Here are the life stories of the men and women who have led the labor movement in America from Reconstruction to recent times, from William H. Sylvis, the first major labor leader, to Cesar Chavez, who organized California's farm workers in the 1960s. All of the chapters have been written expressly for this volume by leading authorities, several of whom are authors of booklength biographies of their subjects. Taken together these readable yet authoritative life studies provide a broad overview of the American labor movement that will appeal to the student and lay reader as well as to the specialist in social history and labor and industrial relations.

No institution in America has changed more in the past 25 years, observes Max Green, than the American labour movements. Green documents the descent into radicalism of these unions and concludes that as currently constituted and led, they no longer serve the public or national interest.

This book, designed to give a survey history of American labor from colonial times to the present, is uniquely well suited to speak to the concerns of today’s teachers and students. As issues of growing inequality, stagnating incomes, declining unionization, and exacerbated job insecurity have increasingly come to define working life over the last 20 years, a new generation of students and teachers is beginning to seek to understand labor and its place and ponder seriously its future in American life. Like its predecessors, this ninth edition of our classic survey of American labor is designed to introduce readers to the subject in an engaging, accessible way.

Even since the last edition of this milestone text was released six years ago, unions have continued to shed members; union membership in the private sector of the economy has fallen to levels not seen since the nineteenth century; the forces of economic liberalization (neo-liberalism), capital mobility, and globalization have affected measurably the material standard of living enjoyed by workers in the United States; and mass immigration from the Southern Hemisphere and Asia has continued to restructure the domestic labor force. Yet even in the face of anti-union legislation, a continuing decline in the number of organized workers, and the fear of stateless, if not faceless terrorism—the shadow of “911” in which we still live, in preparing this new edition of his classic text Professor Dubofsky has hewn to the lines laid out in the previous seven in seeking to encourage today’s students of labor history to learn about those who built the United States and who will shape its future. In addition to taking the narrative right up to the present, a recent history that includes the election of 2008 as well as the tumultuous blow suffered by the U.S. and world economy in 2008-09, this eighth edition features an entirely new (fourth) bank of photographs and, in light of the avalanche of new scholarly work over the last decade, a complete overhauling of the book’s extensive and critical Further Readings section in order to note the very best works from the profuse recent scholarship that explores the history of working people in all its diversity.

The definitive collection of speeches and writings by the labor leader, civil rights activist and founder of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph became the first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s first majority-Black labor union. It was a major achievement in a life dedicated to the causes of civil and workers’ rights. A leading voice in the struggle for social justice, his powerful words served as a bridge between African Americans and the labor movement. This volume documents Randolph's life and work through his own writings. It includes more than seventy published and unpublished pieces drawn from libraries, manuscript collections, and newspapers. The book is organized thematically around Randolph’s most significant activities: dismantling workplace inequality, expanding civil rights, confronting racial segregation, and building international coalitions. The editors provide a detailed biographical essay that helps to situate the speeches and writings collected in the book. In the absence of an autobiography, this volume offers the best available presentation of Randolph's ideas and arguments in his own words.