A Portrait of a UAW Local in Chicago The split-level house of American labor is divided into 190 national and international unions, with over 70,000 affiliated locals. Given the heterogeneity of American workers, any generalization is bound to be faulty. …
Brendan Sexton, who recently retired from his office as Educational Director of the United Automobile Workers Union, is a veteran trade unionist who participated as an organizer in the formation of the CIO. For many years he worked closely with …
The big, middle-aged man, wearing his hard hat and heavy boots, breathes a long sigh as he pours himself a cup of coffee in the union hall (with such signs on the wall as “SST—Ours or Theirs?” showing the U.S. …
On Workers and Intellectuals The working class is a social presence; the proletariat, a historical potential. No one can question the place of the workers in the industrialized countries: their politics, their role in the work process, their ways of …
The current feminist literature largely ignores women who work in factories and their special problems. Is this justifiable? Is industry truly a declining sector in the economy, employing an ever-decreasing percentage of the labor force while the service sector keeps …
A major cause of conflict between white union members and black workers has been union control of jobs. Historically, labor unions have mainly been controlled by whites, with a few exceptions such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) …
In the summer of 1900 the newly formed International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union could call its own a treasury of $30 and a few desks in the office of the Cloakmakers’ Union. This modest enterprise was called into being at …
Gary and Newark Except in the labor movement, working Americans have rarely participated in mass-action organizations. Sociologists have found that the college-educated American is more likely to participate in voluntary interest groups than the American who didn’t finish high school, …
The struggle for life has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left are ground to pieces . . . —William Dean Howells The fabled workingman of the American South—the …
The Debate Among American Sociologists The old question of why there has been no socialism in the United States has often been answered by referring to the racial, ethnic, and religious divisions within the ranks of labor— which are the …
Cicero, Illinois, population 69,130, is a town with a sordid past and a troubled future. Cicero adjoins the City of Chicago on its West Side, and during a rare reform administration in Chicago it was the site to which Al …
Thirty years ago, many of the workers at Sullivan Machine Company—now the Claremont, New Hampshire, Division of Joy Manufacturing—walked to work. They would leave their three-story wooden tenements or one- and two-family homes in their working-class neighborhood—or, as the Wasps …
In the world view of liberal intellectuals, those persons who share decent and humane values form a tiny minority standing on the edge of an abyss. In that world view they are always standing there, the problem being that there …
Carmine Casciano, a personable, young junior-high school teacher, acts as my guide to Newark’s “predominantly white” North Ward. He is a district leader and president of the North Ward Young Democrats—immersed in the politics of his time and place. We …
“Do I like my job—why shouldn’t I?” The idea that he shouldn’t like his job stops him for a second. He flutters with his long collar points. “It’s clean,” he says, “just look.” You look around, and it is clean, …
