Labour S War

This book is the first scholarly history of the Labour Party during the Second World War, and offers a fresh look at British politics during the war years. Brooke examines the effect of war upon the party's ideology and policy, the experience in government of Labour leaders such as Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton, and the tensions produced within the party by the circumstances of war. Brooke's extensively researched and original study calls into question the long-standing belief in an atmosphere of consensus among the political parties, and uncovers the sharp ideological differences which persisted throughout the war years and after.

During the Cold War, American labour organizations were at the centre of the battle for the hearts and minds of working people. At a time when trade unions were a substantial force in both American and European politics, the fiercely anti-communist American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), set a strong example for labour organizations overseas. The AFL-CIO cooperated closely with the US government on foreign policy and enjoyed an intimate, if sometimes strained, relationship with the CIA. The activities of its international staff, and especially the often secretive work of Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown--whose biographies read like characters plucked from a Le Carré novel--exerted a major influence on relationships in Europe and beyond. Having mastered the enormous volume of correspondence and other records generated by staffers Lovestone and Brown, Carew presents a lively and clear account of what has largely been an unknown dimension of the Cold War. In impressive detail, Carew maps the international programs of the AFL-CIO during the Cold War and its relations with labour organizations abroad, in addition to providing a summary of the labour situation of a dozen or more countries including Finland, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Greece, and India. American Labour's Cold War Abroad reveals how the Cold War compelled trade unionists to reflect on the role of unions in a free society. Yet there was to be no meeting of minds on this, and at the end of the 1960s the AFL-CIO broke with the mainstream of the international labour movement to pursue its own crusade against communism.

Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalition's efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.

`This is a beautifully conceived and revealing book. Joan Sangster lucidly explores and explains an astonishing array of complex material to reveal how women in the post-war period became full-fledged members of the labour force. Transforming labour offers such a rich variety of ancedotal evidence that it will benefit students of women's work from all over the world.' Alice Kessler-Harris, author of in Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Through a detailed examination of the party's post-war development, this book outlines how nostalgia has shaped the party's trajectory. It argues that Labour's nostalgically-informed identity has determined the extent to which the party has been able to respond effectively to the changing nature of Britain.

This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

During the Second World War, the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Canada grew from a handful of members to more than a quarter-million and from political insignificance to a position of influence in the emergence of the welfare state. What was it about the "good war" that brought about this phenomenal growth? And how did this coming of age during the war affect the emerging CIO? Labour Goes to War analyzes the organizing strategies of the CIO during the war to show that both economic and cultural forces were behind its explosive growth. Labour shortages gave workers greater power in the workplace and increased their militancy. But workers' patriotism, their ties to those on active service, memories of the First World War, and allegiance to the "people's war" also contributed to the CIO's growth - and to what it claimed for workers. At the same time, union organizers and workers influenced one another as the war changed lives, opinions, expectations - and notions of women's rights. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material, Wendy Cuthbertson illuminates this complex wartime context. Her analysis shows how the war changed lives, opinions, and expectations. She also shows how the complex, often contradictory, motives of workers during this period left the Canadian labour movement with an ambivalent progressive/conservative legacy.