Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress (Cornell), Candacy A. Taylor
According to Candacy Taylor, a standard text on occupations lists waitressing as among the “least skilled” jobs, “but most lifers say it takes about fifteen years to turn waitressing into an art.” Taylor interviewed a fair number of lifers, took their pictures, and incorporated her own observations and insights into this rare on-the-ground investigation of a ubiquitous occupation. Seeing diners as “neighborhood institutions that bring together communities,” Taylor shows that career waitresses “do more than serve food. They are part psychiatrist, part grandmother, part friend, and they serve every walk of American life: from the retired and the widowed, to the wounded and lonely, and from the working class to the wealthy.” A former waitress herself, Taylor gathers the words and pictures of 57 waitresses in 38 towns and cities across the U.S. The color photographs show partly eaten plates of food, diners and diner signs, counters and kitchen appliances, but most are of career waitresses looking dead on into a camera they appear to trust wholeheartedly to show them exactly as they are.
In and Out of the Working Class (Arbeiter Ring Publishing), Michael D. Yates
Mike Yates grew up working class in Ford City, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh Plate Glass company town, and as a grown-up he taught radical political economy for three decades at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, a Bethlehem Steel company town that Bethlehem abandoned during Yates’ tenure there. Along the way Yates taught himself to write in a spare, matter-of-fact style that allowed him to explain complex subjects of economics, labor law, and American contract-unionism in an especially accessible way. In and Out of the Working Class brings that style to this collection of stories, some labeled “fiction” others “nonfiction,” about his life and his ongoing education. The stories range from his and his father’s skill at bowling, shooting pool, and gambling to a contested fight for the tenure of a faculty colleague. These simple stories, told with a prejudice against melodramatic adjectives in favor of detailed descriptions and the facts of the case, have a narrative drive that sees drama in the everyday lives of glass workers, migrant farm workers, and university professors alike – both in specific moments and across lifetimes. Though much of the book is sad, in a characteristically understated way, it has an improbable happy ending, which Yates emphatically labels “fiction.”
The Insecure American: How We Got Here & What We Should Do About It (U. of California), edited by Hugh Gusterson & Catherine Besteman
Edited by two cultural anthropologists, this volume gathers the work of 19 ethnographers focused on the rising insecurities and anxieties of Americans – “fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants.” With sections on “Fortress America,” “The New Economy,” and “Insecurity as a Profit Center,” the essays range widely from bad jobs with low wages to child-rearing, the prison-industrial complex, imperial adventures, and a variety of fears – some imagined or exaggerated, but most all too real.
Riders on the Storm: A Novel (Bottom Dog Press), Susan Streeter Carpenter
This first novel explores the lives of young radicals in the 1960s in Cleveland and Chicago. Jeff Gundy says it “explodes the shallow stereotypes and hollow myths – on both left and right – about the Sixties and the young radicals who dreamed of, and sometimes fought for, a transformed world. Compassionate but exacting, [Carpenter] creates unforgettable characters, and their political, personal, and sexual ideals and passions are completely human and entirely compelling.”
Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters (Cornell), Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher
Hundreds of full-color reproductions of “the best posters that have emerged from the American labor movement” can be a little dizzying when just thumbing through it. But the arrangement and text by Cushing and Drescher guide the onlooker through both the art and the struggles represented by it. After a brief history of activist graphic media, the posters are organized by such themes as Dignity and Exploitation; War, Peace and Internationalism; Health and Safety; Race and Civil Rights; Democracy, Voting, and Patriotism; and several others. The dust jacket promises a “deeper understanding of the politics, history, artistry, and impact of this genre of activist art,” as well as of “the importance of the labor movement in the transformation of American society over the course of the twentieth century.”
Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy (Cornell), edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, Victor Narro
Eleven case studies of recent low-wage worker organizing campaigns in Los Angeles make the case for what the authors see as a distinctive L.A. Model of cooperation between labor unions and workers centers. Among the campaigns studied are those of day laborers, security guards, garment workers, car wash workers, janitors, hotel workers, taxi drivers, and immigrant rights organizations. Dan Clawson calls the book “a paradigm shift toward public sociology,” explaining: “Community leaders and activists helped shape the questions that scholars pursued, provided access academics rarely achieve, reviewed drafts and offered feedback, and in the process enriched scholarship and advanced theory.”
Taking on the Big Boys: Or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation (The Feminist Press), Ellen Bravo
Ellen Bravo was one of the founders and former director of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women. Her new book takes a fresh look at the situation of women in the workplace, totaling up the gains, the losses, and the continuing obstacles at work and home. Bravo argues for a system of beliefs, laws, and practices that “fully values women and the work associated with women.” Barbara Ehrenreich gives the book a full-throated endorsement as “feminism at its butt-kicking best – an expose, a manifesto, and a spirited, delightful read.”
Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940 (U. of Illinois), Donald W. Rogers
Well before the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed in 1970, Donald Rogers shows, many states during the Progressive Era established “surprisingly strong . . . work safety and health regulatory agencies, a patchwork of commissions and labor departments that advanced safety law from common-law negligence to the modern system of administrative regulation.” Rogers makes a detailed examination of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission and compares it to efforts in New York, Ohio, Illinois, California, and Alabama.
