Unions that believe that their only job is to deliver at contract time and then disappear are those that can be easily undermined and overwhelmed by savvy management.
This new book offers a history and analysis of the contributions of black workers to our society. It shows just how key a knowledge of black workers' history is to an understanding the working class's fortunes and history overall.
...on the night of September 30, one hundred years ago, ...about 100 African Americans met to organize the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a union of land owners, tenants, and sharecroppers.
Since 1919 Gary has had a tradition of interracial organizing while also being a center for black movements and black power activism.
In left labor circles, it's been a settled question that the Haymarket martyrs, victims of ruling class justice, were framed, and May Day's radical origins are based on remembering the martyrs. The author of the books under review, using a close reading of the trial record, supports the court finding that the accused anarchists conspired to murder police during the epochal 1886 labor demonstration in Chicago. The reviewer strongly disputes the author's conclusions.
The centennial celebration of Joe Hill's execution is being marked by concerts, symposiums, meetings and forums, and the publication of new books, or new editions. Labor historian Paul Buhle reviews two of these. Franklin Rosemont's Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, with a new introduction by David Roediger; and
Philip S. Foner's The Letters of Joe Hill, with new material by Alexis Buss and foreword by Tom Morello.
The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class
A new stunning wall sculpture that features quotes from San Francisco labor and political leader Jimmy Herman, former ILWU President, does not yet qualify as PUBLIC political art.
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