Polish Immigration and the American Working Class

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Pacyga
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
Rust Belt ◽  
Radical History ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Over Time

In the years after the Civil War, Polish immigrants became an important part of the American working class. They actively participated in the labor movement and played key roles in various industrial strikes ranging from the 1877 Railroad Strike through the rise of the CIO and the post-1945 era of prosperity. Over time, the Polish American working class became acculturated and left its largely immigrant past behind while maintaining itself as an ethnic community. It also witnessed a good deal of upward mobility, especially over several generations. This ethnic community, however, continued to be refreshed with immigrants throughout the 20th century. As with the larger American working class, Polish American workers were hard hit by changes in the industrial structure of the United States. Deindustrialization turned the centers of much of the Polish American community into the Rust Belt. This, despite a radical history, caused many to react by turning toward conservative causes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Labor Movement in the United States: A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890

1978 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 440
Author(s):  
John T. Cumbler ◽  
Friedrich A. Sorge ◽  
Philip S. Foner ◽  
Brewster Chamberlin ◽  
Angela Chamberlin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Working Class

Gatekeepers and “Americanizers”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
Political Machines ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
American Working Class

This essay focuses on the later rather than the Famine-era migrants, on the American-born Irish, and on their impact on working-class America. Irish American workers were entrenched in workplaces and unions by the late nineteenth century, and their attitudes and actions had enormous consequences as the American working-class population was continually remade through later waves of migration. Too often their actions marginalized immigrants, the unskilled, women, and people of color, tendencies that left an enduring mark on the labor movement in the United States. They were architects of the conservative business unionism that came to dominate the labor movement and of the political machines that dominated many cities. But I also stress a tradition of progressive labor activism that helped lay the foundation for a new multiethnic movement in the course of the early twentieth century. This was especially true during the organizing drives in basic industry during World War I and in the unsuccessful efforts to organize an independent labor party in the wake of the war. We find important differences between the US and Australian cases in terms of the role of the Church, the character of Irish nationalism, the attitude toward independent labor politics, and elsewhere, but we risk misunderstanding Irish workers in both societies if we ignore the nuances in the narratives.

Labor in the Time of Trump

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
The Right ◽  
Underlying Processes

This book critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions in the United States and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The book shows that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. The chapters examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

The Italian Immigrant Working-Class Experience in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Political Events ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Steel Industries

Close to seventeen million people in the United States, approximately 6 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Italian Americans in the 2016 census. Constituting the nation’s fifth largest ancestry group, they are the descendants of one of the greatest diasporas in human history. Since 1860, twenty-nine million Italians have left their homeland for better opportunities worldwide. Close to six million of them have settled in the United States with about five million arriving prior to World War I. Along with other European groups of the great transatlantic migrations of 1870–1920—Jews, Poles, Croatians, and Finns—they became an essential part of the American working class, building, shaping, and enriching its life and culture. Among the most ubiquitous of the early foreigners, Italians were initially confined to unskilled and manual jobs but gradually made their way into the ranks of semi-skilled operatives in mass-production manufacturing. By 1910, they constituted a vital segment of the American multinational workforce in the mining, garment, and steel industries and played key roles in the labor struggles of the early 20th century, providing both key leadership and mass militancy. Like other ethnic groups, Italian immigrant workers lived deeply transnational lives. Their class consciousness was continually informed by their ethnic identity and their complicated relationship to both Italy and the United States, as they sought to transform, and were transformed by, the political events, industrial conditions, and cultures of the two countries. The story of how Italian immigrant workers became “American” sheds light not only on their experience in the United States but also on the transnational character of the labor movement and the interplay of class, race, gender, and ethnic identities.

Value, politics and democracy in the United States

2011 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Graeber
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
White American ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Working Class

This article examines the role of values in the political discourse of the last decade in the US. It embarks from what many observers had described as a puzzle: the fact that significant parts of the American working class voted against their economic interests but in line with what they perceived to be their values. As a result, a president had been re-elected who cut taxes for the rich while waging an expensive war in Iraq and increasing public debt to historically unprecedented levels. It is argued that large sectors of the white American working class were disappointed with liberal politicians because they associated them with a cultural elite that occupied positions in society that allowed them to pursue careers of intrinsic value in the arts, science, or politics but which were largely closed to the working class. It is thus suggested that the ‘culture wars’ in the US are better interpreted as a struggle over access to the means to behave altruistically. The article rejects the widespread assumption that individuals are narrowly conceived economic self-interest maximizers. Rather, it suggests that human fulfilment can be related to the satisfaction derived from working for the common good.

scholarly journals Disposition Is Not Action: The Rise and Demise of the Knights of Labor

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-321
Author(s):  
Kim Voss
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Full Flowering ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
New Nation ◽  
American Working Class

Recent theoretical and historical studies of working-class formation have raised important doubts about standard interpretations of the American working class. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the renewed debate over “American exceptionalism,” that unexpected combination of political conservatism and weak working-class institutions in the nation that underwent the modern world's first democratic revolution. Once it was popular to argue that American workers felt no need for collective action, either because of a classlessness that was firmly rooted in the psyche of the first new nation or because of an innate job consciousness that was able to attain full flowering only in the United States, that most bourgeois of countries. But two decades of social history have documented such a rich diversity of militant working-class activity that such explanations are now rarely invoked.

Spatial concentration of manufacturing industries in the United States: re-examination of long-run trends

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Crafts ◽  
Alexander Klein
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Dispersion ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Manufacturing Industries ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Spatial Concentration ◽  
Geographical Concentration ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Shape Pattern ◽  
Over Time

Abstract We re-examine the long-run geographical development of US manufacturing industries using recent advances in spatial concentration measures. We construct spatially weighted indices of the geographical concentration between 1880 and 2007 taking into account industrial structure and checkerboard problem. New results emerge. Average spatial concentration was much lower in the late 20th than in the late 19th century, and it was the outcome of a continuing reduction over time. Spatial concentration did not increase in the early 20th century but declined, and we find no inverted-U shape pattern of long-run spatial concentration. The persistent tendency to greater spatial dispersion was characteristic of most industries.

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