Dorothy Sue Cobble

Organizing the Postindustrial Work Force: Lessons from the History of Waitress Unionism

Using previously unexamined archival material, the author reconstructs one successful historical alternative to the kind of unionism that developed in mass production industries: the “occupational unionism” practiced from the 1900s to the 1960s by waitresses organized into the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. This form of employee representation was distinguished by an emphasis on occupational identity, control over the labor supply, portable rights and benefits, and peer determination of performance standards and workplace discipline. The author discusses the implications of this research for the work of labor relations scholars and policy analysts, and speculates that some elements of occupational unionism may hold promise for organizing and representing workers today.

Women and unions : forging a partnership

At the same time, the labor movement has initiated new ties with women and minority workers, adjusting to fundamental changes in the workplace. Women occupy jobs that are quite different from those held by labors traditional constituency, the blue-collar hard hat. The new majority tends to work in service jobs, in decentralized workplaces with fewer than fifty employees, and in jobs with less of a permanent, continuous attachment to a single employer.

The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor

Excerpt] This book too is about class. It details the rise of class inequalities in the United States, and it offer portraits of the new labor movements that are arising in response. But is also about the sex of class. It is about the feminization of work and workers and the continued reluctance of those who study class and who rally on behalf of ameliorating class injustice to take sufficient notice of this fundamental revolution.

Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor

The waves metaphor to delineate feminist activism in the United States is troublesome, to say the least. Despite its problems, the waves model has tremendous staying power when it comes to understanding, analyzing, writing about, and teaching the history of U.S. feminism. In this collection of essays, historians revisit this model, highlighting the efficacy of feminist waves as we know them, but also challenging this model for eliding the experiences of women of color, men, young people, and others whose activist work falls under a capacious definition of feminism.

“A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm”: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women's Service Jobs in the 1970s

In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating the two groups was simply too wide to cross. Indeed, male subway drivers could not understand why the stewardesses would object to their glamorous sex-object image. Deeply held gendered notions of unionism and politics also stood in the way of communication. For even if the complaints of stewardesses were accepted as “real,” to many male union leaders they seemed petty: matters not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity.

Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL's Direct Strategy

From its founding in 1886 to the merger with the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1955, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) chartered some twenty thousand directly affiliated local unions. This article reevaluates the Federations role in organizing by detailing the ways in which the direct affiliate strategy allowed for a wide range of representational strategies and facilitated the organizing of marginal sectors of the workforce. Reviving the direct affiliate strategy today would enable the Federation to expand jurisdictional boundaries, redefine the criteria for union membership, initiate alternative representational approaches, and boost the resurgence of labors economic and political power at the subnational level.

Pure and Simple Radicalism: Putting the Progressive Era AFL in Its Time

Schneirov for their very helpful comments on various iterations of this essay. Fellowship support from the Russell Sage Foundation proved indispensable to the completion of this article. 1. Walter Licht, “Neither Pure nor Simple,” Reviews in American History 27 (1999): 610 – 17. 2. Among others, John Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881 – 1924 (New York: Basic, 1970); Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865 – 1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 3. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912 – 1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 4. Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881 – 1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gary Fink, Labor’s Search for Political Order: The Political Behavior of the Missouri Labor Movement, 1890 – 1940 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973).

A “Tiger by the Toenail”: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority

It is not surprising that the economist and working-class studies scholar Michael Zweig harkened back to the 1970s when he titled his popular 2000 book The WorkingClass Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret.1 In 1974 Andrew Levison had published an essay called “The Working-Class Majority” in the New Yorker, and I remember cheering out loud as I read his discovery (startling in many quarters) that, despite the decline of blue-collar manual jobs, the majority of Americans were still working class.2 How could this be? Levison pulled the white-collar curtain aside to reveal rows upon rows of working-class women typing, fi ling, answering phones, and ringing up purchases in offi ces and shops across America. The touted rise of a postindustrial society, it turned out, was not just about the growth of a white-collar managerial class. It was also about a new army of pink-collar clericals, salesclerks, cashiers, and waitresses as well as the even more invisible behind-the-scenes maids, janitors, and home-care attendants. These blueand pink-collar women have been absent from much of the labor history of the 1970s as well. With the return of interest in public sector labor confl icts, as in Joe McCartin’s careful, nuanced tale, and the embrace by younger scholars like Dave Anderson of neighborhood protests over prices as an integral aspect of the struggle over distribution of wealth, we are on the path to pulling aside our own curtained worlds. Yet we have far to go. Many of the categories we still routinely rely on to gauge working-class militancy and political expression will need broadening or even discarding; the narratives currently in play may need to be recast as well. After identifying some of the new angles on the 1970s raised by McCartin’s

Worker mutualism in an age of entrepreneurial capitalism

ABSTRACT In this Keynote Address to the 30th AIRAANZ Conference in Sydney, the author identifies three vital and promising models of worker mutualism. These models show that worker mutualism is thriving, even in an era of entrepreneurial and hyper-individualistic capitalism. Indeed, we are at a moment of recovery and reconfiguration for labour and labour movements globally. The three models of worker mutualism are set within a larger context. The author challenges three mythic narratives: labour decline, working-class conservatism and the association of the rise of new forms of work with rising economic inequality that keep scholars from thinking clearly about worker mutualism and entrepreneurial capitalism.

A Wagner Act for Today: Save the Preamble but Not the Rest?

Joseph A. McCartin offers in this issue a deeply informed, perceptive, at times elegant review of the scholarly assessments of the Wagner Act, stretching from the “postwar celebrants” to the 1970s New Left, from critical legal studies skeptics to the present-day embrace of Christopher L. Tomlins’s prescient 1985 rotten-to-the-core analysis. “In 2010,” McCartin concludes, the act “began to noticeably loosen its grip on the imaginations of labor intellectuals,” and “a consensus has taken shape” around the need for a “new, twenty-first-century Wagner Act.” McCartin too is ready for a new labor law, though he rightly cautions that in the clamor for this or that legislative fix we not forget the necessity for worker mobilization and favorable public opinion before any “significant reform” can be won. In a final section of the essay, McCartin applies “lessons of the last Wagner Act to the next” and draws our attention to the act’s inspiring preamble. Fighting for a “big new vision,” he believes, even if a “losing fight,” can play an “educative role” and “serve as the starting point for action when the opportunity arises.” He identifies three “essential elements” in the Wagner Act preamble “worthy of emphasis”: its “vision of political economy,” its protection of “organizing rights in ways that promoted worker bargaining power,” and its importation of “basic tenets of democracy . . . into the workplace.” In McCartin’s view, we should foreground the act’s economic and collective orientation, not its nod to individual and human rights. The act was “less about ensuring freedom of association than about empowering workers to bargain,” he observes. And he warns against “would-be reformers” who see “labor’s problem today as being primarily rooted in the law’s failure to protect the ‘right to organize’ ” and who “promote workers’ freedom of association” in ways that “risk exacerbating the problem of how to enhance workers’ bargaining power.” For McCartin, rights