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Building upon historic transnational connections between the cosmopolitan port of Tampico, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the Mexican north, and ports of entry across the Atlantic, a network of labor activists including women such as Caritina Piña emerged in the early twentieth century to address labor inequities. This book retraces the emergence of this network circulating on the eve of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The early revolutionary period ushered in a wave of anarcho-syndicalist groups privileging organizing via labor unions and other collectives. Organizations such as the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) were among the most progressive of collectives that incorporated women’s issues in their agenda. Its members encouraged women’s participation as compañeras, key to creating a real revolution. Yet, despite such progressive stance, gendered ideas about femininity and masculinity shaped members’ perspectives just as much as they shaped mainstream media outlets casting radical female activists as “women of ill-repute.” Their own understanding of gender and ideas about motherhood shaped women activists too. While anarcho-syndicalism declined as the revolutionary state grew stronger in its co-opting of organized labor, the legacy of women’s activism remained a distinctive feature of the greater Mexican borderlands. Women left an indelible mark on the Tamaulipas-Texas borderlands’ labor history. Such historic and gendered border solidarities, while imperfect, helped to build a foundation for postrevolutionary labor alliances.

In 1933, Eugénie Brazier earned three Michelin stars for both of her restaurants—she was the first person to claim these high accolades and the only woman to ever do so. Brazier’s rise to fame helped establish Lyon’s place as the gastronomic capital of France, but it did not ensure that women would continue to lead the way in professional kitchens. Women are celebrated home cooks and guardians of French cuisine, but they have largely failed to achieve the same recognition for their craft in the professional kitchen. The small number of women who have succeeded in the culinary arts are celebrated as exceptions. This book looks at the historical and contemporary reasons for the underrepresentation of women in culinary professions in France, a country where cuisine is considered an important cultural form. It considers the strategies that women use to enter and move ahead in what is often a hostile work environment where gender inequality persists. The author explores the realities of women who cook professionally through their own culinary education and apprenticeship as well as extensive interviews with female and male cooks, chefs, and journalists. Lyon serves as a rich field site for discovering women’s resilience, skill and challenges as they seek to make their mark in the culinary arts.

Ronald W. Schatz tells the story of the team of young economists and lawyers recruited to the National War Labor Board to resolve union-management conflicts during the Second World War. The crew (including Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Jean McKelvey, and Marvin Miller) exerted broad influence on the U.S. economy and society for the next forty years. They handled thousands of grievances and strikes. They founded academic industrial relations programs. When the 1960s student movement erupted, universities appointed them as top administrators charged with quelling the conflicts. In the 1970s, they developed systems that advanced public sector unionization and revolutionized employment conditions in Major League Baseball. Schatz argues that the Labor Board vets, who saw themselves as disinterested technocrats, were in truth utopian reformers aiming to transform the world. Beginning in the 1970s stagflation era, they faced unforeseen opposition, and the cooperative relationships they had fostered withered. Yet their protégé George Shultz used mediation techniques learned from his mentors to assist in the integration of Southern public schools, institute affirmative action in industry, and conduct Cold War negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Union Renegades follows the individuals who did not see the value of following union orders in the Gilded Age. As unions grew more centralized to combat worker grievances in the workplace, leaders were shocked to find that workers were often reluctant to fully follow labor organizations. Although union leaders were quick to cast these individuals as nonunion workers who were “indifferent to their own interests,” this book argues that workers’ decisions to follow or reject unions was based on their own assessment of what course would be most beneficial to them and their families. As corporations sought to increase capitalist gain, rural workers applied these same capitalist mindsets to their own economic needs. It looks closely at the seasonal work patters of rural industries like farming and coal mining to show how workers moved between occupations, causing many to see themselves as business-minded investors rather than as wage earners. This continuous effort to increase income caused farmers and laborers to form their own understandings of unionism that did not always fit with what union leaders envisioned. Workers’ decisions to break away from formal unions, then, did not come from an inability to look after their own interests as some union leaders claimed. Instead, it came from the belief that the union did not offer the surest means to secure their economic, social, and political needs.

This book contributes to legal and labor history by reinterpreting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hague v. CIO (1939) decision, which upheld a federal district court injunction prohibiting Jersey City boss Frank Hague from obstructing workers from the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allies in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from meeting in urban public places. The case involved speech and assembly freedoms, rights essential for CIO workers’ organizing efforts, but, as the book shows, these rights were submerged under municipal police powers to preserve public order until the court brought them under federal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment in Hague. Revising the conventional view, the book argues that Hague was more than simply a civil liberties victory for workers over a dictatorial, antilabor city boss. Drawing on new evidence in city archives, CIO records, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and Jersey City court filings, as well as traditional sources in ACLU records and anti-Hague literature, the book demonstrates that the Hague-versus-CIO controversy emanated more from shifts in the labor movement from craft to industrial unionism, in municipal law, in urban police practices, in the politics of anticommunism and antifascism, and especially in the Supreme Court’s “civil liberties revolution.” With women and African Americans on the periphery, the book concludes, male CIO workers initiated the case, but Hague ultimately benefitted outdoor protests more than it benefitted labor speech.

This book examines how debates about children and their labor shaped the way Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, morality, and the market from the 1850s through the 1930s. Initially, Northerners and Southerners clashed over child labor in the context of the sectional crisis over slavery. For decades after the Civil War, debates about child labor bore the traces of this sectionalist conflict. Reformers, who eventually came to see child labor as the worst evil of the nation since slavery, mobilized politically in a national movement to abolish child labor with the power of the progressive state, liberating children to develop their potential in a burgeoning consumer market society. To defeat this movement, the opponents of reform also mobilized politically, asserting an opposing vision of American freedom that drew on traditional understandings of familial authority and the moral value of free labor. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the battle over child labor over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict within a post-emancipation, modern capitalist society.

This book shows that full employment has been rare in the United States in the last 150 years; excessive unemployment has been the norm. Against prominent economists who argue that unemployment is voluntary choice, it shows by analysis and many stories that being unemployed is painful and not something people choose lightly. It argues that hidden unemployment and a continuing labor surplus help explain why average real wages in 2019 are not much above their level of the early 1970s. The book locates consequential ideas about unemployment on a continuum between two opposing views. The free-market view holds that except for external shocks or government mistakes, significant unemployment is rare. People can always find jobs. But the historical record tells another story. For example, with mostly laissez-faire conditions, there were six major depressions from 1873 through 1933.The opposing view is that the business system naturally generates excessive unemployment, and at times depressions with catastrophic levels of joblessness. The book shows how the second model fits past and present facts. It also argues that the official unemployment rate, whose creation in the 1940s was an advance for economic policy, underestimates real unemployment and lessens the impetus for job-creation programs. And that’s a problem. Because many employers are happy with a labor surplus, and because tax cuts for the rich do not create many good jobs, this book argues that only direct job creation by the federal government—financed partly by taxes on the rich—will bring high-wage full employment.