Carl Gersuny

“A Devil in Petticoats” and Just Cause: Patterns of Punishment in Two New England Textile Factories

Professor Gersuny examines discipline and punishment of the workforce in two New England textile mills separated in time by almost a century and a half. He finds that, despite dramatic changes in the technological, social, and cultural context, the constraints governing factory discipline have shown remarkable continuity.

Industrial Rights: A Neglected Facet of Citizenship Theory

Theoretical treatment of citizenship, beginning with the pathbreaking work of T.H. Marshall, has made short shrift of industrial citizenship. Treating industrial citizenship as subsidiary to civil, political and social citizenship as well as limiting it to the realm of trade union organization and collective bargaining are serious shortcomings. Citizens of advanced societies need also to be shielded against wage competition from underdeveloped societies. The alternative to industrial rights is that the advanced societies will be shown the image of their future by the less developed societies.

Employment seniority: Cases from Iago to Weber

Expectations based on length of service concerning promotion and other conditions of employment antedate institutionalized collective bargaining. With the growth of unionization, formal seniority rules came increasingly to be incorporated in collective agreements to provide fair and objective criteria for regulation of layoffs, recall from layoff, and promotion on the basis of waiting one’s turn in a line of succession. The remedy sought by plaintiffs in discrimination cases is court-ordered assignment to their rightful place on the appropriate seniority roster. Plaintiffs in “reverse discrimination” cases seek ouster of former discriminatees who were placed ahead of them under affirmative action.

Work Injuries and Adversary Processes in Two New England Textile Mills

Whatever the shortcomings of “no-fault” employee compensation laws, such as the one passed in Massachusetts in 1911, Professor Gersuny shows that such laws were a great improvement over what had prevailed. Working with formerly confidential files, he shows that an “adversary relationship” had existed between the employer and his insurance company, on the one hand, and often pitifully maimed employees on the other. With few exceptions, all of the advantages were on the side of the employer, and the rights of employees to more than token compensation were routinely trampled upon.