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In Live Wire, Francine Moccio brings to life forty years of public policy reform and advocacy that have failed to eliminate restricted opportunities for women in highly paid, skilled blue-collar jobs. Breaking barriers into a male-only occupation and trade, women electricians have found career opportunities in nontraditional work. Yet their efforts to achieve gender equality have also collided with the prejudice and fraternal values of brotherhood and factors that have ultimately derailed women's full inclusion. By drawing instructive comparisons of women’s entrance into the electricians’ trade and its union with those of black and other minority men, Moccio’s in-depth case study brings new insights into the ways in which divisions at work along the lines of race, gender, and economic background enhance and/or inhibit inclusion. Incorporating research based on extensive primary, secondary, and archival resources, Live Wire contributes a much-needed examination of how sex segregation is reproduced in blue-collar occupations, while also scrutinizing the complex interactions of work, unions, leisure, and family life.
Even as the world becomes increasingly wireless, nearly everyone remains dependent on the hardwired work of electricians. The need for homes, offices, public spaces, and other facilities to stay heated and able to power people's machines and devices at any time of day or night means that electricians are always in demand. This useful guide provides an overview of the various jobs electrical workers do and the education and skill requirements they must meet. Readers will learn how women have broken into this once male-dominated field and how this necessary work can become a stable and fruitful career.
An exciting yet relatively unknown episode in American labor history took place in New York City between 1965 and 1975. Rank-and-file members of numerous unions caught a "strike fever" as they challenged the entrenched power of some of the country's most powerful politicians, employers, and union leaders in a wave of contract rejections, wildcat strikes, and electoral campaigns. Workers in unions across New York wanted more than better contracts: they contested control of the work process, racism on the job, and workers' place in America's socioeconomic hierarchy while implicitly and explicitly demanding greater democratic control of their representative organizations. Some initial challenge...
“Meticulously researched and rewarding to read...Thomas is a gifted storyteller.” —The New York Times Book Review Best known as a monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act also revolutionized the lives of America’s working women. Title VII of the law made it illegal to discriminate “because of sex.” But that simple phrase didn’t mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job—and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court. Among them were Ida Phillips, denied an assembly line job because she had a preschool-age child; Kim Rawlinson, who fought to become a prison guard—a “man’s job”; Mechell...
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