Workers in Industrial America

Book excerpt: This famous book, representing some of the finest thinking and writing about the history of American labor in the twentieth century, is now revised to incorporate two important recent essays, one surveying the historical study of the CIO from its founding to its fiftieth anniversary in 1985, another placing in historical and comparative perspective the declining fortunes of the labor movement from 1980 to the present. As always, Brody confronts central questions, both substantive and historiographical, focusing primarily on the efforts of laboring people to assert some control overtheir working lives, and on the equal determination of American business to conserve the prerogatives of management. Long a classic in the field of American labor history, valued by general readers and specialists alike for its brilliance of argument and clarity of style, Workers in IndustrialAmerica is now more timely than ever.