Joseph A. McCartin

Book Review: History: The Miners of Windber: The Struggles of New Immigrants for Unionization, 1890s–1930s, the United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity?

for cultural sensitivity and an awareness of the issues faced by recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Chapters 8-9 present in equal detail the process by which the new work force was integrated into the company. The author stresses the need for appropriate auxiliary services such as assistance with childcare, transportation, and clothing needs. The book concludes with a summary of the key components needed in order for such a program to succeed: public/private sector collaboration; the availability of public sector financing to cover training costs; jobs in which to place trainees upon graduation;jobspecific training; corporate commitment to the project; and cultural sensitivity and flexibility on the part of all individuals involved in the process. The book boasts two primary strengths. First, as already noted, it provides fine detail on planning and implementing a training and employment program for AFDC recipients. All aspects of the process, from staffing and teacher training to entry level criteria for the trainees and the auxiliary services needed by the new employees, are well articulated. I highly recommend the book to organizations and individuals interested in launching such a project. Second, the text sends a strong message to policy-makers that public sector financial support adequate to appropriately train AFDC recipients is crucial. Clearly, the private sector can and should be a partner in the welfare-towork transition, but no corporation can be expected to bear both the risk and the expense of such programs. Perlmutters book is not and does not claim to be a rigorous academic text on AFDC work/ training programs. Rather, it is for those who are interested in operating welfare-to-work programs and, to a lesser extent, state policy-makers seeking corporate partners. I highly recommend it to these groups. Nonetheless, the book would have benefited from some mention of the numerous analyses of work/training programs that have been published since the 1 970s. The fact that most of the more general training programs that have been evaluated have been deemed failures would only strengthen Perlmutters contention that training needs to bejob-specific and thatjobs need to be available to trainees upon graduation.

Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973

The years since 1973 have witnessed vast changes in working-class life in the United States. The globalization of trade accelerated the deindustrialization of the nation. New technologies, especially the proliferation of computers, transformed work processes and moved the economy’s center of gravity increasingly away from industrial production toward the provisioning of services. The liberalization of U.S. immigration law in 1965, and the acceleration of immigration, both legal and illegal, from south of the U.S.-Mexico border began to decisively reshape the demographics of the U.S. working class. Together, such changes swept away the two decades of economic stability that most workers had experienced after World War II.

Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy, 1914–1947

The years bounded by the two world wars constitute a watershed in U.S. labor history, a time of profound changes in almost every feature of working-class life. During these years, the structure of the economy was transformed by consolidation of a mass production economy and the emergence of its mass consumption counterpart. The composition of the U.S. working class was altered by dramatic changes in the racial composition of the industrial labor force. Paradoxically, these years also saw corporate industrial capitalism plunge from the zenith of its vast cultural and economic power in the 1920s to the nadir of its political influence and credibility in the 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s exacted an enormous human toll on working-class America and the frail community institutions upon which workers had traditionally relied during periods of economic hardship. The scale of the economic collapse was so vast that it triggered the sea change in American economic and labor policy ushered in by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Together with the political and social dynamics unleashed by U.S. participation in two world wars, the New Deal laid the basis for a policy of state intervention in the economy, a policy that directly benefited workers and their efforts to organize unions. Taking advantage of changing federal policy toward labor, union organizers orchestrated the most dramatic labor upsurge in American history during the 1930s, a departure best symbolized by the launching of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1935.

The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947–1973

The quarter century after World War II proved to be the most prosperous period in U.S. history. For most of that period the U.S. economy dominated world markets and its rising productivity raised the income of most citizens. The car in every garage and chicken in every pot that Herbert Hoover had promised voters on the eve of the Great Depression became by the 1960s sometimes more than one car in a multiple-car garage and a beef steak on every grill. Public policies and rising incomes created a suburban nation in which a majority of families and individuals, including most better-paid workers, owned their residences.

The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades Organization, 1828–1877

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed profound changes in the size and structure of the U.S. economy, the arrangement of workplaces, the methods by which workers labored, and the organizations through which workers responded to all of these changes. These years provided the seedbed for an industrializing nation. During this time one finds the origins of an industrial working class in the United States, the end of pre-industrial work patterns of slavery and artisan labor, and the emergence of the first national workers’ organizations that sought to challenge the inequities of the emerging industrial system.

Labor in the Colonial and Early National Periods, to 1828

The colonies established on the North American mainland and the Caribbean islands by rival European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an age of mercantilism, aimed at enriching the colonial powers. The Spanish, who led the way, wrested silver, gold, and other precious materials from their Western Hemisphere possessions. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British who followed sought similar riches but failed to find the precious metals dug from the earth by indigenous and imported slave labor under Spanish domination. Instead, the Dutch, French, and British relied on other avenues of trade and exploitation to amass wealth. All three imperial nations, the Dutch and the British most especially and the French less so, turned to private entrepreneurs in the form of joint-stock companies to nourish the streams of trans-Atlantic commerce that would fill the coffers of the home country with bullion, the residue of a positive balance of trade.

American labor : a documentary collection

Introduction Acknowledgments Labor in the Colonial and Early National Periods, to 1828 The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades Organization, 1828-1877 Workers in a Maturing an Industrial Society, 1877-1914 Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy, 1912-1947 The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947-1973 Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973

Workers in a Maturing and Industrial Society, 1877–1914

Between 1877 and 1914 the United States became the world’s leading industrial society. It was an era of free trade in people, goods, and capital. As people moved incessantly over the face of the globe crossing oceans and borders, international commerce flourished as never before and capitalists searched ceaselessly for the most profitable investment opportunities. The United States benefited more fully from those three interrelated processes than perhaps any other nation. If for much of the nineteenth century the United States had been a relatively underdeveloped economy, dependent on the importation of capital and technology from abroad, by the turn of the twentieth century the United States could boast of one of the most developed economies in the world. In those economic sectors that marked a modern, developed economy most clearly—coal and steel, petroleum-based enterprises, chemicals, food processing, electrical equipment (all of which required large capital investments and the use of new technologies)—the United States had few rivals. Its economy could boast some of the largest enterprises in the world and the first that truly established a system based on mass production, mass distribution, and mass consumption. Whereas the United States had once exported primarily agricultural products and raw materials, importing manufactured goods from abroad, by the end of the nineteenth century such American enterprises as Standard Oil, International Harvester, Singer Sewing Machine, and the G. Swift Packing Company not only exported their products abroad but established branch plants overseas.

Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921.

Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalitions efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.