Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

By the early twentieth century, consumers around the world had developed a taste for Ottoman-grown tobacco. Employing tens of thousands of workers, the Ottoman tobacco industry flourished in the decades between the 1870s to the First Balkan War—and it became the locus of many of the most active labor struggles across the empire. Can Nacar delves into the lives of these workers and their fight for better working conditions. Full of insight into the changing relations of power between capital and labor in the Ottoman Empire and the role played by state actors in these relations, this book also draws on a rich array of primary sources to foreground the voices of tobacco workers themselves.

Tells the story of the people who live and work on US tobacco farms at a time when the global tobacco industry is undergoing profound changes. This book explores the cultural and ethical ambiguities of tobacco farming and offers concrete recommendations for the tobacco-control movement in the United States and worldwide.

"Each year, children work on tobacco farms in the United States, where they are exposed to nicotine, toxic pesticides, and other dangers. The US government has failed to protect children from hazardous work in tobacco farming. Since 2014, some tobacco companies have prohibited the employment of children under 16 on farms from which they purchase tobacco. These policies are an important step forward, but they exclude 16 and 17-year-old children. This report is based on interviews with 26 children ages 16 and 17, as well as parents, health experts, and tobacco growers. It documents the dangers of tobacco farming for 16 and 17 year olds. Most teenage children interviewed suffered symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning. Many also reported working in or near fields that were being sprayed with pesticides and becoming ill. Several tobacco companies prohibit children under 18 from many hazardous tobacco farming tasks, but none have policies sufficient to protect all children from danger. Teenage children are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of the work because their brains are still developing. Nicotine exposure during adolescence has been associated with mood disorders, and problems with memory, attention, impulse control, and cognition later in life. Human Rights Watch calls on tobacco companies and the US government and Congress to take urgent action to ban all children under 18 from hazardous work on tobacco farms"--Publisher's description.

Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their "property," or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. In Working Knowledge, Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies--including DuPont, Rand McNally, and the American Tobacco Company--Fisk makes a highly technical area of law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.