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Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Contesting The Dinosaur Image: The Labor Movement's Search For A Future, Richard W. Hurd

Richard W Hurd

[Excerpt] As labor contests the dinosaur image it will find no easy answers. Hard work, careful assessment of options, and a willingness to take risks are all required. Without widespread experimentation and a significant reallocation of resources to organizing, extinction awaits.

Organizing In The Nafta Environment: How Companies Use “Free Trade” To Stop Unions, Kate Bronfenbrenner

Kate Bronfenbrenner

[Excerpt] These findings point to both an enormous challenge and a great opportunity for American unions. Clearly, under NAFTA and other free trade agreements more and more employers will feel emboldened to threaten to close the plant during organizing campaigns, and workers and unions will find organizing increasingly difficult. At the same time, unions have an opportunity to overcome these barriers to organizing if they commit enough resources to run large-scale, aggressive campaigns which mobilize the rank-and-file workers to build a union in their workplace, regardless of the intensity of the employer’s campaign.

Introduction To Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory And The Revival Of American Labor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Tom Juravich

Kate Bronfenbrenner

[Excerpt] When the Ravenswood Aluminum Company locked out seventeen hundred workers on October 31, 1990, it hardly looked like a big opportunity for labor. In what had become standard operating procedure for employers during the 1980s, management broke off bargaining with the United Steelworkers of America, and then brought hundreds of replacement workers into a heavily fortified plant surrounded by barbed wire and security cameras. Injunctions prevented union members from doing little more than symbolic picketing, and the wheels of justice, as they had done for more than a decade, creaked ever so slowly. All the pieces were in place …

Oral History Interview: Frank Brooks, Frank Brooks

0064: Marshall University Oral History Collection

Frank Brooks was born in Fayette County, WV, but grew up in Carter County, KY, in the early 1900s. He attended a one room school house through the third grade. Mr. Brooks began working in coal mines with his father in Borderland, WV, when he was 13 years old. In the audio clip provided, he discusses his first time in a coal mine. He focuses on how he tried to appear bigger than he was in order to be able to work. In his interview, Mr. Brooks compares and contrasts the labor conditions in the mines before and after unionization. …

Where Is The Cio Going?: A Program For Militant Trade Unionism, George Morris

PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements

No abstract provided.