Trade union leader and journalist Steve Early discusses how to reverse American labour's current decline.

Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War. Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness. In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.

“Should be required reading for all workers’ rights advocates.” —Bernie Sanders Between 2008 and 2010, the progressive wing of the US labor movement tore itself apart in a series of internecine struggles. More than $140 million was expended, by all sides, on organizing conflicts that tarnished union reputations and undermined the campaign for real health care and labor law reform. Campus and community allies, along with many rank-and-file union members, were left angered and dismayed. In this incisive book, labor journalist Steve Early draws on scores of interviews and on his own union organizing experience to explain why and how these labor civil wars occurred. He examines the bitter disputes about union structure, membership rights, organizing strategy, and contract standards that enveloped SEIU, UNITE HERE, the California Nurses Association, and independent organizations like the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico and the new National Union of Healthcare Workers in California. Along the way, we meet rank-and-file activists, local union officers, national leaders, and concerned friends of labor who were drawn into the fray, as Early considers the quest to stem the tide of the labor movement’s long decline.

Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism. An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers’ rights.

American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations. Contributors: Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina Anne Eller, Yale University Richard Huzzey, University of Liverpool Howard Jones, University of Alabama Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San Antonio Rafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao Paulo Erika Pani, College of Mexico Hilda Sabato, University of Buenos Aires Steve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV Sorbonne Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University Jay Sexton, University of Oxford