Catherwood Library

Rebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang (editors)

In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy. Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools. [from publisher web site]

Betsy Wood

Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state. Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society. [from publisher web site]

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda

Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal. In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today. [from publisher web site]

Cynthia Cranford

In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socio-economic backgrounds generate tension in the intimate encounter that is home help. As Cranford shows, workers experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. Home Care Fault Lines analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and Cranford argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for a new unionism that builds deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. She argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs worker-recipient run, culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries to help people find workers and jobs, and addresses everyday tensions in the home-workplaces in order to support both flexible care and secure work. [from publisher web site]

Jeffrey Vogt, Janice Bellace, Lance Compa, Keith Ewing, John Hendy QC, Klaus Lörcher, Tonia Novitz

This monograph is a direct response to the claim made by members of the 'Employers Group' at the 2012 International Labour Conference, namely that the right to strike is not protected in international law, and in particular by ILO Convention 87 on the right to freedom of association. The apparent aim is to sow sufficient doubt as to the existence of an internationally protected right so that governments might have a free hand to limit or prohibit the right to strike at the national level while still claiming compliance with their international obligations. Already, some governments have seized on the employers' arguments to deny this right in law and in practice. The book is the only exhaustive analysis as to the existence of the right to strike under international law, and its findings, based on deep legal research, dispel any doubt on the matter. There is simply no credible claim that the right to strike does not enjoy international protection; indeed, the authors argue that it has attained the status of a customary international law norm. [from publisher web site]

Ergin Bulut

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics. [from publisher web site]

Stefano Bellucci and Andreas Eckert (editors)

Co-published with the International Labour Organization on the centenary of its founding in 1919, the General Labour History of Africa is a landmark in the study of labour history. It brings, for the first time, an African perspective within a global context to the study of labour and labour relations. The volume analyses key developments in the 20th century, such as the emergence of free wage labour; the transformation in labour relations; the role of capital and employers; labour agency and movements; the growing diversity of formal and informal or precarious labour; the meaning of work; and the impact of gender and age on the workplace. The contributors - eminent historians, anthropologists and social scientists from Africa, Europe and the United States - examine African labour in the context of labour and social issues worldwide: mobility and colonial and postcolonial migration, forced labour, security, the growth of entrepreneurial labour, the informal sector and self-employment, and the impact of trade unionism, welfare and state relations. The book discusses key sectors such as mining, agriculture, industry, transport, domestic work, and sport, tourism and entertainment, as well as the international dimension and the history and impact of the International Labour Organization itself. This authoritative and comprehensive work will be an invaluable resource for historians of labour, social relations and African history.

Jasmine Kerrissey, Eve Weinbaum, Clare Hammonds, Tom Juravich, and Dan Clawson (editors)

Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions 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 contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. Essays in the volume examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes. [from publisher web site]

Dalia Etzion

Based on a twenty-year research study, Work, Vacation and Well-being delves into the ubiquitous yet often-underestimated issues surrounding vacation and respite. Providing an original outlook on how breaks from work can be beneficial for the well-being of employees, this book also addresses the potential negative impacts of vacation. Taking into account factors concerning the nature of the break and the person taking it, Etzion delves into the benefits and drawbacks of workplace breaks, from annual leave to maternity leave and sabbaticals. Work, Vacation and Well-being looks at breaks from work through various social and cultural lenses, to present a balanced and well-researched perspective on all angles of taking a break. [from publisher web site]

Susanne M. Bruyère (Ed.)

Nearly three decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities continue to be significantly underrepresented in the American Labor force. This loss of talent to U.S. organizations and restriction of opportunities for millions of workers have broader implications for civil society. People denied access to the workforce are limited in their ability to contribute to the economy and to their communities, heightening their reliance on public support systems and reducing the number of people participating in community life. This LERA volume focuses on the employment of individuals with disabilities. Its purpose is to review the current employment situation for Americans with disabilities, place it in the context of the U.S. regulatory system, describe current issues, identify ways that employers are approaching possible remediation of these issues, and identify emerging concerns and opportunities. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers and practitioners provide a broad-based overview of related issues, approaches, and opportunities. This volume will be useful to a wide array of professionals, including labor and employment relations attorneys and specialists; human resource, diversity and inclusion, and equal employment opportunity professionals; as well as organizational leaders, managers, and supervisors who are seeking to improve employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities both here and abroad. [from publisher web site]