Books in the Labor And Social Change series

Offers an analysis of Solidarity, from its ideological origins in the Polish "new left," through the dramatic revolutionary months of 1980-81, and up-to the union's resurgence in 1988-89, when it sat down with the government to negotiate Poland's future.

After decades of research by the author and her colleagues into what women do in positions such as bank teller, secretary, waitress, nurse, factory worker, and poultry processor, the author is astonished to find that for many policymakers, researchers, and activists, the topic of women's occupational health doesn't exist.

A reinterpretation of New Deal liberalism and industrial relations, this work reveals that Democrats helped create and then undermine the modern labor movement. It traces the auto industry's development from a virtual dictatorship in the 1920s to pluralist democracy in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1990, Hartford, Connecticut, ranked as the eight poorest city in the country. The harsh economic times felt throughout the city's workplaces and neighborhoods precipitated the formation of grassroots alliances between labor and community organizations. This text offers an insider's view of these coalitions.

In 1971, when General Telephone and Electric relocated its GTE Lenkurt plant to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city fathers were elated. GTE Lenkurt became the largest manufacturing employer in the state. This title uncovers 200 GTE workers (95 per cent of them women, 70 per cent of them Hispanic), each of them had an array of health problems.

Surveys the major professions in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. This work investigates the implications of professional experience in a socialist economy as well as relating changes in professional organization and power to reform movements in general and perestroika in particular.

Offers a useful ethnography of factory life in the industrial periphery.

Against the backdrop of increasing ambivalence in the federal government commitment to race-based employment policies, this book reveals how African-Americans first broke into professional and managerial jobs in corporations during the sixties and offers in-depth profiles of their subsequent career experiences.

Examines the impact of class status on an individual's participation or non-participation in the political process. Focusing on the relative absence of white working-class involvement in many contemporary US liberal and left social movements, this title goes straight to the source: members of the working class and activists in various movements.

Documents and dramatizes the changing face of the American workplace, transformed in the 1980s by immigrant workers in all sectors. This collection of ethnographies aims to capture the stench of meatpacking plants, the clatter of sewing machines, the sweat of construction sites, and the strain of management-employee relations.

Investigates two areas of technology that affect women's lives: productive (clerical work) and reproductive (health care). Case studies of clerical workers and health care recipients illustrate gender-specify effects of technology, ranging from word processors to treatments for infertility.

The Manhattan Project was a sprawling research and industrial enterprise. It also included women in every capacity. Although women participated in all aspects of the Manhattan Project, their contributions are either omitted or only mentioned briefly in most histories of the project. This title presents this hidden story.

Hard times are no stranger to the people of Appalachia and the South. This book presents a collection of essays by people who are involved in the efforts to challenge economic injustice in these regions and to empower the residents to build democratic alternatives.

A study of the relationship between women employers and employees. It provides an overview of domestic service in the Western tradition, a history of servitude in the South and northeastern United States, with an attention to a few non-Western locales.

A story that explodes the belief that women white-collar workers tend to reject unionization and accept a passive role in the workplace. On the contrary, the women workers of Harvard University created a powerful union - one that emphasizes their own values and priorities as working women and rejects unwanted aspects of traditional unionism.

When Jacoby and Myers made it big with their low-budget legal services and prolific advertising, the business of practicing law was forever changed. Offering a portrait of the dilemmas and work lives of solo and small-firm attorneys, this book provides insight into that continually expanding boundary between professionalism and commercialism.

The Wagner Act of 1935 (later the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act of 1947) was intended to democratize vast numbers of American workplaces: the federal government was to encourage worker organization and the substitution of collective bargaining for employers' unilateral determination of vital work-place matters.

An ethnography of trucking culture, this work documents and analyzes truckers' lives and work ethic, exploring the range of identities truckers create for themselves the renegade cowboy, the company man, the voyeur, the lone king of the road. It examines the meaning of work and the motivation for excelling despite long hours on the road.

Continued economic restructuring has brought service work to center stage in labor and management studies, as well as in the sociology of work, gender, race, and inequality. This work features essays that explore questions of power and control, resistance and empowerment, and innovation and organizing in the lives of front-line service workers.

Examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. This book traces the political, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession.

Explores the psychological issues that arise in modern corporations.