Building Power In the New Economy: The South Bay Labor Council (original) (raw)
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Chapter One Introduction Background to the Study
mkpuma solomon, 2018
Preface "Once I thought to write a history of immigrants in America," commented Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted. "Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."* An important segment of that history is the large numbers of Mexicans who began moving into the United States in the very late 1800s. They were one of the successive waves of newcomers who helped transform an almost empty area into a powerful nation. Their coming coincided with the immigration of millions of "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who came to the United States for similar reasons. From 1897 to 1930 low-paid, unskilled workers were in strong demand in the United States, especially for agricultural work and railroad building. Simultaneously, events in Mexico created a large class of migrant workers. In view of the migrant's strong ties to their ancestral area, migratory patterns would not have emerged by the turn of the twentieth century without the existence of compelling factors in the Mexican society and economy. Circumstances in Mexico provided the initial impetus for the movement northward of campesinos and peones. My major concern throughout this study is the people whom the Mexican novelist Mariano Azuela called "the underdogs" (los de abajo). This group of people comprised upward of 90 percent of Mexican immigrants to the United States from 1897 to 1930. The history of middle-and upperclass immigrants forms another story, related to this one but not part of it.
Why Lead Labor? Projects and Pathways in California Unions, 1984-2001
2003
This focus on demographics rather than motives made sense at a time when unions were growing and gaining influence, and when they were dominated by workers who came up from the ranks. Mills sounded a theme which many other studies echoed: labor leaders were most often men who rose from the ranks, self-made men whose motivation for union work seemed self-evident and not worth further probing. Investigating motivation seemed unnecessary, and it was also out of step with the theoretical fashion of structuralism, which has dominated social science thinking for many years. And to the extent that students of leadership in management ), political science, or social movement theory look at motivation at all, they do so mainly in terms of class background, education, or personality and its relation to function.
This course covers labor history, from the Civil War through the 1980s, and current problems having to do with the structure, culture, and organization of working life in the US. We will be paying special attention to ways that work is structured by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class strata, and region, and the implications this has for workers’ self-organization. The course will also be attentive to the relationship between the ways capitalism organizes workers and work and the way workers organize themselves. The primary organizational vehicle for workers’ self-organization is the union, and a lot of this course will deal with the history, struggles, and organizing of US unions. We’ll also look at non-traditional workers’ organizations such as workers’ centers, consider relationships between students and workers, and discuss areas of work which are particularly important to contemporary capitalism, several of which pose a challenge for traditional models of worker organization. We’ll think about unfree and domestic labor, which are often accorded a marginal status compared to that of formal, paid labor. The course will examine critiques of unions which have been particularly sharp in the past few years, especially with respect to public sector workers and teachers unions, and how those workers have responded. We will consider the impact of globalization on work and labor movements.