The History of Unions: America and the World

by bam

How working people organized, and what it cost them. The American arc from the Knights of Labor and Haymarket through the Triangle fire, the Wagner Act, Taft-Hartley, Memphis, and PATCO to today's union density, told with the parts a comfortable course skips: the law's deliberate exclusion of farm and domestic workers, unions' own record of racial and gender exclusion, and the corruption chapters. Then the world: there is no single "union" model. Nordic sectoral bargaining, German co-determination, Japanese enterprise unions, China's state-run federation, Solidarity and COSATU as democratic opposition, and the Gulf's migrant workers, who have almost no rights at all. You finish able to look at any country and ask the right four questions. Cited throughout to BLS, the NLRB, the ILO, the OECD, the Library of Congress, and the statutes themselves.