Bøger af Nelson Lichtenstein

The top American writers on labor provide vital historical context for the current upsurge in union organizing In 1954, the American labor movement reached its historic height, with one-third of all nonagricultural workers belonging to a union--and much higher percentages in the nation's key industries. That same year, a group of writers and activists, many with close ties to organized labor, founded Dissent magazine, which quickly became the publishing home for the most important progressive voices on American unions. Today, at a time of both resurgent union organizing and socialist politics, the need for this rich tradition of ideas is as pressing as ever. With over twenty-five contributions by some of the nation's most influential progressive voices, Labor's Partisans brings to life a history of labor that is of immediate relevance to our own times. Introduced and edited by leading labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti, this essential volume reveals the powerful currents and debates running through the labor movement, from the 1950s to today. Combining stunning writing, political passion, and deep historical perspective, Labor's Partisans will be a source of ideas and inspiration for anyone concerned with a more just future for working people.

Wal-Mart is the world's largest company and it sets the standard--both social and commercial--for a huge swath of the global economy. In this probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein shows how the company's success has spread evangelical Protestantism into the workplace, made South China an American workshop, and pushed American politics to the right. At the same time, he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire. Insightful and original, The Retail Revolution gives a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has reshaped international commerce.

A collection of essays that "do an incredible job of balancing the wonders and horrors of the force that is Wal-Mart" (Booklist, starred review).   Edited by one of the nation's preeminent labor historians, this book marks an ambitious effort to dissect the full extent of Wal-Mart's business operations, its social effects, and its role in the United States and world economy. Wal-Mart is based on a spring 2004 conference of leading historians, business analysts, sociologists, and labor leaders that immediately attracted the attention of the national media, drawing profiles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books. Their contributions are adapted here for a general audience.   At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad declared itself "the standard of the world." In more recent years, IBM and then Microsoft seemed the template for a new, global information economy. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wal-Mart had overtaken all rivals as the world-transforming economic institution of our time.   Presented in an accessible format and extensively illustrated with charts and graphs, Wal-Mart examines such topics as the giant retailer's managerial culture, revolutionary use of technological innovation, and controversial pay and promotional practices to provide the most complete guide yet available to one of America's largest companies.   "Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here [are] examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture." -The New York Times   "Stimulating perspectives on the world's largest corporation." -Publishers Weekly

Offers important perspectives on the relationship of labour and the state.

In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "e;labor question"e; became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "e;management-labor accord"e; by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations. This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "e;Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions.?

Examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy.