Samuel Cohn’s critical study of two Victorian British firms represents a radically new examination of women’s work. By contrasting the Post Office, which was the first employer to use female clerks instead of males, and the Great Western Railway, one of the last employers to make this change, Cohn identifies the organizational and economic limits to female employment. The Process of Occupat…
In December of 1984, the members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local P-9 initiated a campaign against wage and benefit concessions at Geo. A. Hormel Company in Austin, Minnesota. By summer, they were involved in what many observers would come to regard as the strike of the decade, both because of the energy and imagination of the union members and because of the nationwide respon…
South Africans are struggling to characterise the times we are living through. Is this a time of deepening grievance, of political patronage and plunder – or a season of hope and previously unimaginable opportunity for most? The 2006 Transformation Audit – Money and Morality focuses on accountability, corruption and its costs.
How are users influenced by social media platforms when they generate content, and does this influence affect users’ compliance with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analysing how the behaviours of social media users are regulated from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan, an internet governance spec…
The life of Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966) reads like a chronology of American radicalism in the first half of the twentieth century. The foremost pioneer of labor journalism in the U.S. and a prominent participant in the women’s universal suffrage movement, Vorse spent her life actively struggling for libertarian socialism, feminism, and world peace. Her friends and colleagues were among the …
On paper, the Occupation Health and Safety Act (OSHA) required employers to reduce the risks of illness and injury on the job regardless of the cost. Department of Labor health and safety inspectors could now show up unannounced at factories, construction sites, and offices and levy fines against employers who failed to comply. OSHA never lived up to its promises, however. Within a decade of th…
Labor Education for Women Workers was first published in 1981, a year that marked a significant shift in labor-movement history. When Barbara Wertheimer, working with a team of leading labor educators, published this essential text, it raised awareness of the importance of creating space for women workers to have solid labor education. They also identified a major gap in the literature on labor…
In The Early Colombian Labor Movement, David Sowell traces the history of artisan labor organizations in Bogotá and examines long-term political activity of Colombian artisans in the century after independence. Relying on contemporary newspapers, political handouts, broadsides, and public petitions, Sowell analyzes the economic, social, and political history of the capital's artisan class, a m…
Operation Dixie—the attempt by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to unionize the postwar South—was on the defensive almost as soon as it began in 1946. Although the South had a longstanding reputation for being particularly unreceptive to organized labor, the CIO decided that a Southern drive was necessary to consolidate the considerable gains unions had made during the war and…
Many developing countries—Viet Nam included—continue to struggle to raise incomes per capita. A common feature of the growth and development process is a fundamental change in the pattern of economic activity, as households reallocate labour from traditional agriculture to more productive forms of agriculture and modern industrial and service sectors. Broad structural transformation and wid…