From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States Priscilla Murolo and A. B. Chitty. New York: The New Press, 2001. Labor's Story in the United States Philip Yale Nicholson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. American Labor: A Documentary Collection Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin, Editors. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004. These three texts, two surveys, and a collection of documents, are recent contributions to the rich history of American workers. In a sense there cannot be too much scrutiny of how the United States labor force has lived its struggle. From the shop windows of mega stores to the more rarefied "Book Notes" talk shows on C-Span, the working class is inevitably edged out in favor of highly touted volumes on presidents, wars, politicians, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. While many confrontations between workers and management have been scandalous-government troops firing on women and children at Rockefeller-owned mines in strike-torn Telluride, Colorado in the early 1900s comes readily to mind-these are not the scandals that sell. Murolo and Chitty, Nicholson, and Dubofsky and McCartin render an essential service in reminding general readers as well as scholars and college instructors of the "other American history." Yet in so doing they have also raised important questions about the voice of the people. What is the worker to a society dedicated to the idea of fluid or even nonexistent class boundaries? All three books are faithful to the rise of class formation in decades before the American Revolution, the imposition of an antebellum factory regime, and the response to deskilling of early artisans and guilds. They move logically from the earliest trade unions in carpentry and allied crafts and the subsequent rise and decline of the innovative, and racist Knights of Labor. Slavery and blacks' post-Emancipation relegation to what the skilled trades dismissed as "nigger work" shadow the slow progress toward inclusiveness in the traditional, native-born, or English-speaking "male and pale" labor force. A parallel set of concerns is the exclusionary American Federation of Labor struggles of the late nineteenth century and the key industrial battles in steel, coal, and light manufacturing; the ideological struggles over syndicalism and inclusiveness within the Socialist Party; and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) of the pre-World War I era. Crucial too in these books is workplace contractualism before collective bargaining. Cornerstones are the Depression era advances in industrial democracy, the continuing schisms of race, gender, and ethnicity, and the attempts of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations to unite all industrial workers. The Taft-Hartley Act and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the incursions on labor, and the business unionism of the 1960s through the present are scrutinized as preludes to the decline of American labor organizing and the current battles with international Big Business as the robotic if well-paid assembly line and electronic sweatshop become global. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend is featured in catalogs put out by organizations such as Union Communications Services (http://www.unionist.com). Unlike the Nicholson volume, it signals an emphasis on trade unions and prominority organizations placing an extensive list of abbreviations before the first chapter: The venerable American Railway Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers share space with the little-known 1930s Japanese-Mexican Labor Association and the stillcontroversial Young Lords Party of the inner-city 1960s. Murolo and Chitty's approach nicely balances watershed events in the story of workers with anecdotes, eyewitness testimony, and reminiscences not usually found in broad surveys of this kind. Woven into a discussion of the colonial labor force (many histories begin much later with the 1870s strikes in mining and rails) is a reference to the forgotten Magdalena Zeh. …