Product Description

By studying the ways in which American industrial workers mobilized concerted action in their own interest, the author focuses on the workplace itself, examining the codes of conduct developed by different types of workers and the connections between their activity at work and their national origins and neighborhood life. David Montgomery, Farnam Professor of History at Yale University since 1979, is the author of Worker's Control in America (CUP, 1979) and is co-editor of the journal International Labor and Working Class History.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #507608 in Books
• Published on: 1989-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 508 pages

From Library Journal
After the Civil War, American workers struggled to gain a voice in how the workplace was run, and to create strong labor unions. Montgomery concentrates on what was happening on the shop floor, rather than in the union hall or the factory office. He shows how craftsmen, machine operatives, and common laborers developed separate codes of job conduct related to their backgrounds (many were immigrants) and neighborhood cultures. At the turn of the century, big companies adopted management styles designed to weaken unions, while radicals competed with unions. By the mid-1920s, the labor movement was in retreat, radical movements were discredited, and workers mostly unorganized.Recommended for subject collections.Harry Frumerman, formerly with Economics Dept., Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"David Montgomery...both exemplifies and transcends the recent trend toward painstakingly detailed social history...he has undertaken a far vaster project than most contemporary labor historians would attempt: American labor activism of all varieties and locales, from the time when American workers organized the first tentative but recognizable trade unions, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence of the working class as an insurrectionary force during the first two decades of the twentieth century, to its humiliating defeat in the years following the First World War...the closest thing we have...to E.P. Thompson's monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class." Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Atlantic

"...the most sweeping portrait of working-class life to emerge from the new labor history...a subtle, complex, often brilliant study..." Alan Brinkley in the New Republic

Customer Reviews

attacks on labor activism
David Montgomery analyzes the United States between 1865-1925 in terms of the conflicting social classes that fought for control of industry and labor relations. He argues that class consciousness permeated all levels of social interaction both inside and outside of the workplace. Labor struggles with management about working conditions, wages, and for control of the shop floor. Montgomery focuses on the workers' lives in his investigation of this battle.

Montgomery delineates three different type of workers in the nineteenth century. Skilled workers, such as iron puddlers, maintained a degree of control over the workplace because of their specialized knowledge. Common laborers, such as railroad builders, provided the muscle that shaped industrial America. They exerted power because industry depended on them to survive. Operatives, or unskilled laborers such as textile workers, filled an interum position. Mostly women, these workers operated under a piecework system and possessed limited power over their jobs. The changes in industrial society reduced the power of skilled craftsmen and swelled the ranks of operatives.

Industry used a variety of methods to transform the workplace in order to marginalize skilled workers and increase the numbers of more easily controlled operatives. Scientific management served to explain, guide, and justify this transformation. Scientific management separated the mental component of commodity production from the actual work. This separation de-skilled workers and decreased their control over the industrial environment. The open-shop drive consolidated middle class opposition to the workers. Their hostility led to the inability of workers to enact reform legislation to remedy managerial encroachments into the shop floor. Welfare capitalism diverted workers attention from collective action and solidified their support for the company rather than class consciousness. Montgomery deplores scientific management, the open-shop, and welfare capitalism because they detracted from labor's traditional control in the workplace and limited their response to the problems of industrialization.