Farewell to the Factory

Farewell to the Factory
Author: Ruth Milkman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0520918347

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This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime—a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study. Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later. Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs. Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.

Farewell to Manzanar

Farewell to Manzanar
Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780618216208

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A true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War internment.

A Farewell to Alms

A Farewell to Alms
Author: Gregory Clark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2008-12-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400827817

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Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

Farewell to the Working Class

Farewell to the Working Class
Author: André Gorz
Publisher: Pluto Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1997
Genre: Capitalism
ISBN: 9780861043644

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André Gorz argues that changes in the role of the work and labour process in the closing decades of the twentieth century have, once and for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken, says Gorz, by social movements such as the womenʹs movement and the green movement, and all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies. Provocative and heretical, Farewell to the Working Class is a classic study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world.

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
Author: Albert Marrin
Publisher: Yearling
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-02-10
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0553499351

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On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City burst into flames. The factory was crowded. The doors were locked to ensure workers stay inside. One hundred forty-six people—mostly women—perished; it was one of the most lethal workplace fires in American history until September 11, 2001. But the story of the fire is not the story of one accidental moment in time. It is a story of immigration and hard work to make it in a new country, as Italians and Jews and others traveled to America to find a better life. It is the story of poor working conditions and greedy bosses, as garment workers discovered the endless sacrifices required to make ends meet. It is the story of unimaginable, but avoidable, disaster. And it the story of the unquenchable pride and activism of fearless immigrants and women who stood up to business, got America on their side, and finally changed working conditions for our entire nation, initiating radical new laws we take for granted today. With Flesh and Blood So Cheap, Albert Marrin has crafted a gripping, nuanced, and poignant account of one of America's defining tragedies.

Made in China

Made in China
Author: Pun Ngai
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2005-04-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0822386755

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As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Crossing the Great Divide

Crossing the Great Divide
Author: Vicki Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2002
Genre: Labor market
ISBN: 9780801488122

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Vicki Smith analyzes this shift, asking how workers navigated their way across the divide between bad jobs and good jobs, between bad jobs organized hierarchically and jobs requiring greater worker involvement, and between temporary and stable work.".

Poverty and Power

Poverty and Power
Author: Edward Royce
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2015-01-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442238097

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Poverty and Power asserts that American poverty is a structural problem resulting from failings in our social system rather than individual failings of the poor. Contrary to the popular belief that poverty results from individual deficiencies—that poor people lack intelligence, determination, or skills—author Edward Royce introduces students to the very real structural issues that stack the balance of power in the United States. The book introduces four systems that contribute to inequality in the U.S.—economic, political, cultural, and structural—then discusses ten institutional problems that make life difficult for the poor and contribute to the persistence of poverty. Throughout the book, the author compares individualistic and structural approaches to poverty to assess strengths and limitations of each view. The second edition of this provocative book has been revised throughout with new statistical information, as well as analysis of the recent recession, the Obama presidency, increasing political polarization, the rise of the Tea Party and appearance of the Occupy Movement, new anti-poverty movements, and more.

Our Young Aeroplane Scouts in France and Belgium

Our Young Aeroplane Scouts in France and Belgium
Author: Horace Porter
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-11-05
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN:

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"Our Young Aeroplane Scouts in France and Belgium" is a historical adventure book written for young adults. The novel tells many stories of air fights, battles and everyday struggles of these young volunteered pilots and regular soldiers in WW2. This edition is enriched with many authentic illustrations.

American Made

American Made
Author: Farah Stockman
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1984801155

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What happens when Americans lose their jobs? In American Made, an illuminating story of ruin and reinvention, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Farah Stockman gives an up-close look at the profound role work plays in our sense of identity and belonging, as she follows three workers whose lives unravel when the factory they have dedicated so much to closes down. “With humor, breathtaking honesty, and a historian’s satellite view, American Made illuminates the fault lines ripping America apart.”—Beth Macy, author of Factory Man and Dopesick Shannon, Wally, and John built their lives around their place of work. Shannon, a white single mother, became the first woman to run the dangerous furnaces at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was proud of producing one of the world’s top brands of steel bearings. Wally, a black man known for his initiative and kindness, was promoted to chairman of efficiency, one of the most coveted posts on the factory floor, and dreamed of starting his own barbecue business one day. John, a white machine operator, came from a multigenerational union family and clashed with a work environment that was increasingly hostile to organized labor. The Rexnord factory had served as one of the economic engines for the surrounding community. When it closed, hundreds of people lost their jobs. What had life been like for Shannon, Wally, and John, before the plant shut down? And what became of them after the jobs moved to Mexico and Texas? American Made is the story of a community struggling to reinvent itself. It is also a story about race, class, and American values, and how jobs serve as a bedrock of people’s lives and drive powerful social justice movements. This revealing book shines a light on a crucial political moment, when joblessness and anxiety about the future of work have made themselves heard at a national level. Most of all, American Made is a story about people: who we consider to be one of us and how the dignity of work lies at the heart of who we are.