In February of 1996, Columbia University and New York University marked the centennial of the French labor movement by jointly sponsoring a conference to reflect on the history of this movement and on the future prospects for trade unionism in France. A Century of Organized Labor in France is a collection of papers presented at that conference, written by distinguished historians and social scientists from both France and the United States, as well as by important French trade union leaders. Offering an interdisciplinary approach that is rare among studies on this subject, this volume examines the trajectory of the French labor movement and provides rich lessons for students of contemporary France, Western European politics and society, and comparative labor movements.

University Of California Publications In Economics, Volume 8, Number 1, April 15, 1930.

Many historians have examined the French labor movement, but few have gone beyond chronicling unions, strikes, and personalities to undertake a concrete analysis of workers’ aims in their historical context. Searching for what Marx called the “real movement” of the working class, Bernard H. Moss presents a sophisticated revisionist interpretation that uncovers a core ideology of social vision underlying the many changes and variations in French socialism. To define this ideology and delineate its social base, Moss cuts through conventional distinctions between artisans and proletarians and between anarchism and socialism to derive an intermediate category, the federalist trade socialism of skilled workers. Originally manifested in the trade movement for producers’ associations and cooperatives, this socialism eventually found revolutionary expression in Bakuninism, possibilism, Allemanism, and revolutionary syndicalism. The social base of this movement was the skilled craftsmen undergoing a process of proletarianization. In The Origins of the French Labor Movement, Moss rehabilitates ideology both as a vital force in history and as a serious subject for scientific history. He proposes important revisions in our understanding of French politics and society in the nineteenth century and suggests a new approach to socialist ideology, not as abstract theory, but as the result of historical experience and process. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news. Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.