This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike. Hinging on a major reinterpretation of the Haymarket era, Labor and Urban Politics argues for labor's profound influence on the shaping of urban politics and the transformation of liberalism in late nineteenth-century America.''After this book, no one will have any excuse to write about late nineteenth-century politics in Chicago, or any other city, solely on the basis of the actions and interests of elites. Schneirov argues for the importance of the working class in municipal politics on a level that surpasses anything else in the literature.'' -- David Montgomery''The most thorough, deepest re-reading of Gilded Age reality that has yet emerged from labor historians. . . . Gives an unparalleled understanding of the world of contemporary labor.'' -- Leon Fink, author of In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz

Having more in common than their deaths on the same day in 1997, the late Cheddi Jagan of Guyana and Michael Manley of Jamaica both represented a radical perspective in modern Caribbean politics. Jagan and Manley each had a bold and creative ability to connect labor and politics and made it their priority to minimize poverty and inequality and to enhance the welfare of the Caribbean's disadvantaged and dispossessed. Caribbean Labor and Politics looks closely at the legacies of Jagan and Manley and their ramifications for the political and economic struggles of the Caribbean region and the world. This edited volume brings together a variety of studies on the lives, works, and intellectual and practical contributions of these two stalwart political leaders. The chapters focus primarily on Jagan's and Manley's years as heads of state of their respective countries and also encapsulate their pre-political years-mainly their growing-up experiences and their organizational work in the labor movement. The core contributions of these men are characterized in terms of their pivotal struggles towards the realization of what we term the "working class project."

America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions. Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center. Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant. Whose Detroit? brings the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism and integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.

One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s proudest accomplishments is his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program this double standard begs a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in Free Labor, John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on either side of the debate. Krinsky’s broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. Free Labor will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services. Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Introducing the role of urban social context in the field of labor revitalization, this book features global case studies in which strong coalitions have enabled new union influence as well as those in which such coalition building has been thwarted.

"Kazin's book is about far more than the construction industry: it also illuminates the social and political history of San Francisco. . . . Gracefully written and adorned with evocative portraits of local political and labor leaders, Barons of Labor is absorbing reading as well as a fine piece of history."-- The Nation "A bold and pioneering work that revises our understanding of skilled craftsmen and the politics of class in the Progressive Era."-- Journal of American History "Barons of Labor, is superb work, carefully researched and written with clarity, vitality, and wit, a pleasure as well as an education to read." -- Labor History

Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all. Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power. A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.