Thanks for this, and to all for the discussion. Very useful.
Gene Coyle
On Oct 11, 2007, at 7:08 PM, Michael Nuwer wrote:
raghu wrote:
Thanks for this info Michael. Do you have any references for this
period?
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the
State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 is certainly the best,
most lucid argument for the centrality of struggles over workplace
control in shaping the American labor movement.
For detailed descriptions of the values of craft workers, their
commitments to job control, irregularity of work patterns, and
maintenance of group discipline and solidarity see David Bensman, The
Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth
Century
and Patricia Cooper, Once A Cigarmaker: Men, Women and Work Culture in
American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919.
You can find a discussion of labor's legal standing during the
nineteenth century and of the assassination of labor's freedom at the
hands of the New Deal in William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of
the
American Labor Movement and the very important work by Christopher L.
Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the
Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960.
I am curipous about what kind of "entitlements" they were
looking for. If it is just better pay then it is not really that
different from Fordism (and inevitably, mass-consumption), right?
Yes, if it is just better pay, but, before the 1930s, that was not
often
the issue. In many trades, the union developed rules at its assemblies
which governed specific aspects of the craft. The iron workers, for
example, had rules about the amount of iron that could be fired per
day
in a furnace. When the capitalist, who owned the furnaces, contracted
with, or recognized, the union, they were agreeing to abide by the
union's rules. This is why the closed shop was an essential element of
the union's goals, providing for the maintenance and enforcement of
union rules. When union membership is a pre-condition for employment,
the union could enforce its rules via its own internal disciplinary
procedures. This is the type of thing that the workers believed they
were entitled too. Today, under the law, management is entitled to
make
decisions about the organization of work. Management is the master and
the employee is the servant.
Also
doesn't the idea of organized workplaces automatically assume the
factory system as the predominant organizational unit? Isn't there a
rather basic contradiction here? i.e. how can you decommodify labor
while staying within the organized workplace (which is premised on
division of labor ad-absurdum)?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're getting at. All
workplaces
are organized in some why or another. You seem to have a particular
kind
of organization in mind, but I'm not clear on what that is.
