num_pages: 318
description: A professional labor organizer, whose experience runs back to the sitdown strikes of the thirties, offers in this book a frank and objective critique of big labor in America. He discusses rackets and racketeers, names names, gives vivid biographical sketches of big labor's leaders. The union movement, as Mr. Lens sees it, has once more come to a dead end. Labor has become institutionalized, and the top echelon in big labor too often finds it has more in common with the leaders of big business than it has with labor's own rank and file. In trying to predict the new direction the union movement must take, the author surveys the whole history of labor in America. He shows how, in previous crises, new leaders and new orientation have brought renewed vigor to organized labor. Mr. Lens, who has known both men well, also provides sharp and searching portraits of two of big labor's most exciting figures - Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Reuther. He assesses the value of each to the labor movement and contrasts their basic philosophies and practices.
language: English
title: The Crisis of American Labor
publisher: A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc.