Labor Relations History

A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy.

G.C. "Red" Jones' classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of "Bloody Harlan", and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.

Workers talk about the lives they lived, the battles they fought, the union they built, and the history they made. The United Auto Workers' Ford Local No. 600 was not only the biggest local union in the world, it was also one of the most militant, radical, yet democratic unions in the United States. Talking Union gives us the exceptional opportunity to hear members of this local tell about their activism as they experienced it.

From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.