The Revolution, the Labour Regime and Conditions of Work in the Cotton Textile Industry in Mexico, 1910–1927

From 1910 to 1927 workers in the Mexican cotton textile industry took advantage of the larger surrounding revolution to create a revolution of their own. Based on a significant and persistent challenge to workplace authority, millhands radically transformed the labour regime in Mexican industry. Although owners combated the workers' rebellion, they never inflicted a decisive defeat. As a consequence, the conditions of work in Mexican mills improved dramatically. Among the advancements workers fought for, and obtained, were a sharp reduction in the working day from fourteen hours to eight, mandated medical care for work-related accidents and illnesses and union control of hiring and firing. The latter included the union shop and a system of tripartite boards that made it virtually impossible to fire workers who enjoyed union support. The new labour regime reflected changes in the formal and informal institutions of work, but its final institutionalisation empowered unions more than the rank and file workers who fought to change the social relations of work.

Right-To-Work Legislation and the Economic Position of Black Workers

Recent empirical analysis of state right-to-work legislation indicates that a negative wage effect may result as a consequence of banning union shop contracts. It has been previously shown that industrial unionism tends to improve the relative wage position of black workers. Thus, it is hypothesized that if state right-to-work laws weaken the economic power of unions to raise wages, black workers will experience a disproportionate decline in their relative wage position. Black workers in right-to-work states would therefore experience a reduction in their relative economic position unless a strong positive relative employment effect occurs in response to the decline in wages. Using a cross-sectional regression model this article examines the relative employment effect due to right-to-work legislation. The results indicate that black workers experience a statistically significant decline in their relative employment rate within right-to-work states. When this finding is coupled with the hypothesized negative wage effect, it is concluded that right-to-work legislation results in a worsening of the net economic position of black workers.

To Be Alive

If appetites are ready, food will follow. To be alive means clear eyes and a good digestion: a readiness to risk one's neck or lose one's sleep: a willingness to work at anything one needs for bread or knowledge from catching fish to measuring an atom's dance: the will to be incorporated with others in a family, union, shop or city, and yet to keep one's proper self intact. A life well-keyed will find its way with equal ease about a landscape or a library. To be a man at all means sharing in the modes of life that men have found a help to sheer existence or to ecstasy.