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This chapter introduces the problems of the roles racial differences play in the workplace. It discusses the changes in the way Americans talk about race and what pragmatic and progressive voices say that they want since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Never before has such a wide variety of employers, advocates, activists, and government leaders in American society discussed the benefits of racial diversity and the utility of racial difference in such a broad range of contexts. Thus, the chapter points out the emerging discourse of race as a qualification for employment, and briefly details the many issues as well as the role of established laws on such an issue. It also lays out the conceptual foundations upon which the following chapters will be based on.

This chapter focuses on the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as an explicitly anti-union organization with the stated goal of maintaining the “open shop”—or union-free workplaces. NAM's chief target was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which, like NAM, sought to bring order and standardization to the field of labor, but on workers' terms. NAM fought the AFL using many of the same tactics the AFL deployed against employers: disciplined organization, injunctions, lobbying, and what it variously called “propaganda” or “education.” The battle between NAM and the AFL was epic, conceived by both as a struggle for control of the American workplace. Unions and industrialists—both wary of the state—fought one another for control. Neither the AFL nor NAM were truly representative of their alleged constituency (“workers” and “industry,” respectively), but they were the organizations most fully engaged in this battle, each vilifying the other as “the enemy,” both claiming to uphold American individualism.

In making care into work, agencies justify their existence in the market as managing the predictable tensions that regularly arise in home care. Home care agencies build upon women’s familial experience of care while seeking to transform them into workers whose labor conforms to the ethical and temporal norms of American workplaces. Conflicts regularly arise between people’s moral ideologies about care, the economic pressures of capitalist markets, and the laws that govern labor and elder care in the United States. This chapter traces the transformation of moral values into economic value by focusing on the everyday ethics practiced by home care agency training and management staff as they mediate between national moralities, the needs of their agencies, the needs of clients, and their own ethics. Agencies’ different funding sources affect how they imagine and generate their clients’ independence. Publicly funded care policies view older adults as liberal persons in a democratic state in which rights and services are the result of citizenship and need rather than social position. In privately funded care, older adults’ independence was authorized by their privileged position as consumers whose subjective tastes and preferences determined the kinds and quantity of care they received. Their independence was not the result of fair treatment by an equitable state, but rather determined by their ability to wield economic power.

This chapter presents a portrait of Harvey Swados, whose novels, stories, and spirited reportage in the last decade and a half of his life helped uncover the political and social drama that unfolds in the daily routine of every American workplace. Nothing he wrote accomplished this with more power and insight than the series of interconnected short stories called On the Line, which first appeared in the fall of 1957. This humane and sympathetic portrait of the psychological and social brutality inherent in midcentury factory work injected a moral urgency into the understanding of manual labor at a time, early in the postwar era, when most literary and political intellectuals were convinced that all meaning had been drained from the toil still required of so many millions.