Craft Class

"Uncovering the hidden history of the creative writing "workshop," this book reveals the profound social and economic consequences involved in figurations of literary production as craft labor"--

Robert W. Kaps examines air transport labor law in the United States as well as the underlying legislative and policy directives established by the federal government. The body of legislation governing labor relations in the private sector of the U.S. economy consists of two separate and distinct acts: the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which governs labor relations in the railroad and airline industries, and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which governs labor relations in all other industrial sectors. Although the NLRA closely follows the pattern established by the RLA, Kaps notes that the two laws are distinguishable in several important areas. Labor contracts negotiated under the RLA continue in perpetuity, for example, whereas all other labor contracts expire at a specified date. Other important areas of difference relate to the collective bargaining process itself, the procedures for the arbitration of disputes and grievances, and the spheres of authority and jurisdiction to consider such matters as unfair labor practices. Congress established a special labor law for railroad and airline workers for several reasons. Because of transportation’s critical importance to the economy, an essential goal of public policy has been to ensure that both passenger and freight transportation services continue without interruption. Production can cease—at least temporarily—in most other industries without causing significant harm to the economy. When transportation stops, however, production stops. Thus Congress saw fit to enact a statute that contained provisions to ensure that labor strife would not halt rail services. Primarily because of the importance of air mail transportation, the Railway Labor Act of 1926 was extended to the airline industry in 1936. The first section of this book introduces labor policy and presents a history of the labor movement in the United States. Discussing early labor legislation, Kaps focuses on unfair labor practices and subsequent major labor statutes. The second section provides readers with a comparison of labor provisions that apply to the railroad and airline industries as well as to the remainder of the economy. The final section centers on the evolution of labor in the airline industry. The author pays particular attention to recent events affecting labor in commercial aviation, particularly the effect of airline deregulation on airline labor.

This volume brings together former students, colleagues, and others influenced by the sociological scholarship of Archibald O. Haller to celebrate Haller's many contributions to theory and research on social stratification and mobility. All of the chapters respond to Haller's programmatic agenda for stratification research: "A full program aimed at understanding stratification requires: first, that we know what stratification structures consist of and how they may vary; second, that we identify the individual and collective consequences of the different states and rates of change of such structures; and third, seeing that some degree of stratification seems to be present everywhere, that we identify the factors that make stratification structures change." The contributors to this Festschrift address such topics as the changing nature of stratification regimes, the enduring significance of class analysis, the stratifying dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender, and the interplay between educational systems and labor market outcomes. Many of the chapters adopt an explicitly cross-societal comparative perspective on processes and consequences of social stratification. The volume offers both conceptually and empirically important new analyses of the shape of social stratification.

A wide-ranging and authoritative history of SOGAT, which provides a valuable insight into the paper and printing industries during a period of great change, and an examination of crucial moments in recent UK industrial relations history.