New York’s White-Collar Unions during Wartime and Reconversion

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-243
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
The Political ◽  
Equal Distribution ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Distribution Of Income

Chapter 5 refocuses the narrative on the experiences of white-collar workers employed within New York’s culture industries between 1941 and 1947. As economic conditions improved rapidly with the mobilization for war, the chronic underemployment and precariousness of work during the Depression gave way to the tightest labor market of the twentieth century. Wartime conditions facilitated union organizing even as they restricted unionists’ range of permissible collective action, leading white-collar unionists to support the social consumerism of the Office of Price Administration. The resurgence of unionism occurred within the context of a seismic shift toward a more equal distribution of income and wealth in the United States, which only intensified the political polarization of white-collar workers. In addition, this chapter also highlights the continued vibrancy of Popular Front labor feminism during the 1940s and women’s profound influence on the surge in white-collar organizing.

The Emergence of White-Collar Unionism in New York’s Culture Industries

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-97
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Professional Workers ◽  
White Collar Workers

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

The Cold War in New York’s Culture Industries

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-292
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Professional Workers ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 6 examines the impact of the domestic Cold War on white-collar workers in New York’s culture industries. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated during the late 1940s, anticommunists’ attacks on the Popular Front and its supporters within the culture industries became more intense and more effective. Changes in labor law targeted unions like the United Office and Professional Workers of America that had procommunists among the leadership, while congressional investigations and blacklisting ruined the careers of numerous writers, artists, and other culture workers who had strongly backed the Popular Front. By the 1950s, the unions in the city’s culture industries were weakened or destroyed from the onslaught, diminishing the options for workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design to fight for improved working conditions and greater creative autonomy.

Counting on Relief: Industrializing the Statistical Interviewer during the New Deal

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Statistical Studies ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.

scholarly journals Engaging for Puerto Rico: #RickyRenuncia (and #RickySeQueda) during El Verano del 19 and digital identities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danilo T Perez-Rivera ◽  
Christopher Torres Lugo ◽  
Alexis R Santos-Lozada
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Puerto Rican Diaspora

Between July 13-24, 2019 the people of Puerto Rico took the streets after a series of corruption scandals shocked the political establishment. The social uprising resulted in the ousting of the Governor of Puerto Rico (Dr. Ricardo Rosselló, Ricky), the resignation of the majority of his staff something unprecedented in the history of Puerto Rico; this period has been called El Verano del 19 (Summer of 19). Social media played a crucial role in both the organization and dissemination of the protests, marches, and other activities that occurred within this period. Puerto Ricans in the island and around the world engaged in this social movement through the digital revolution mainly under the hashtag #RickyRenuncia (Ricky Resign), with a small counter movement under the hashtag #RickySeQueda (Ricky will stay). The purpose of this study is to illustrate the magnitude and grass roots nature of the political movement’s social media presence, as well as their characteristics of the population of both movements and their structures. We found that #RickyRenuncia was used approximately one million times in the period of analysis while #RickySeQueda barely reached 6,000 tweets. Particularly, the pervasiveness of cliques in the #RickySeQueda show concentrations of authority dedicated to its propagation, whilst the #RickyRenuncia propagation was much more distributed and decentralized with little to no interaction between significant nodes of authority. Noteworthy was the role of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States of America and around the world, contributing close to 40% of all geo-located tweets. Finally, we found that the Twitter followers of the former governor had indicators of being composed of two distinct populations: 1) those active in social media and 2) those who follow the account but who are not active participants of the social network. We discuss the implications of these findings on the interpretation of emergence, structure and dissemination of social activism and countermovement to these activities in the context of Puerto Rico.

scholarly journals Raising European citizens: Constructing European identities in French and English textbooks

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 444-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inari Sakki
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
English School ◽  
The Social ◽  
French And English ◽  
English Textbooks ◽  
Post War

Schools play a pivotal role in the formation of identities and in the political socialization of youth. This study explores the social representations of European integration in French and English school textbooks and shows how the social representations are discursively used to construct national and European identities. By analysing the history and civics textbooks of major educational publishers, this study aims to demonstrate how European integration is understood, made familiar and concretized in the school textbooks of the two influential but different European countries. The findings suggest some shared and some diverse patterns in the way the two European countries portray and construct the political project of European integration. These representations, constructed around French Europe in French textbooks and ambivalent Europe in English textbooks, share the images of a strong European economy and a French-led political Europe. However, they position themselves differently with respect to the United States, motivation for the European unification process and the significance of common values and heritage. In both countries textbooks draw upon memories that are important for group identity. While the French textbooks make European integration meaningful in reference to a shared post-war collective memory and to a cultural memory based on a more ancient idea of Europe, shared values and heritage, the English textbooks anchor it more strongly to domestic policy.

National Construction of Occupational Identity: Jewish Clerks in British-Ruled Palestine

1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
David De Vries
Keyword(s):  
Work Experience ◽  
White Collar ◽  
State Building ◽  
Occupational Identity ◽  
Essential Point ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Symbolic Approach

This essay addresses the relationship between white-collar workers and nationalism by introducing a cultural-symbolic approach to examine how national discourse became an essential “point of production” of white-collar identities, particularly those of clerks and clerical work. Based on an analysis of the imagery that clerks use to describe their work experience, this discussion attempts to document and explain how and why nationalism, as a cultural system with an internal logic and specific stylistic devices, was employed by the clerks “from below” to construct their occupational identity.The association between white-collar workers and nationalism, particularly in the context of state building, has long attracted the attention of sociologists and historians. First, the emergence of non-manual workers as the social basis of bureaucratic organizations was linked to state formation. Second, the role of white-collar workers in the evolution of national-capitalist economies and urban consumer communities was regarded as essential in linking state building and economic change. Third, political and social histories of the nationalist Right centered on bureaucrats and clerical employees as standard-bearers of conservative politics.

Effects of Social Context on Psychological Responses to Survived Myocardial Infarction

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Myocardial Infarction ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Blue Collar ◽  
Myocardial Tissue ◽  
Psychological Responses ◽  
Work Efficiency ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Returning To Work

Persons respond in a diversity of ways to the crisis of acute myocardial infarction (MI). The social contexts of 120 survivors of MI was examined to determine whether this influenced such responses, working on the assumption that MI would represent a greater threat to the livelihoods of certain groups of persons than it would for other groups. The most prominent influence was observed for patients' occupation, where persons in so-called blue collar occupations exhibited significantly more anxiety in response to MI than did persons in white collar occupations. It was argued that this arose from the possibility that the nature of blue collar jobs was physical, and that loss of myocardial tissue might be expected to more markedly interfere with their work efficiency (on returning to work) than it would the efficiency of the more sedentary jobs of white collar workers.

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