Capital, Labor, and State is a systematic and thorough examination of American labor policy from the Civil War to the New Deal. David Brian Robertson skillfully demonstrates that although most industrializing nations began to limit employer freedom and regulate labor conditions in the 1900s, the United States continued to allow total employer discretion in decisions concerning hiring, firing, and workplace conditions. Robertson argues that the American constitution made it much more difficult for the American Federation of Labor, government, and business to cooperate for mutual gain as extensively as their counterparts abroad, so that even at the height of New Deal, American labor market policy remained a patchwork of limited protections, uneven laws, and poor enforcement, lacking basic national standards even for child labor.

This book presents a detailed explanation of the essential elements that characterize capital labor relations and the resulting social conflict that leads to repression of labor. It links repression to the class struggle between capital and labor. The starting point involves an historical approach used to explore labor repression after the American Revolution. What follows is an examination of the role of government along with the growth of American capitalism to analyze capital-labor conflict. Subsequent chapters trace US history during the 19th century to discuss the question of the role assumed by the inclusion/exclusion of capital and labor in political-economic structures, which in turn lead to repression. Wholesale exclusion of labor from a fundamental role in framing policy in these institutions was crucial in understanding the unfolding of labor repression. Repression emerges amid a social struggle to acquire and maintain control over policy-making bodies, which pits the few against the many. In response, labor attempts to push back against institutional exclusion in part by the formation of labor unions. Capital reacts to such actions using repression to prevent labor from having a greater role in social institutions. For instance, this is played out inside the workplace as capital and labor engage in a political struggle over the function of the workplace. Given capital’s monopoly of ownership, capital employs various means to repress labor at work, including the introduction of technology, mass firings, crushing strikes, and the use of force to break up unions. The role of the state is not to be overlooked in its support of elite control over production, as well as aiding through legal means the growth of a capitalist economy in opposition to labor’s conception of greater economic democracy. This book explains how and why labor continues to confront repression in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History critically examines the defining processes and structures of historical developments in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The Handbook pays particular attention to countries that have leapt out of the political shadows of dominant and better-studied neighbours in the course of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. These dramatic and interconnected developments have exposed the dearth of informative analysis available in surveys and textbooks, particularly on Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

This volume honours the contributions Claudia Goldin has made to scholarship and teaching in economic history and labour economics. The chapters address some closely integrated issues: the role of human capital in the long-term development of the American economy, trends in fertility and marriage, and women's participation in economic change.

This work concerns transformation processes in labour relations and in production systems in the 1980s. It describes new industrial and occupational patterns, as well as technological progress and the implications of the end of the Welfare State. Old practices are assessed.

Excerpt from The Relations Between Capital and Labor in the United States Our government is made up of the people, by the people, and for the people. Whatever irritates and distracts any considerable number of its citizens comes close and quick in its sensitive pulsation to the heart and strength of our national life. With us government and people are synony mous terms. Like the brain and the body, they are bound together by innumerable and delicate nerves. Does the one suffer, then the pain is speedily communicated to every part of the body politic. We have no Strong, conservative and centralized force that stands apart by itself, governed by a special sovereignty, and controlled by a limited authority, in the maintenance of public peace and order. Do the people strike at the government and the civil rule, then they fall. We have no soldiers enlisted in their defence but them; no coercive power for municipal order and national unity but what they voluntarily contribute. Do the people make the assault upon our institutions, then Caesar has fallen by the hand of his bosom-friend Brutus. It would seem, then, that under such circumstances we must make some satisfactory solution of this difficult problem of capital and labor; that we must find some remedy for the disease, discover some palliative to sooth and allay its inflammation for, should it continue to increase in its maddened intensity and purpose, who will set the bounds to what it may destroy, who limit the extent of the upheaval and change it may produce, in the present social order and political system of the government of the United States? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.