accenture wins a lot of awards and portrays itself as the perfect company, but perhaps Accenture seems too good to be true. After all, the company promised "market relevant" and "performance based" to its Austin call center agents, but it did not follow through.

In the 1950s manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of US income. Over the past 55 years that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent at the same time that real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing's share of the US economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy.

In this urgently important book, Zelnick looks past the good intentions to how affirmative action really works in such areas as voting rights, employment, minority set-asides, mortgage and insurance regulation, and education. Zelnick traces how affirmative action was first sold as a short-term program designed to expand employer awareness of qualified minority job applicants, but instead has become a coercive network of race-conscious laws, regulations, quotas, preferences, and entitlement programs - in short, an assault on the very value of equality of opportunity it was supposed to promote.

In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between Black parents and Jewish teachers. Later, however, he built alliances with Blacks, and at the time of his death in 1997, such figures as Bill Clinton celebrated Shanker for being an educational reformer.

In an era when people live longer and want (or need) to work past the traditional retirement age, the Vita Needle Company of Needham, Massachusetts, provides inspiration and important lessons about the value of older workers. Vita Needle is a family-owned factory that was founded in 1932 and makes needles, stainless steel tubing and pipes, and custom fabricated parts. As part of its unusual business model, the company seeks out older workers; the median age of the employees is seventy-four.

The McCarthy-era witch hunts marked the culmination of an anticommunist crusade launched after the First World War. With Bolshevism triumphant in Russia and public discontent shaking the United States, conservatives at every level of government and business created a network dedicated to sweeping away the "spider web" of radicalism they saw threatening the nation. In this groundbreaking study, Nick Fischer shines a light on right-wing activities of the time, showing that the term "spider web" far more accurately described the anticommunist movement.