Introduction: Bringing the Study of Work Back to Labor Studies

Looking back at our history we cannot ignore how struggles around the changing nature of work itself were formative in the building of the U.S. labor movement. In the early textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, New England farm women, and later immigrants from western and central Europe, faced unending work days, dangerous conditions, and abusive supervisors. The rallying cry of the women who struck in Lawrence in 1912 was "Give us bread and roses too." Of course they wanted higher wages, but theirs was no less a fight for dignity and respect—about humanizing their work lives so they might have the time and energy left for family and community.

As Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford pushed the early factory system in the United States to new levels of inhumanity in the 1930s, workers organized in places like Flint, Gary, and Detroit. The CIO and the wave of organizing in auto, steel, and rubber brought important wage increases and the beginning of new employer-based benefits plans. Yet the CIO also brought important checks to management rights on the shop floor in an effort to restore some semblance of humanity for industrial workers and to make sure that workers had something left at the end of the day to share with their families and friends.

We could explore more contemporary struggles of immigrant workers in meatpacking, hotels, building services, nursing homes, the legions of Wal-Mart workers, or those in more high-tech occupations. And we would discover the same processes at work—that the labor movement is borne from workplace struggles. Up and down the occupational ladder, what workers want is some kind of control on the job, some dignity in their work, some measure of fairness in their workplace, and some chance at a life outside of work.

Turning Away from Work

Much has been written about the labor movement in the post-World War II era. For the first time in U.S. history, the labor movement became a legitimate social institution, and a complex infrastructure was developed to resolve labor conflicts as part of the post-war accord between labor and management. Spontaneous strikes and job actions were replaced by labor board charges, formal grievances, and arbitration. As the locus of union activity moved from the shop floor and local unions to union headquarters, pattern bargaining, and contract administration, the labor movement was changing.

Without question this new industrial relations system brought great benefits to a core group of largely white, male, urban, industrial workers. But the labor movement also lost something in the process. Many have written about the costs resulting from labor's bureaucratization, the ensuing servicing model, and the movement away from organizing. At the same time, this post-war paradigm also marked the beginning of labor's move away from work, the labor process, and workplace struggles. For example, as bargaining became more centralized—across local unions and often employers—it increasingly focused on wages and benefits, and less on specific workplace issues.

While we saw tremendous improvement in the economic fortunes of workers during this period, increasing union density and power did not, for the most part, translate into significant institutional changes on the shop floor —no moves to shorten the work day, increase the amount of worker control, or make work less alienating or less physically demanding. The labor movement filed grievances and enforced its complex contracts, but their contracts for the most part did not address the big issues on the shop floor as the labor movement largely ceded control of the shop floor to management. We saw the dramatic consequences of this at Lordstown in the late 1970s as younger workers, horrified with the conditions in the auto plants, struck against their own union. While we did see some efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s at improving the quality of working life, these programs...