Labor-Movement Modernism: Proletarian Collectives between Kuhle Wampe and Working-Class Performance Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Schaub
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Performance Culture

Labor in the Time of Trump

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
The Right ◽  
Underlying Processes

This book critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions in the United States and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The book shows that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. The chapters examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

The Fix We Are In

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-87
Author(s):  
Richard Hudelson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Science Ethics ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Grand Strategies

I have been thinking about the history and future of the labor movement for fifty years. As an academic in philosophy I have focused my research on the intersections of the global labor movement with philosophy of history, philosophy of science, ethics, economics, and political theory. ‘The Fix We Are In’ is a summary of my current thinking. At present the grand strategies for emancipation, ascendant in the mid-twentieth century, have faltered. Headless capitalism runs amuck. The conditions of the working class deteriorate. There is no vision of a better world—no clear pathway toward a better future. The ‘popular revolt’ bubbling up around the globe is a product of this moment. My paper concludes with a difficulty regarding my own favored way forward. Responses from readers would be welcome at: [email protected].

The Quest for Industrial Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Goodier ◽  
Karen Pastorello
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Immigrant Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Viable Solution ◽  
Italian Women ◽  
Working Class Women

This chapter explores the contribution of working-class immigrant women—another important but often underestimated group—to the movement. Working-class women touted the vote as a viable solution to wage woes and threatening working conditions. They did not need elite suffragists to empower them; working-class women transferred the speaking and activist skills they had honed in the labor movement to disseminate their suffragist convictions. In addition, many of the women possessed some of the same qualities suffrage leaders valued in their workers; being young and single, they had the freedom to travel the state and the ability to appeal to broad, working-class audiences. They compensated for class tensions by appealing to multi-ethnic voters as Irish, German, Russian, Polish, Jewish, and Italian women joined the suffrage alliance.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Saori Shibata
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Mode Of Regulation

This concluding chapter reflects on the trajectory of capitalism in Japan and the role of its precarious workers in that process. The key issues facing Japan are whether and how Japan's new labor movement will develop. It is only in studying this recomposition of Japan's working class that one will be able to understand and explain the trajectory of capitalism as it exists in Japan. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether a new mode of regulation emerges, and what role labor—either regular or nonregular, organized or disorganized—will play in any new socioeconomic regime. What is certain is that any attempt to undermine, sideline, or eradicate labor will ultimately be futile, as workers in Japan (as they do elsewhere) invariably continue to disrupt and resist—in different ways in different times and contexts—efforts to consolidate a model of global neoliberal capitalism that cannot be stable.

Workers in Transition

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-75
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
American Federation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter argues that change in the U.S. labor movement from American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unionism to Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) industrial unionism largely lay behind Jersey City’s opposition to the CIO in 1937, not just Mayor Hague’s supposed antilabor inclinations. Hague aligned with AFL unions, but Depression and New Deal labor laws weakened them, while boosting CIO industrial unionism and its appeal to suffering Jersey manufacturing workers, including women and African Americans. Moreover, the CIO’s class-conscious culture of “working-class Americanism” clashed with Hague’s ethnicity-based rhetoric of “Patriotic Americanism.” Meanwhile, interwar anticommunism intensified Jersey City’s opposition to CIO organizers, who themselves drew on Popular Front rhetoric of antifascism to oppose “dictatorial” regimes like Hague’s. This polarization complicated Jersey City’s reception of the CIO.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

Collective Action and Collective Violence in the Russian Labor Movement

Slavic Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Koenker
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Urban Worker ◽  
Labor Violence ◽  
The One

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the “peasant yokel” who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a “half-literate intellectual,” sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.

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