In this comprehensive, wide-ranging analysis, Susan Lehrer investigates the origins of protective labor legislation for women, exposing the social forces that contributed to its passage and the often contradictory effects it had on those it was designed to protect. A rapidly expanding female work force is prompting both employers and society to rethink attitudes and policies toward working women. Lehrer provides critical insight into current issues affecting female employees--pay equity, equal rights, maternity--that have their roots in past debates about and present realities affecting women workers. Protective labor laws enacted from 1905 to 1925 had the effect of delimiting the position of working women. Lehrer examines the relationship between women's work in the labor force and domestic labor, and the reasons why the government was interested in regulating this relationship. Focusing on the dual need for a continuing labor force (women as producers of children) and cheap labor (women in low-paying jobs), she demonstrates the way in which social reforms worked to the advantage of capitalism even though they materially aided subordinate classes. The principal groups considered herein are social reform organizations (suffragists and the Women's Trade Union League), organized labor (AFL, ILGWU, printing trades' unions), and employers' associations (National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation). Considered together, this book provides a broad and detailed picture of the forces involved in the issues of protective labor legislation.

“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick

New York City boasts a higher rate of unionization than any other major U.S. city—roughly double the national average—but the city’s unions have suffered steady and relentless decline, especially in the private sector. With higher levels of income inequality than any other large city in the nation, New York today is home to a large and growing precariat—workers with little or no employment security who are often excluded from the basic legal protections that unions struggled for and won in the twentieth century. Community-based organizations and worker centers have developed the most promising approach to organizing the new precariat and to addressing the crisis facing the labor movement. Home to some of the nation’s very first worker centers, New York City today has the single largest concentration of these organizations in the United States, yet until now no one has documented their efforts. New Labor in New York includes thirteen fine-grained case studies of recent campaigns by worker centers and unions, each of which is based on original research and participant observation. Some of the campaigns documented here involve taxi drivers, street vendors, and domestic workers, as well as middle-strata freelancers—all of whom are excluded from basic employment laws. Other cases focus on supermarket, retail, and restaurant workers, who are nominally covered by such laws but who often experience wage theft and other legal violations; still other campaigns are not restricted to a single occupation or industry. This book offers a richly detailed portrait of the new labor movement in New York City, as well as several recent efforts to expand that movement from the local to the national scale.