Human Resources Management

This book, designed to give a survey history of American labor from colonial times to the present, is uniquely well suited to speak to the concerns of today's teachers and students. As issues of growing inequality, stagnating incomes, declining unionization, and exacerbated job insecurity have increasingly come to define working life over the last 20 years, a new generation of students and teachers is beginning to seek to understand labor and its place and ponder seriously its future in American life. Like its predecessors, this ninth edition of our classic survey of American labor is designed to introduce readers to the subject in an engaging, accessible way. 

A concise history of labor and work in America from the birth of the Republic to the Industrial Age and beyond.

Despite achieving monumental reforms in the United States such as the eight-hour workday, a federal minimum wage, and workplace health and safety laws, organized labor's record on much of its agenda has been mixed. Tracy Roof's sweeping examination of labor unions and the American legislative process explains how this came to be and what it means for American workers. Tracing a 75-year arc in labor movement history, Roof discusses the complex interplay between unions and Congress, showing the effects of each on the other, how the relationship has evolved, and the resulting political outcomes.

Working Americans 1880-2016, Volume VII: Social Movements explores how Americans sought and fought for change from the 1880s to the present time. This updated edition adds new coverage of Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and Black Lives Matter. With coverage of child welfare, civil rights, religion, freedom of the press, women's rights, health, and the environment, this remarkable volume highlights how regular people took a stand to fight for what they believed in. Following the format of previous volumes in the Working Americans series, the text examines the lives of 34 individuals who have worked-often behind the scenes-to bring about change. Issues include topics as diverse as the Anti-smoking movement of 1901 to efforts by Native Americans to reassert their long lost rights. Along the way, the book will profile individuals brave enough to demand suffrage for Kansas women in 1912 or demand an end to lynching during a march on Washington in 1923. Each profile is enriched with real data on Income & Job Descriptions, Selected Prices of the Times, Annual Incomes & Budgets, Life at Work, Life at Home, Life in the Community, along with News Features, Key Events, and Illustrations. The depth of information contained in each profile allows the user to explore the private, financial and public lives of these subjects, deepening our understanding of how calls for change took place in our society. A must-purchase for the reference collections of high school libraries, public libraries and academic libraries.

"Describes how new kinds of direct-action labor movements are emerging to reshape American labor activism in the twenty-first century"--

In this book, historian Steven A. Reich examines the economic, political and cultural forces that have beaten and built America's black workforce since Emancipation. From the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights Movement and Great Recession, African Americans have faced a unique set of obstacles and prejudices on their way to becoming a productive and indispensable portion of the American workforce. Repeatedly denied access to the opportunities all Americans are to be afforded under the Constitution, African Americans have combined decades of collective action and community mobilization with the trailblazing heroism of a select few to pave their own way to prosperity. This latest installment of the African American History Series challenges the notion that racial prejudices are buried in our nation's history, and instead provides a narrative connecting the struggles of many generations of African American workers to those felt the present day. Reich provides an unblinking account of what being an African American worker has meant since the 1860s, alluding to ways in which we can and must learn from our past, for the betterment of all workers, however marginalized they may be. A Working People: A History of African American Workers Since Emancipation is as factually astute as it is accessibly written, a tapestry of over 150 years of troubled yet triumphant African American labor history that we still weave today.

This unique study will appeal to scholars and students interested in the Gilded Age and US and labor history.