Labor Relations Commons^™

[Dis]Assembling Race: The Fepc In Oklahoma, 1941-1946, Arley Ward

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On the World War II home front in Oklahoma the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) succeeded in securing defense jobs for African Americans. The efforts of the committee, The Oklahoma Eagle, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, and the State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) advanced civil rights in Oklahoma throughout World War II and beyond. The efforts of the FEPC in Oklahoma connect civil rights efforts in the 1940s directly to Brown v Board of Education, (1954) and the classic civil rights movement.

Improving Veteran Access; Status Of Operations Of The United States Department Of Veteran Affairs Work-Study Program, Kirk Allen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The usage status of The U.S. Department Veterans Affairs Work-Study Program is examined. Beneficiary numbers from the Global, Unites States, State, and Local/County perspective are reviewed. While of essential value, the program suffers from a lack of scholarly research and government oversight, and is further hindered by restrictive administrative rules lived first-hand. Research suggests that the program is operating outside of accountability to the taxpayer, presents as unnecessarily/overly-restrictive in accessibility, and is underutilized. The program appears to not be serving all veterans to full potential.

The Work-Study Program is codified in Veterans Benefits', Title 38 United States Code, Part III, …

Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb & Ash, 2013) is a place-based mobile augmented reality game and simulation that takes the form of a situated documentary. Players take on the role of time traveling reporters tracking down a story “lost to time” to bring back to their editor at the Jewish Time Jump Gazette. The game is played in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City. Players’ iPhones become their time traveling device and companion. Based on the player’s GPS location, players receive digital images from their location from over a hundred years in the past as well …

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 …

Did Hollywood Take Theatre "By Hook Or By Crook?", Catherine S. Wright

MSU Graduate Theses

Hollywood and Theatre have been partners in producing entertainment for over 100 years. The relationship was fruitful for both parties, but Hollywood moguls and playwrights battled over ownership of the work and crafting of its creative nucleus, story and character. Theatre was the dominant entertainment right before the rise of motion pictures. Once Hollywood’s talkies closed the curtain on silent films, playwrights had a high creative worth to movie makers. In the cinema, story and dialogue were essential for its survival and growth. Playwrights were courted by the Hollywood studio heads but were not offered equal partnership as they were …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

Broken Glass: The Decline Of Corporate Paternalism And Welfare Capitalism, A Critical Analysis Of One Company’S Systematic Socio-Economic Metamorphosis, Doug Bruno

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Review: John S. Ahlquist And Margaret Levi, 'In The Interest Of Others: Organizations And Social Activism" (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Review of the comparative study of trade union organizational behaviour by John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, 'In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism" (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), which involves a target group of US and Australian trade unions.

Movimientos Obreros Y Por Los Derechos Humanos En América Latina: Convergencia, Divergencia Y Consecuencias Para La Promoción De Los Derechos Económicos, Sociales Y Culturales [Labor Movements And Human Rights In Latin America: Convergence, Divergence, And The Implications For The Promotion Of Economic, Social And Cultural Rights], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] Los derechos propios del trabajo forman parte de los derechos humanos hace mucho tiempo y gozan del reconocimiento de pactos internacionales. La Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos, adoptada por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, en 1948, enumera los derechos a condiciones de trabajo justas y favorables; a igual remuneración por trabajo de igual valor; a una remuneración equitativa y favorable, y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos (PIDCP) incluye los derechos a la libertad de asociación y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos …

Introduction To Eugene V. Debs: Citizen And Socialist, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] This is a social biography of Eugene Victor Debs. It is a traditional biography in that it emphasizes this one individual's personal and public life as far as the evidence allows. But the book is also a piece of social history that assumes individuals do not stand outside the culture and society they grew in and from. I have stressed each aspect of Debs's story in order to present both the importance of the man and a more complete picture of the political and cultural struggles his society engaged in during his lifetime. Neither in his time nor in …

Introduction To Faith And The Historian: Catholic Perspectives, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] What follows are the essays by eight historians touched by Catholicism on the meaning of that experience and its effect on their professional work. The essays are presented in broad chronological order, organized more by generational cohort than by specific date of birth. The essays are reflections, in some cases even meditations, and were never intended to conform to the structure and methodology of the historical article for a professional journal. Still, we have tried to shed some light on the inner processes that create that very work.

