Labor Relations

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

For more than a century, the interplay between private, investor-owned electric utilities and government regulators has shaped the electric power industry in the United States. Provision of an essential service to largely dependent consumers invited government oversight and ever more sophisticated market intervention. The industry has sought to manage, coopt, and profit from government regulation. In The Power Brokers, Jeremiah Lambert maps this complex interaction from the late 19th century to the present day.

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.

After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. In The Stigma Trap, Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment.

What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries—like manufacturing, construction, printing—as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive—jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people’s full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement.

This is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff, early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly collapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearly two hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic, to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times.

Millions of Black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition.

Looking to electrify your career and boost your income? The IBEW: A Complete Overview For Prospective Members is your go-to guide for navigating the rewarding, yet often complex, landscape of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). This is your gateway to a six-figure career, top-tier healthcare, and pension plans that let you retire in comfort.

A generation of Americans came of age boycotting grapes, swept up in a movement that vanquished California's most powerful industry and accomplished the unthinkable: dignity and contracts for farm workers. Four decades later, Cesar Chavez's likeness graces postage stamps, and dozens of schools and streets have been renamed in his honor. But the real story of Chavez's farm workers' movement - both its historic triumphs and its tragic disintegration - has remained buried beneath the hagiography.

En Fragmentados Andrés Hatum describe, analiza y ejemplifica las distintas formas en que el trabajo nos arruinó y fragmentó la vida. Arruinar, por lo inhumano de ciertos trabajos, en particular en momentos como la Revolución Industrial; fragmentar porque, en vez de estar integrados en nuestra vida, los trabajos se metieron como una cuña para complicárnosla.

In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it.

¿De qué hablamos cuando decimos renta básica? ¿Significa lo mismo para izquierdas y derechas? ¿Es acaso viable? ¿Cómo influyen los debates feministas en ella? La asociación Basic Income Earth Network aporta la siguiente definición para la renta básica: "asignación monetaria, individual, incondicional y universal". Daniel Raventós explora en este audiolibro las grandes cuestiones en torno a esta propuesta y cuenta con la colaboración de grandes expertos y expertas para acabar ofreciendo un ensayo donde intervienen la filosofía, la política y la economía.

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.

In this book, Christian Wright explores the complex history of the UMWA and coal mining in the West over a 50-year period of the 20th century, concentrating on the coal miners of Carbon and Emery counties in Utah. Wright emphasizes their experience during the 1970s, which saw the rise and passing of American workers’ most successful postwar effort to internally reform a major labor organization: the Miners for Democracy movement.

Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced Congress to enact long-overdue legislation designed to virtually eradicate black lung disease and provide fair compensation to coal miners stricken with the illness. Today, however, both promises remain unfulfilled. Levels of disease have surged, the old scourge has taken an aggressive new form, and ailing miners and widows have been left behind by a dizzying legal system, denied even modest payments and medical care.

From acclaimed legal historian, author of a biography of Louis Brandeis and Dissent and the Supreme Court a history of affirmative action from its beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the first use of the term in 1935 with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, mandating that federal contractors take "affirmative action" to ensure that there be no discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin" down to today’s American society.

Le organizzazioni sindacali hanno attraversato il Novecento svolgendo un ruolo essenziale nella conquista dei diritti dei lavoratori e affermandosi come presenza politica e sociale importante nei paesi avanzati. Oggi lo scenario è cambiato - come dimostra anche la lunga contrattazione Fiom/Fiat - e i problemi del lavoro, dall'instabilità degli impieghi ai bassi salari, ai lavori poco gratificanti, risentono della crisi mondiale. I sindacati possono ancora trovare soluzioni soddisfacenti per un mondo lavorativo così sfaccettato o sono irrimediabilmente legati a una stagione passata?

Linda Chavez, who was denied a plum job in President George W. Bush's Cabinet because she employed an illegal alien, here has her chance to get back at the unions and like-minded organizations that opposed her candidacy. She takes this opportunity with a vengeance. Chavez is shocked that labor unions have traditionally supported Democratic politicians and social causes; to her, these politicians and causes represent "socialism" at its worst.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country, more than six million people earned their living as tipped workers in the service industry. These workers, unsurprisingly, were among the most vulnerable workers during the pandemic. As in many other areas, the pandemic exposed the inadequacies of the nation's social safety net and minimum-wage standards. In her new book, One Fair Wage, Jayaraman shines a light on these workers, illustrating how the people left out of the fight for a fair minimum wage are society's most marginalized.

David Ranney’s vivid memoir describes his work experiences between 1976 and 1982 in the factories of Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana. The audiobook opens with a detailed description of what it was like to live and work in one of the heaviest industrial concentrations in the world. The author takes the listener on a walk through the heart of the South Side, Chicago, observing the noise, heavy traffic, the 24-hour restaurants and bars, the rich diversity of people on the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the smell of the highly polluted air.