DESEGREGATION: RESISTANCE AND READINESS, by Melvin Tumin. Princeton University Press, 1958. This book reports the results of an investigation conducted by Professor Melvin Tumin and his assistants into the attitudes of white people in Guilford County, North Carolina, toward the …
DEMOCRACY AND THE CHALLENGE OF POWER, by David Spitz. Columbia University Press, 1958. “Power” seems to have a peculiar fascination for the modern mind, in part, perhaps, because men feel en. trapped by the superordinate-subordinate relations which become more ubiquitous …
About the steel workers’ union only one thing can be said with assurance: no ready-made formula will take us far on the road to understanding. Here is an important section of the classical “proletariat”; yet in consciousness, initiative and militancy …
There has been much talk in recent years about Big Labor, some of it warranted and some of it malicious; but almost no one has paid any attention to the scores of small unions which, quietly and persistently, continue to …
It was all very odd, even eerie, as if by some trick one of my youthful political fantasies had come true in a perverted form. There I sat, in a union hall jammed with cheering truck drivers, listening to their …
Not long ago in Washington someone wanted to know how many union staff people worked in the city and whether an accurate estimate could be made of the number of Jews with union staff jobs in the community. The first …
Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway and a wall of bulkhead sheds is the New York waterfront, an atavistic world more redolent of the brawling money-grubbing of the nineteenth century than the smooth-mannered business …
Pinned on the basement walls of a temporary union headquarters during New York’s hospital strike last spring was a two-page, full color advertisement torn from Life magazine. It showed a gentleman of the New Leisure stretched in a hammock, drinking …
Basic changes are taking place in the American economy and the American labor movement. They signify a crisis of historic proportions. Among these changes I would include automation, the wider application of electronics to industry, the use of computers for …
They stroll the narrow, shabby streets, chat at the corners, lean against the peeling pillars of the town saloon, the St. Michael Hotel & Restaurant, and they look more like movie actors than real human beings, because something is wrong. …
At the outset a word should be said about the present climate of opinion in relation to trade unions. It has become the fashion, not only among reactionaries but also among liberals, to deprecate “big labor” along with “big business” …
This issue of DISSENT discusses the present condition of the American unions. There are general articles on new problems facing the labor movement and studies of individual unions focused on particular problems: democracy in the steel union, racketeering in longshore, …
I want to discuss a mistaken policy of certain theater craft unions, and suggest a remedy. The matter has an importance in itself, because in recent years there has been a growth in new theater “off Broadway” that may, if …
No one can work his way through Das Kapital without etching on his mind forever the knowledge that profit must come from loss —the lost energy of one human being paying for the comfort of another; if the process has …
What Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night about greatness in men one could also say about that mysterious something in books that makes them bestsellers: Some are born with it, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. An …
