front cover of Ambassadors of the Working Class
Ambassadors of the Working Class
Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas
Ernesto Semán
Duke University Press, 2017
In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin America turned the region into a Cold War battlefield for the hearts of the working classes. In this context, Ernesto Semán reveals, for example, how the attachés' brand of transnational populism offered Fidel Castro and Che Guevara their last chance at mass politics before their embrace of revolutionary violence. Fiercely opposed by Washington, the attachés’ project foundered, but not before US policymakers used their opposition to Peronism to rehearse arguments against the New Deal's legacies.
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front cover of The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey
The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey
Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism
Çagatay Edgücan Sahin
Pluto Press, 2021

Decades of neoliberal authoritarianism have propelled Turkey into crisis. Regime change, economic disaster and Erdogan’s ambition to impose ‘one-man rule’ have shaken the foundations of Turkish political life, but what does this mean for workers?

Moving beyond the headlines and personalities, this book uncovers the real condition of the working class in modern Turkey. Combining field research and in-depth interviews, it offers cutting-edge analyses of workplace struggles, trade unionism, the AKP’s relationship with neoliberalism, migration, gender, agrarian change and precarity, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on workers.

Bringing together Turkish activists and scholars, this book is an inside look at the dynamics and contradictions of working-class resistance against Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarian regime; from worker self-management to organized labor and rural struggles.

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front cover of Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920
Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920
Michael K. Rosenow
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society?
 
Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.
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front cover of From Cottage to Bungalow
From Cottage to Bungalow
Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869-1929
Joseph C. Bigott
University of Chicago Press, 2001
It's hard to overestimate the complexity of the factors that dictate something as simple as where, and in what sorts of structures, people live. Urban planning, business, labor, ethnicity, architecture—each influences the types of structures people live in, and the sorts of lives they lead within them.

Joseph C. Bigott takes on all of these fields in From Cottage to Bungalow, a sophisticated study of domestic structures and ethnic working-class neighborhoods in Chicago during the critical period of 1869 to 1929, when the city attracted huge numbers of immigrants. Exploring the meaning of home ownership in this context, Bigott develops two case studies that combine the intimate lives of ordinary people (primarily in Chicago's Polish and German communities) with broad analysis of everything from real estate markets to the very carpentry practices used to construct houses. His progressive methods and the novel conclusions they support chronicle not only the history of housing in Chicago, but also the organizations of people's lives, and the ways in which housing has affected notions of who is—and who is not—a worthy American citizen.

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front cover of The Gospel of the Working Class
The Gospel of the Working Class
Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America
Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll
University of Illinois Press, 2011

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War.

 
Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion.
 
This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
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front cover of Modernization and the Working Class
Modernization and the Working Class
The Politics of Legitimacy
By Carlos H. Waisman
University of Texas Press, 1982

This is a fascinating inquiry into the factors that determine the acceptance or rejection of capitalism by the industrial working class. Combining classical social theory, historical evidence, and survey data, Waisman explores the relationship between the degree of modernization and the legitimacy of the capitalist social order.

Propositions about the interaction between established elites and emerging working classes are illustrated with three typical cases: Disraelian Britain, Bismarckian Germany, and Peronist Argentina. From the contrasting theories of Marx and Bakunin, the author derives hypotheses concerning the position of the working class in the economy and the consequences this has for legitimacy. He finds that countries at middle levels of industrial development—mostly latecomers to industrialization in Southern Europe and advanced areas of Latin America—have the greatest difficulty in establishing capitalism as a legitimate social order. They are advanced enough to have a large working class, yet underdeveloped enough to have a dissatisfied one.

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front cover of This Fine Place So Far from Home
This Fine Place So Far from Home
Voices of Academics from the Working Class
edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law
Temple University Press, 1995

These autobiographical and analytical essays by a diverse group of professors and graduate students from working-class families reveal an academic world in which "blue-collar work is invisible." Describing conflict and frustration, the contributors expose a divisive middle-class bias in the university setting. Many talk openly about how little they understood about the hierarchy and processes of higher education, while others explore how their experiences now affect their relationships with their own students. They all have in common the anguish of choosing to hide their working-class background, to keep the language of home out of the classroom and the ideas of school away from home. These startlingly personal stories highlight the fissure between a working-class upbringing and the more privileged values of the institution.

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Where Was the Working Class?
REVOLUTION IN EASTERN GERMANY
Linda Fuller
University of Illinois Press, 1999
In six months bridging 1989 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic underwent a transformation that took the world almost completely by surprise.  Yet unlike the revolution in Poland a decade earlier, only a small percentage of workers played apolitically active role in the fall of socialism in Germany.
 
In this unprecedented study, Linda Fuller sets out to explain why the working class was largely missing from the 1989-90 revolution.   Drawing on pre- and post-revolutionary visits to East German work sites and dozens of interviews, Fuller documents workers' day-to-day experience of the labor process, workplace union politics, and class. She shows how all three factors led most workers to withdraw from politics, even while prompting a handful to become actively involved in the struggle.
 
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front cover of The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920
The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920
Daniel T. Rodgers
University of Chicago Press, 1978
"Rodgers's book is a study of how technology affects ideas. That is the issue to which Rodgers always returns: how did men and women react to the economy of unprecedented plenty that the 19th-century revolution in power and machines had produced? . . . This is certainly . . . one of the most refreshing and penetrating analyses of the relation of diverse levels of 19th-century culture that it has been my pleasure to read in a long time."—Carl N. Degler, Science
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