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Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, governments around the world have been engaged in a conflict over the appropriate role of public services in society. In the U.S. and elsewhere, public services have faced pressures to restructure, reduce the size of government, and make government more ‘business-like.’ This paper examines how the evolution of public services and public sector unions shaped the distinctive character of public sector industrial relations in the U.S. Next it demonstrates how this distinctive character made public services and public sector unions vulnerable to neoliberal attacks and New Public Management reforms. It concludes by theorizing about how the frameworks of citizenship at work and union renewal may be used to strengthen the essential identity and restore the positive role that public sector unions have traditionally played in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Well known is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) in the United States places a largely per se ban on nonunion employee representation (ER) groups which deal with employers over a term or condition of employment. Much less well known is that America’s other labor law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA, 1926), takes a different approach and permits employers to operate such councils and committees as long as they do not perform a collective bargaining function or interfere with workers’ free choice of a bargaining agent. Thus, under the RLA Delta Air Lines is able to operate what is today the closest living approximation to a 1920s-style ER plan while hundreds of other companies (e.g. Polaroid) under the jurisdiction of the NLRA have been forced over the years to disband similar groups on grounds they are a proscribed company union. No study to date has explored the history behind the RLA and NLRA’s divergent treatment of nonunion ER groups so this article takes a first look. The main part of the story covers the 1920–1935 period and examines the events, people, and experiences associated with company unions and ER in, respectively, the rail and manufacturing industries and why the legislative outcome in the former was a permissive stance on nonunion committees but prohibitive in the latter. The last part of the paper fast-forwards the RLA-NLRA story from the 1930s to contemporary law and practice in order to demonstrate how “history matters” when it comes to what employers can and cannot do with nonunion representation groups, such as works councils, participation and involvement committees, and dispute resolution forums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the last notable period of working-class unrest in Britain and America, the 1968-74 'upsurge.' It questions the widespread dismissal of such workplace-based, 'economistic' forms of resistance as disconnected from more explicitly political forms of rebellion. The explosive, dynamic character of the rebellion is argued to have contained both the potential and actuality of a transformed consciousness and thus fundamental questioning of existing political and economic relations. The loss of 'what might have been' is attributed less to absence of a grand political narrative, despite the ruling-class panic of 1974, than to a simple failure to build cross-class networks which could have achieved the coordination and unity of often separate struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an announcement about several meetings to be held concurrently in the year 1979 in various cities of the U.S. The Economic and Business Historical Society issued a call for papers for the April 1979 meeting at Lake Tahoe-Reno. A dissertation session is also planned. The Society meets concurrently with the Western Social Science Association. The Fourth Midwest Marxist Scholars Conference will be held on March 9-11, 1979 at the University of Cincinnati on the theme "The U.S. Educational System: Marxist Approaches;' The focus will be on education as an institution and on Marxist approaches to research and teaching in various academic disciplines. The Department of History and the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University announce a national labor history conference that will be held in October 1979. The American Council of Learned Societies had published a brochure on "Aids to Individual Scholars," which deals with competitions to be held in 1978-79. The ninth annual Institute for Historical Editing will take place in July 15-27, 1979, in Madison, Wisconsin.

The article presents information on limits of labor unions in reference to the Chicago newspaper strike of 1912. William Randolph Hearst established the Chicago American, an evening daily, in 1900. Subsequently, a morning paper, the Chicago Examiner, was started. Initially Hearst's representatives signed a joint contract for five years covering printers, stereotypers, pressmen, engravers and mailers. All but the pressmen were covered by an agreement with the International Typographical Union (ITU); the pressmen were members of the International Printing Pressmen's and Assistants' Union of North America. Both international unions underwrote the contract. By the time it had expired, stereotypers and engravers had withdrawn from the ITU and set up their own international unions. In 1905, agreement was renewed separately with each organization, for another five-year term. During this period, unions signed contracts with the Chicago Chapter of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association (ANPA) on terms more favorable to management than those granted to Hearst. In 1910 at the expiration of the pressmen's contract on the Hearst Chicago newspapers, the pressmen as well as the other printing trades unions were informed of the desire of Hearst's management to come under the Chicago ANPA contract.

In this article the author shares his experience of attending the meetings of the labor organization, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). What first attracted the author to the IWW was its songs and the gusto with which its members sang them. Such singing, the author thought, was good propaganda, since it had originally attracted him and many others as well. Despite its size, the songbook blazed the trail for the larger songbook to come, a songbook of lasting fame, and one that would make the IWW. known in all corners of the earth. That time came nearer when J. H. Walsh blew in from Alaska. He came as a National Organizer to the Spokane Branch of the IWW, after Alaskan activities which included the founding of a paper, "The Nome Industrial Worker." By the time Walsh returned to Spokane, Washington, where he would continue his work, the worst effects of the 1907 panic were nearly over. This Panic came without advance warning. It was caused, some said, when Eastern bankers withdrew financial backing from railroad construction.

The article presents information on various meetings related to labor disputes to be held in various places. The Arizona Labor History Council and the Arizona State University will jointly sponsor the 1977 Southwest Labor Studies Conference scheduled to meet in Tempe, Arizona on March 4-5, 1977. The sponsors welcome conference proposals, papers, and participants from both the academic and labor-union communities there is a possibility that participants will have expenses paid by a pending grant proposal. The Forest History Society has published "Oral History Collection of the Forest History Society: An Annotated Guide." The fifth annual Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization conference has been tentatively scheduled for April 16-16, 1977, in New York City. The theme of the conference will be "The Politics of Culture: Legitimation and Resistance in Advanced Capitalism."