Reviews for Working Americans, 1880-1999

The average rating for Working Americans, 1880-1999 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-24 00:00:00 Nickarre Kiesman The author is one of Becky's advisors at Berkeley. The thesis is that the US, English, and French labor movements were remarkably similar until the 1880s and the rise of the Knights of Labor. With the failure of the KOL the US Labor movement became a more conservative, craft based union movement up until the 1930s. She argues against the main historical theoreticians which discuss American exceptionalism (expanding territory, etc.) as the reasons the labor movement went in a different direction. She pins the blame on the strength of the employer associations which defeated the Knights in a bunch of strikes in the late 1880s. These associations were much stronger than what existed in Britain or France. Her book is based on a lot of data from the local Knights organization in New Jersey. It is the first 'sociological history' I have read. The statistical chapters are difficult to get through, but the introduction and concluding chapters are quite interesting.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-02 00:00:00 Robb Lovre Voss argues, and very effectively too, that America's weak working-class institutions and conservative unions are NOT due to an absence of class struggle in the US. If you look historically, there was in fact a class struggle on par with and broadly similar to that of Britain and France. The explanation lies not in ethnic diversity, lack of class consciousness or etc, it lies in the fact that the employers won the class struggle between 1886 (Haymarket anyone?) and 1887, and that has shaped all future organizing. The fall of the Knights of Labor was a critical moment, and so this book explores their rise and fall using the normal qualitative data, but also quantitative data in a very rich and interesting way. I would have given this 5 stars but the material was so brilliant and fascinating and yet it was still so dry to read! Still, her finding that the presence of organized capital in the form of employers associations as one of the principal factors in labour's losses is a good thing to think about. And if you want further reading on anything, the footnotes are the best I've ever seen.