At The Picket Line

The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh.

Bonnie Ritter Book Award, National Communication Association's Feminist and Women Studies Division, 2008. On the Picket Line uncovers the voices of working-class women, particularly those active in the Communist Party, U.S.A., in order to examine how these individuals confronted the tensions between their roles as workers, wives, mothers, and consumers. Combining critical analysis, Marxist and feminist theory, and labor history, Mary E. Triece analyzes the protest tactics employed by working class women to challenge dominant ideologies surrounding domesticity. She details the rhetorical strategies used by women to argue for their rights as workers in the paid labor force and as caregivers in the home. Their overtly coercive tactics included numerous sit-ins, strikes, and boycotts that won tangible gains for working poor and unemployed women. The book also gives voice to influential figures in the 1930s labor movement (many of whom were members of the Communist Party, U.S.A.), such as Ella Reeve Bloor, Margaret Cowl, Anna Damon, Ann Burlak, and Grace Hutchins. Triece ultimately argues that these confrontational protest tactics of the 1930s remain relevant in today’s fights for more humane workplaces and better living conditions.

On February 9, 2000, the largest white-collar strike in the private sector in U.S. labor history was called against the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington. The engineers and technicians represented by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace walked away from good-paying jobs for forty days and forty nights. This book is a first-person narrative of the experiences of that strike. The strike was unprecedented in the union's history. The local media, Boeing management and the workers themselves had little confidence that this strike would last more than a few days.This narrative explores the motivation and the issues that compelled these workers to give up the security of a regular paycheck and face the uncertainty of a prolonged labor strike. This strike was unique in many ways. This strike grew from the dissatisfaction with the lack of respect in management's treatment of engineering and technical employees.Tom is an Electrical Engineer who spent 41 years at the Boeing Company. Shortly after graduating from Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, he accepted a job with the Boeing. Tom is a former President of SPEEA, the union which represents the Engineers, Technicians and Training Pilots in the Pacific Northwest.

Examines the legal framework regulating picketing and the role of police at a strike scene. Includes the texts of Criminal Code provisions and of provincial statutes relating to strikes and trespass on property.

Working-class women's creative challenges to oppressive gender norms and workplace discrimination