Labor Relations History

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: A fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than 10” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all 10 were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not 10 but 87. And there were seven survivors.

A good society needs a balance between aptitudes relating to head (cognitive), hand (manual/craft) and heart (caring/emotional). In recent decades in Western societies, they have got out of kilter. One form of human aptitude - cognitive ability - has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society, and largely in its own interests: in the knowledge economy, the over-expansion of higher education and in the very idea of a successful life. To put it bluntly: smart people have become too powerful.

En Fragmentados Andrés Hatum describe, analiza y ejemplifica las distintas formas en que el trabajo nos arruinó y fragmentó la vida. Arruinar, por lo inhumano de ciertos trabajos, en particular en momentos como la Revolución Industrial; fragmentar porque, en vez de estar integrados en nuestra vida, los trabajos se metieron como una cuña para complicárnosla.

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America?

As labor unions and movements began to form and coalesce in the 19th century, the tensions between workers and companies led to demonstrations, encounters, and even conflicts that descended into violence. Among those, few were as notorious as the fight that took place on April 20, 1914 at Ludlow in the Southern Colorado coalfields between the Colorado National Guard and striking miners at a United Mine Workers camp. In the previous several decades, there had been a number of violent incidents during strikes, but in 1914, the Ludlow tragedy deeply shocked the nation.

The McCarthy-era witch hunts marked the culmination of an anticommunist crusade launched after the First World War. With Bolshevism triumphant in Russia and public discontent shaking the United States, conservatives at every level of government and business created a network dedicated to sweeping away the "spider web" of radicalism they saw threatening the nation. In this groundbreaking study, Nick Fischer shines a light on right-wing activities of the time, showing that the term "spider web" far more accurately described the anticommunist movement.

The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

America searched for an answer to "The Labor Question" during the Progressive Era in an effort to avoid the unrest and violence that flared so often in the late 19th and early 20th century.

From the number-one international best-selling author of The Revenant - the book that inspired the award-winning movie - comes the remarkable true story of the worst mining disaster in American history. In 1917, the lives of a company of miners changed forever when the underground labyrinth of tunnels in which they worked burst into flames. Within an hour, more than 400 men would be locked in a battle to survive. Within three days, 164 of them would be dead.