State of the Union : a century of American labor

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The Resource State of the Union : a century of American labor

Label: State of the Union : a century of American labor

Title remainder: a century of American labor

Statement of responsibility: Nelson Lichtenstein

Creator

Lichtenstein, Nelson

Subject

Genre

History

Language: eng

Summary: The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations

Member of

Politics and society in twentieth-century America

Cataloging source: DLC

Illustrations: illustrations

Index: index present

LC call number: HD8066

LC item number: .L53 2002

Literary form: non fiction

Nature of contents: bibliography

Context

Context of State of the Union : a century of American labor

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