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This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime—a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' pe...
The years of the Third Republic (1870-1940) in France were ones of intense social and economic transformation as workers struggled to defend their rights in the face of growing industrial capitalism. In The Fabric of Gender, Helen Chenut paints a vivid picture of working life during these years by following four generations of laboring women and men in one community, the textile town of Troyes in the Champagne region. In Troyes workers were locked in an adversarial relationship with mill owners, whose monopoly over the labor market in a single-industry town largely determined the workers' future. And yet workers managed to create a counterculture of resistance by founding labor unions, consu...
Powerful narratives often describe Latin American nations as fundamentally mestizo. These narratives have hampered the acknowledgment of racism in the region, but recent multiculturalist reforms have increased recognition of Black and Indigenous identities and cultures. Multiculturalism may focus on identity and visibility and address more casual and social forms of racism, but can also distract attention from structural racism and racialized inequality, and constrain larger antiracist initiatives. Additionally, multiple understandings of how racism and antiracism fit into projects of social transformation make racism a complex and multifaceted issue. The essays in Against Racism examine actors in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico that move beyond recognition politics to address structural inequalities and material conflicts and build common ground with other marginalized groups. The organizations in this study advocate an approach to deep social structural transformation that is inclusive, fosters alliances, and is inspired by a radical imagination.
The United States faces a growing crisis in care. The number of people needing care is growing while the ranks of traditional caregivers have shrunk. The status of care workers is a critical concern. Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers...
Responding to the tough question, why are scientists so unresponsive to the needs of women workers, Messing describes long-standing difficulties in gaining attention for the occupational health of women, ranging from the structure of the grant process and the conferences crucial to the professional life of researchers to the basic assumptions of scientific practice.
Offering a broad introduction to the methodology & practice of transnational history, this work focuses on three defining moments of 20th century European history, when changes affected the whole of the continent.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. As social constructs, masculinities and femininities are continually being challenged and reconstructed, and in so doing, new subjectivities are re/produced. The boundaries of gender thus remain both violent and vulnerable; violent in the Butlerian sense of subject formation and normative gender policing, and vulnerable as they are fraught with possibilities for new ways of gendering and new definitions of sexual difference. This volume thus examines the boundaries of masculinities and femininities through various cultural, socio-historical, and political contexts, and the tensions which arise from the constant challenges and reconstructions. Violent and Vulnerable Performances: Challenging the Gender Boundaries of Masculinities and Femininities contains fourteen chapters which demonstrate the situatedness of gender, and its impacts on race, class, sex, the body, identity, language, work, the family, and further cultural, socio-political, and economic processes.
How the occupation of a watch factory became one of the iconic labor struggles after May 1968 In 1973, faced with massive layoffs, workers at the legendary Lip watch firm in Besançon, France, occupied their factory to demand that no one lose their job. They seized watches and watch parts, assembled and sold watches, and paid their own salaries. Their actions recaptured the ideals of May 1968, when 11 million workers had gone on strike to demand greater autonomy and to overturn the status quo. Educated by ’68, the men and women at the Besançon factory formed committees to control every aspect of what became a national struggle. Female employees developed a working-class feminism, combatin...
Second-wave feminism is now in its third decade.
What do human beings do when they work, how is work organized, and what are its multidimensional – economic, social, political, biographical, ecological – effects? We cannot answer these questions without drawing on the numerous categories that we use to describe work, such as "skilled" or "unskilled" work, "domestic work" or "wage labor," "gig work" or "platform work." Such categories are not merely theoretical labels as they also have practical effects. But where do these categories come from, what are their histories, how do they differ between countries, and how are they evolving? Shifting Categories of Work asks these questions, illuminating the many ways in which our societies cate...