Introduction To The Pullman Strike And The Crisis Of The 1890’S, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

The strike of Pullman carshop employees and the subsequent boycott that disrupted rail traffic throughout the territory west of Chicago in June-July 1894 marked the culmination of nearly two decades of the most severe and sustained labor conflict in American history. Yet until very recently little new scholarship has focused on the meaning of the Pullman strike and its historical context. By offering a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and by examining the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities the Pullman conflict reveals, these essays resituate the strike in its historical context. They demonstrate that Pullman played …

Deeply Within: Catholicism, Faith And History, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In the decade I spent living with Gene Debs, I thought much about faith's relation to intellect, especially in the political realm. It was not just that a socialist in capitalist America needed faith but rather that Debs's very vision of America's promise was itself a profound act of faith. But with the exception of the last chapter, which I titled, "A Species of Purging," following a phrase in one of Debs's prison letters, overt discussion of any religious sensibility was largely sotto voce, echoes of a private dialogue with myself. Pleased as I was with the book when …

Two Tales Of A City: Nineteenth-Century Black Philadelphia, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In the tension between Forging Freedom and Roots of Violence certain themes present themselves for further research and thought. Neither volume successfully analyzes the historical roots of the African-American class structure. This is especially evident in each book's treatment of the black middling orders. While neither defines the category with clarity, their basic assumption that small shopkeepers and regularly employed workers were critical to the community's ability to withstand some of the worst shocks of racism is important. The clash between these books also raises questions concerning the role of pre-industrial cultural values in the transition to industrial capitalism. …

Preface To Singing In A Strange Land, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

Salvatore delves into the life of the one of the most influential clergyman in twentieth-century African-American religious life, from his 1915 origins as a poor Mississippi farmboy to his early years as a preacher in Tennessee to his 1950s rise to acclaim in Detroit. Along the way, Franklin's charismatic preaching style revolutionized the sermon yet he was no saint away from the pulpit. His encouragement to proclaim both faith and dignity in the black community helped bolster the civil rights movement.

[Review Of The Book William Johnson’S Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary Of A Free Negro], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] To raise this issue of Johnson's silences and social isolation is not to engage in historical pity. He made choices from the options available to him and suffered the consequences as they developed. But his history underscores the fact that slavery generated a corresponding social system that was unforgiving to the individual caught in its contradictory currents. As Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark suggest in Black Masters, their sensitive study of another slave owner and ex-slave, William Ellison of South Carolina, a purely personal solution to such volatile social relations proved impossible. What bound William Johnson to …

In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] At first glance such a spatial transformation of work may seem positive, as indeed it was for the largely white work force that left the city and staffed these new positions. But left behind geographically, economically, and socially were the largely black (and to a lesser extent, Mexican) working-class residents. It was at this juncture, with jobs disappearing and the urban social structure fragmented, that black Chicago, symbolized in the person of Harold Washington, finally assumed political power. In Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods, editors Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel have collected a group of essays that examine the …

Biography And Social History: An Intimate Relationship, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

Biography has been considered as outside the discipline of history by many historians. Since the chronological framework of the study is pre-deter-mined, given the subject's life, it has been argued, it does not meet the fundamental historical test of analyzing historical change across time. Others, particularly literary critics, have suggested that the biographical emphasis on the personal is itself, at root, invalid. This comment instead suggests that the recent turn to biography in labor and social history is most welcome, for it creates the possibility of a broader understanding of the interplay between an individual and social forces beyond one's …

Faith, Politics, And American Culture [Review Of The Books Letter To A Christian Nation, Pity And Politics: The Right-Wing Assault On Religious Freedom, Faith And Politics: How The “Moral Values” Debate Divides America And How To Move Forward Together, The Compassionate Community: Ten Values To Unite America, Righteous: Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement, And Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In January 2004, before a black church congregation in New Orleans, President George W. Bush commemorated Martin Luther King's birthday with a spirited promotion of his faith-based initiatives. Appropriating the slain Civil Rights leader's profession of faith, Bush proclaimed his ultimate purpose was to change "America one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time." He emphasized voluntary action by citizens (four times he extolled them as "the social entrepreneurs") and he consistency denigrated the role of government but for one critical function: providing "billions of dollars" to faith-based social-service groups. Proclaiming the values of the Christian Bible as …

Labor Economics, George R. Boyer, Robert Smith

George R. Boyer

The authors hypothesize that most labor economists "sooner or later had to incorporate at least the appearance of institutional concerns in their papers to avoid indigestion whenever lunching with colleagues outside the field of economics" They add: "If the new interests of modern labor economics are in fact driven by the imperatives of science, then the institutionalist and the neoclassical approaches may well synthesize".

