Eric Arnesen

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ISBN 9780252063770, OCLC 28854129online
  • co-editor, Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (1998) excerpt
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    The nature and power of organized labor in the United States is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party USA</span> American political party

    The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), also known as the American Communist Party, is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters</span> American labor organisation

    Founded in 1925, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, commonly referred to as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The BSCP gathered a membership of 18,000 passenger railway workers across Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

    Labor history is a sub-discipline of social history which specializes on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.

    The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">African Blood Brotherhood</span> Radical black liberation organization founded in New York City

    The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen</span>

    The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) is a labor union founded in Marshall, Michigan, on 8 May 1863 as the Brotherhood of the Footboard. It was the first permanent trade organization for railroad workers in the US. A year later it was renamed the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The B of LE took its present name in 2004 when it became a division of the Rail Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).

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    The March on Washington Movement (MOWM), 1941–1946, organized by activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin was a tool designed to pressure the U.S. government into providing fair working opportunities for African Americans and desegregating the armed forces by threat of mass marches on Washington, D.C. during World War II. When President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941, prohibiting discrimination in the defense industry under contract to federal agencies, Randolph and collaborators called off the initial march.

    Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US history, teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed.

    The railroad brotherhoods are labor unions of railroad workers in the United States. They first appeared in 1863 and they are still active. Until recent years they were largely independent of each other and of the American Federation of Labor.

    The International Association of Railway Employees (IARE) was a union for black railroad workers formed in 1934 at a time when the major railroad brotherhoods restricted membership to whites. Members included conductors, trainmen, engineers, shop mechanics, porters and maintenance-of-way employees. It joined the United Transportation Union in 1970.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America</span> Former trade union of the United States

    The Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) was an American labor union which existed between 1933 and 1988. The IUMSWA was first organised at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation shipyard in Camden, New Jersey after striking in 1934 and 1935. From here it slowly spread to a number of other private shipyards in the Northeast, gaining representation at the Staten Island shipyard in 1936, the Federal Shipyard in 1937, Brooklyn and Hoboken in 1939, Baltimore and Sparrows Point in 1941, as well as a range of other smaller ship repair yards in the New York area. The IUMSWA's industrial coverage of all production workers in the shipbuilding industry brought it into conflict with established craft unions, such as the boilermakers, leading the IUMSWA to be refused an AFL charter in 1933. The IUMSWA later joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936.

    Shelton Stromquist is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa and a former president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. A social and labor historian, Stromquist's research examines an array of topics that include nineteenth century labor movements in the United States, labor union politics during the Cold War, and workers' struggles for municipal socialism across the world.

    References

    Eric Arnesen
    Born (1958-04-30) April 30, 1958 (age 65)
    NationalityAmerican
    Academic background
    Alma mater Wesleyan University
    Yale University