California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative (U. of California), Jan Goggans
Dorothea Lange’s photographs of victims of the Great Depression still shape how those of us who were not there “remember” that awful decade. This book tells the story of how Lange and her labor economist husband Paul Taylor forged a personal and professional relationship in their decade-long project of documenting the plight of California’s dispossessed, a project which culminated in 1939 with their classic American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Blending biography, literature, and history, Jan Goggans argues that American Exodus provided “a new way of understanding those in crisis during the economic disaster . . . and ultimately informed the way we think about the Great Depression.” Peter Schrag says Goggans “elegantly interweaves sound scholarship with the moving human stories of California’s Dust Bowl immigrants . . . [and] makes it dramatically clear that Taylor and Lange . . . fused documentary photojournalism and the traditions of protest literature to create a new form that was at least as essential in telling that story and in proposing remedies.”
The Transformation of Work in the New Economy: Sociological Readings (Oxford), edited by Robert Perrucci and Carolyn Perrucci
This 624-page compendium of articles and excerpts is designed for classroom use, with each reading preceded by a brief context-setting introduction and followed by discussion questions. The volume covers a wide range of topics organized around “established practices governing how products are produced, how work is organized, and who comprises the labor force.” Some of the issues it addresses are globalization and its costs, persistent inequalities, and the potential for labor union revitalization. The closing section focuses on policy proposals that could improve conditions for workers in the new economy.
For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (PM Press), John Curl
Beginning with the cooperative work and living arrangements of Native Americans, this book examines the entire sweep of cooperative movements for social change in American history, including farmer, worker and consumer cooperatives and a variety of communalist experiments. The late Howard Zinn said of For All the People: “It is indeed inspiring, in the face of all the misguided praise of ‘the market,’ to be reminded by John Curl’s book of the noble history of cooperative work in the United States.”
On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Cornell), James T. Fisher
Described as a “detailed social history of the New York/New Jersey waterfront” from the Civil War to the mid-1950s, this book tells the story of the real life “crusading priest” in the Marlon Brando classic On The Waterfront. “Father Pete Barry” in the movie was based on John M. “Pete” Corridan, a Catholic priest who navigated “the tight web of dockworkers, union organizers, crime bosses, politicians and church leaders bound for decades to the corrupt Irish-controlled ports” to fight for union democracy in what a 1948 newspaper expose portrayed as “a jungle, an outlaw frontier.” Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “true crime story,” but one that “explores the conflicts experienced and accommodations made by an insular Irish-Catholic community forced to adapt its economic, political, and religious lives to powerful forces of change both local and global in scope.”
Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (U. of Washington), Harvey Swartz
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was born out of a series of West Coast maritime strikes, including the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, and achieved amazing gains for its members. In this oral history union leaders and rank-and-file workers “recall the back-breaking, humiliating conditions on the waterfront before they organized, the tense days of the 1934 strike, the challenges posed by mechanization, the struggle against racism and sexism on the job, and their activism in other social and political causes.” Labor historian David Brody says, “Harvey Schwartz is the dockworkers’ Studs Terkel,” and calls Solidarity Stories an “inspiring account in their own words of how men and women . . . built a great union and won dignity and fair pay on the job.”
Global Connections and Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States (U. of Tennessee), edited by Fran Ansley and Jon Shefner
This collection of work by anthropologists, legal scholars, sociologists, journalists, and labor studies researchers ranges widely – including accounts of union and worker center organizing in Tennessee and North Carolina, the recent history of Latino immigration to the American South, studies of Tyson and other chicken-processing plants, and a legal history of the last several decades of U.S. Immigration Law. An economist from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas argues against “the cheap labor export model” that “free trade” has brought to Mexico, and one of the editors argues that U.S. immigration policy cannot be “fixed” unless labor standards and neoliberal development models are addressed in both the U.S. and Latin America.
A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement (Cornell), Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds
Amy Dean and David Reynolds draw on a wealth of grassroots labor, community and political organizing campaigns over the last two decades to develop a “regional power-building model” that they argue can become the basis for a “new New Deal” for American workers. The stated purpose of their regional power-building model is to build permanent structures that generate well-targeted campaigns to advance a regional economic policy agenda that “ultimately aims to establish a labor-community movement [as] part of the region’s governing fabric.” Policy wins on good jobs, living wages, affordable housing, and, more broadly, on regional economic development with broad and sustainable benefits for workers and working-class communities is one goal. But the other one, for Dean and Reynolds, is establishing a dialectic where “[g]rowing and strengthening . . . grassroots institutions become[s] a core way to strengthen a region’s quality of life.” Si Kahn, Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership, says “A New New Deal helps lay the groundwork for the next great set of social movements.”
The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933, and The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Haymarket Books) by Irving Bernstein
Bernstein’s two voluminous classics of American labor history are finally being republished in paperback by Haymarket Books, both with introductions by Frances Fox Piven.
May Day: A Graphic History of Protest published by the Graphic History Collective and the Centre for Labor Studies at Simon Fraser University
This 24-page graphic novel traces the history of May Day in Canada, starting with the fight for the 9-hour day in 1872, well before the 1886 fight for an 8-hour day and the Haymarket Massacre. Historian Paul Buhle calls it “a grand experiment in reviving the traditional holiday of working people.” Purchasing information is available from Anne Klein at aklein@sfu.ca