The Union Wage Effect In Late Nineteenth Century Britain, Timothy J. Hatton, George R. Boyer, Roy E. Bailey

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] This paper offers an historical dimension to the impact of trade unions on earnings by estimating the union wage effect in Britain in 1889-90 using data from the US Commissioner of Labor survey conducted at that time. The determinants of union status are also investigated in terms of a probit estimation using individual characteristics which may be correlated with union membership. The results of this first step are used in the computation of selectivity corrected estimates of the union wage effect. It is found that the effect of union membership on earnings at this time was of the order …

Poor Relief, Informal Assistance, And Short Time During The Lancashire Cotton Famine, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] This paper presents new evidence concerning the importance of poor relief as a source of income assistance for unemployed operatives during the Lancashire cotton famine. My comparison of weekly data on the number of relief recipients in 23 distressed poor law unions with estimates of weekly cotton consumption for the period November 1861 to December 1862 suggests that the average length of time between becoming unemployed and receiving poor relief was less than 2 months. This result is shown to be consistent with available evidence on working class saving. Given the meager amount of informal assistance available to them, …

The Influence Of London On Labor Markets In Southern England, 1830-1914, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] Historians have long acknowledged that London, because of its enormous size and rapidly growing demand for labor, acted as a powerful magnet for migrants from throughout southern England. However, while there is a large literature documenting the flow of migrants to London, there have been surprisingly few attempts to determine the consequences of this migration for southern labor markets. This article attempts to redress the imbalance in the literature by examining the influence of London on agricultural labor markets during the nineteenth century. In particular, the article examines the effect of distance from London on wage rates in southern …

Migration And Labour Market Integration In Late Nineteenth-Century England And Wales, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] There is a long and well established tradition of studies analysing the pattern and causes of internal migration and assessing the degree of labour market integration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Some studies document the flows of migrants from one area to another and describe migrant characteristics and the directions of the predominant streams of migration. Others analyse the determinants of gross or net migration flows at the region or county level. The questions implicit in these studies are: How mobile was the labour force? What were the major factors which determined individual decisions to migrate? How are these factors …

Editor's Introduction (Review Symposium On Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes In Employment Systems), George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] During the past two decades there have been significant changes in employment systems across industrialized countries. Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, by Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire, examines changes since 1980 in employment practices in seven industrialized countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Italy—with a focus on the automotive and telecommunications industries. Katz and Darbishire find that variations in employment patterns within these countries have been increasing over the past two decades. The increase in variation is not simply a result of a decline in union strength in some sectors of …

Comments On Geraghty, Márquez, And Vizcarra, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

Professor Boyer reviews and comments upon the three dissertations that were finalists for the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize in 2002.

[Review Of The Book Growing Public: Social Spending And Economic Growth Since The Eighteenth Century], George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] Lindert’s discussion of the costs and benefits of the welfare state is only one part, albeit the most eye-catching part, of this wide-ranging work in comparative economic history. Volume 1, written for non-specialists, presents “The Story”; it is tailor-made for upper-level undergraduate courses in economic and social history, public policy, and welfare economics. Volume 2 presents “Further Evidence,” including the regression results that underlie the findings presented in the first volume, and eighty pages of appendices. Graduate students and scholars studying the welfare state will want to read this volume in conjunction with Volume 1. For those who want …

The Economic Role Of The English Poor Law, 1780-1834, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] Over the 85-year period from 1748/50 to 1832/34, real per capita expenditures on poor relief increased at an average rate of approximately 1 percent per year. There were also important changes in the administration of relief with respect to able-bodied laborers during the period. Policies providing relief outside of workhouses to unemployed and under-employed able-bodied laborers became widespread during the 1770s and 1780s in the grain-producing South and East of England. The so-called Speenhamland system of outdoor relief flourished until 1834, when it was abolished by the Poor Law Amendment Act. The aim of the thesis is to provide …