Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal,
1908-1915 - By Hugh G. J. Aitken. The author fully describes the
walkout of 1911 - which began when a Watertown, Massachusetts foundry
worker refused to work against a stop watch - and subsequent events that
carried the controversy over Taylorism to Congress. $8.00
Their Lives and Numbers - Edited by Henry Bedford. Brings
together narrative and statistical documents from the Massachusetts Bureau
of Statistics of Labor from 1870 to 1900, providing a detailed picture of
the experience of working families in an industrial society. --
$6.00
The Molly Maguires - By Anthony Bimba. A classic history of the
forgotten history of the Molly Maguires, Pennsylvania minors who organized
to improve their miserable working conditions in the 1870s, only to be met
with the fierce repression that characterized labor relations in this
industry for decades. -- $7.00
Union Mergers in Hard Times: The View From Five Countries - by
Gary Chaison. An examination of the forces that led to union mergers in
five English-speaking countries, with particular emphasis on each
country¹s labor relations system. While Chaison generally sees mergers as
a positive development, he concludes that mergers alone will not solve the
fundamental problems that plague unions. -- $10.00
Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History - Edited by
Gary Fink and Merl Reed. This collection of 13 scholarly papers addresses
working conditions and resistance in textile mills, the struggles of black
workers in the post-Civil War era, industrial unionism in the Jim Crow
era, convict mining, and Southern unions' efforts to come to terms with
the Civil Rights Movement. -- $10.00
Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers' Union
Local 1199. - by Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg. The story of the
battle to organize New York City hospital workers that began in 1958, and
quickly forced hospitals around the country to address the conditions of
the workers whose "involuntary philanthropy" had long bolstered hospital
finances. While focusing on the years in which the union was built, the
final chapters address the internal conflicts that ripped the union apart
in the 1980s.
Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor
-- by Steven Fraser. Sidney Hillman played a key role in organizing the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers union and founding the CIO before he became a
key player in the New Deal labor agencies. A highly sympathetic but richly
detailed portrait of a labor official who helped shape the post-war labor
consensus. -- $18.00
The Earthly Paradise of William Morris -- edited by Clare
Gibson. An attractively produced selection of quotations (and a few poems)
from pioneer socialist William Morris on aesthetics, beauty, literature,
and the ideal society. "I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful
freedom, open-heartedness and reality so much she sickens under
selfishness and luxury ... I do not want art for a few, any more than
education for a few, or freedom for a few." "It is a new Society that we
are working to realize, not a cleaning up of our present tyrannical muddle
into an improved smoothly working form of that same 'order.'"
-- $6.00 (hardcover only)
WCFL, Chicago's Voice of Labor 1926-78 - By Nathan
Godfried. Chicago radio station WCFL was the first and longest surviving
labor radio station in the nation, beginning in 1926 as a
listener-supported pirate station owned and operated by the Chicago
Federation of Labor and lasting more than fifty years. - $15.00
Strike! - By Mary Heaton Vorse. Strike! is a vivid
portrayal of the events during the critical southern textile strikes of
the late 1920s at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. -
$10.00
Office Politics: Computers, Labor, and the Fight for Safety and
Health - by Vernon L. Mogensen. A look at the ways in which the
desktop computer has transformed office work, this book challenges the
notion that the use of video display terminals (VDTs) in the offices of
the future would free workers from routine tasks, giving them more time
for creative work and chances for career advancement. It argues that, for
many VDT workers - most of whom are non-unionized women in low-paying,
dead-end jobs - exactly the opposite is true. VDTs have been used to
routinize office tasks; to export work via satellite to low-wage, nonunion
offshore offices; to de-skill workers and closely monitor their activity,
in addition to the sundry of health and safety-related problems. --
$7.00
The Big Strike - By Mike Quin. "This book is about a general
strike that demonstrated the might of the rank and file. Economists,
lawyers, financial advisors, and even the officers they elected to lead
them, while valuable and truly important skilled tools, ran second to the
united strength of the workers. Rank and file strength is shown for what
it is - indispensable. This principle remains eternally sound." --Harry
Bridges. -- $7.50
The CIO's Left-Led Unions - Edited by Steve Rosswurm. In 1949
and 1950 the CIO expelled several left-wing unions. This collection
explores the history of 11 of these unions, addressing the role of race
and government policy in shaping unionism, the impact of anti-communism on
race relations and working conditions, and the impact of the expulsions on
the labor movement. -- $10.00
A Generation of Boomers - By Shelton Stromquist. This history
of railroad labor conflict in nineteenth century America is a complex one,
incorporating the skilled craftsmen whose railroad brotherhoods dominated
the labor movement, as well as the legions of workers who laid and
maintained tracks, worked the shops, and populated the railroad towns.
Both labor and management struggled to navigate these currents, resulting
in spectacular strikes and routinized labor struggles; a promise of
solidarity and a reality of scientific management. -- $10.00
Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings
1920-1972 - edited by W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner.
Moore was one of the leading leftists in the Harlem community in the 1920s
and 1930s, and prominent in Caribbean independence struggles in the
decades that followed. This collection offers a biographical overview,
followed by excerpts from Moore's speeches and writings on labor
struggles, housing conditions, racism, the pan-Caribbean movement,
Afro-American history, and related topics. -- $12.00
Convicts, Coal and the Banner Mine Tragedy - By Robert David
Ward and William Warren Rogers. This book throws new light on mining
practices in Alabama during the early 1900s and deals at length with the
evolution of the state's convict lease system. It is a study of people
caught up in an exploiting economic establishment that underwrote and
profited from a vicious penal system. -- $10.00
