According to the New York Times, “America’s most admired corporation” is General Electric, its year 2000 profits—$12.7 billion—the largest in the history of the world. Fortune magazine calls G.E. Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch “the management revolutionary of the century.” Welch once explained that, “Ideally you’d have every plant you own on a barge,” ready to be towed wherever labor costs were lowest. The flaw in his conceit is that labor is not just a cost factor, but work performed by people who have hopes and ambitions beyond just making someone already rich even richer, who have the collective resources, the strength in numbers, to assert their own rights and uphold their own dignity. As an officer in one of G.E.’s unions promised in response, “wherever Welch lands his barge, we’ll be there to greet him.”
If no victory has ever been final, neither has any defeat. The hope for a better life and the impulse to resist injustice always revive. Labor’s cardinal role in this historic and democratic drama comes from the fact that labor is the engine of the system. Labor really does create all wealth. All kinds of people can organize to maintain their rights and advance their interests;only working people can also organize to abolish the system altogether. When the final conflict comes—as come it will—working people will have to be ready; the world will hang in the balance.
SUGGESTED READING
Here are suggestions for readers interested in learning more about particular periods or issues in labor history. The titles have been chosen because they are interesting, readable, and in most cases readily available. This is not a list of sources or a comprehensive bibliography. Many excellent works are out of print.
The titles are listed by broad categories. Where the title does not describe the subject, the listing is briefly annotated. No title appears more than once.
SURVEYS AND GENERAL HISTORY
Acuña, Rodolfo F. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. Fourth Edition. New York: Longmans, 2000.
Amott, Teresa, and Julie Matthaei. Race, Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Revised edition. Boston: South End Press, 1996.
Baxandall, Rosalyn. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present. Revised and updated. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
Berlin, Ira, ed. Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War. New York: The New Press, 1992.
Boyer, Richard and Herbert Morais. Labor’s Untold Story. New York: United Electrical and Machine Workers of America, 1955. Reprinted 1975.
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised and updated edition. Boston: South End Press, 1997.
Brody, David. Workers in Industrial America. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Henry Holt, 1991.
Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakis, eds. The Encyclopedia of the American Left. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye, eds. The American Radical. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Buhle, Paul, and Dan Georgakas, eds. The Immigrant Left in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Clark, Christopher, and Nancy A. Hewitt, eds. Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation’s Politics, Economy, Culture, and Society. Two volumes. [Revised edition] New York: Worth Publishers, 2000.
Dubofsky, Melvyn and Foster R. Dulles. Labor in America: A History. Sixth edition. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1999.
Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Seven volumes. New York: International Publishers, 1947–1987.
Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981. Second edition. New York: International Publishers, 1982.
Gómez Quiñones, Juan. Mexican-American Labor, 1790–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Green, James R. The World of the Worker: Labor in 20th Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
Grigsby, Daryl Russell. For the People: Black Socialists in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. San Diego: Asante Publications, 1987.
Gutman, Herbert S. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Harris, William Hamilton. The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Laurie, Bruce. Artisans into Workers; Labor in 19th Century America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Le Blanc, Paul. A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the 21st Century. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1999.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Nash, Gary B. Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. Second edition. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Ruiz, Vicki L. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in the 20th Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 1990.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Updated and revised edition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.
Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Zinn, Howard. A Peoples’ History of the United States, 1492 to the Present. New York: The New Press, 1997.
SPECIAL TOPICS
Adamic, Louis. Dynamite! A Century of Class Violence in America. Seattle: Left Bank Distribution, 1984.
Arnesen, Eric. Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.
Barrett, James R. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packing-House Workers, 1894–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: The New Press, 1992.
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Brody, David. Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970.
Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. First Elephant edition. Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1989.
Buhle, Paul. Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor
. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999.
Bush, Rod. We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Chateauvert, M. Melinda. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue. Dishing It Out: Waitresses and their Unions in the 20th Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Cowie, Jefferson R. Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Crawford, Vicki L., ed. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Dawley, Alan. Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. Second 25th anniversary edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Verso, 1996.
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
DuBois, Ellen Carol. Women Suffrage and Women’s Rights. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the Turn of the 20th Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.
Filippelli, Ronald L., and Mark D. McColloch. Cold War in the Working Class: the Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers. Albany: State University of New York: 1995.
Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Fink, Leon, and Brian Greenberg. Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers Union, Local 1199. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Finn, Janet L. Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault Against Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Frank, Dana. Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement 1919–1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870–1942. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Updated edition. Boston: South End Press, 1998.
Gerstle, Gary. Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Glaberman, Martin. Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the No Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II. Detroit: Bewick/Ed, 1980.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Glickman, Lawrence B. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Greenwald, Maurine W. Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Hahamovitch, Cindy. The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Honey, Michael K. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Hunter, Tera W. To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. Ithaca, New York: ILR Press, 1989.
Kornbluh, Joyce, ed. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. New and expanded edition. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1988.
Kwong, Peter. Chinatown, NY: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950. New York: The New Press, 2001.
Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. Revised edition. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
La Botz, Dan. Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union. New York: Verso, 1990.
Letwin, Dan. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1879–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.
Levy, Peter B. The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Littlefield, Alice, and Martha C. Knack, eds. Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
López, Alfredo. Dona Licha’s Island: Modern Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Boston: South End Press, 1987.
Matles, James J., and James Higgins. Them and Us. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974. [United Electrical Workers, 1940s–1960s]
Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking, 1991. [American Indian Movement]
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experiences of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the 19th Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Montgomery, David. Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Moody, Kim. Injury to Al
l: The Decline of American Unionism. London: Verso, 1988.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.
Okihiro, Gary Y. Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Rachleff, Peter J. Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1993.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revised edition. New York: Verso, 1999.
Roediger, David R., and Philip S. Foner. Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Roediger, David R., and Franklin Rosemont. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.
Romero, Mary. Maid in the U.S. A. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Rorabaugh, W. J. The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Rosales, F. Arturo. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1996.
Rosenbaum, Robert J. Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: “The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation.” Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Ruiz, Vicki L. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.
Sales, William W. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of African-American Unity. Boston: South End Press, 1994.
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