Labor In Crisis

The Cio In World War Ii

Nelson Lichtenstein

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439904237
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement—especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations—and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration. He argues that tensions within the labor movement and within the ranks of American business profoundly affected government policy during the war and the nature of organized labor's political relations with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. Moreover, the political arrangements worked out during the war established the foundations of social stability and labor politics that came to characterize the postwar world.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction to the new edition
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Unfinished Struggle
• 3. CIO politics on the eve of war
• 4. "Responsible unionism"
• 5. Union security and the Little Steel formula
• 6. "Equality of sacrifice"
• 7. The social ecology of shop-floor conflict
• 8. Incentive pay politics
• 9. Holding the line
• 10. The bureaucratic imperative
• 11. Reconversion politics
• 12. Epilogue: Labor in postwar America
• Notes
• Bibliographical essay
• Index