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Bituminous coal mining was notorious for prolonged labor strikes and for the violence that marred some strikes. This chapter compares the strike activity in bituminous coal mining and other industries and assesses the pecuniary costs and benefits of strikes. Coal miners gave up earnings during the strike to achieve improvements in wages and working conditions. Unless the strike was over union recognition, the loss in earnings while on strike exceeded the gains from obtaining a higher wage rate. In union recognition strikes, the gains from unionization had to last several years before the expected gain from the strike exceeded the lost earnings in the course of the strike. Although most strikes were settled peacefully, the coal industry became infamous for a series of violent episodes, some that developed into full-scale warfare. Rather than trying to fix blame on one side or the other, this chapter argues that both miners and employers armed themselves in self-defense.

Coal mining offered the opportunity to earn money quickly during booms, but it was a dirty, dangerous job often located in isolated little towns. To protect themselves against exploitation by employers, coal miners exercised both voice and exit. The voice came in the form of collective action either through the formation of labor unions or labor strikes. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) enhanced the welfare of their members in several ways. Within the coal industry, miners obtained higher wages by joining the union and striking. The union did not necessarily lead to a better situation in all phases of the job, however. Accident rates were no lower in union than in non-union mines, nor was the quality of sanitation better, holding other factors constant. Blacks were welcomed into the union in the mining areas where they had long been located, but a number of union locals in the North treated blacks as pariahs. The UMWA was crushed along with the coal operators by the deterioration of the industry in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Coal miners had two means of improving their conditions: voice and exit. They could band either together in labor unions and raise their collective voices, using strikes to focus attention on their grievances, or each miner could act alone moving to other mines or other industries to improve his position. The impact of exit often is ignored or described as inconsequential. Yet it was a powerful force in improving the economic welfare of the miners. This book is written based on cliometrics, combining old and new economic history, using both qualitative and quantitative evidence to examine the bituminous coal labor market. It describes conditions in the labor market, the nature of coal mining, and wages, safety, company stores, company towns, labor strikes, and violence.

This chapter analyzes why São Paulo’s labor organization was weak prior to World War I. It breaks with traditional explorations into organizers, focusing instead on how industrialist interests and state interventions intersected with the motivations and experiences of rank-and-file and non-striking workers. Prior to the 1917 General Strike, industrialists relied on the state’s increasing willingness to provide police intervention and intimidation to guarantee the “freedom to work.” When these measures proved insufficient and strikes persisted, employers could and did look to the Hospedaria to provide replacement workers. Industrialist interests and the state’s willingness to intervene on industrialists’ behalf certainly limited organization success when compared to other Southern Cone immigration centers, but so too did São Paulo’s distinctive nuclear family–centered immigration and workers’ unwillingness to strike. Newspaper accounts reveal rank-and-file divisions, and Hospedaria records explain the phenomenon by demonstrating the large number of nuclear families arriving and living in the city. For those immigrants and Paulistanos with minimal social connections and opportunities, family goals and survival trumped labor organization and camaraderie. These divisions existed across gender and national lines, but evidence suggests that Portuguese and Afro-Brazilians were more likely to be non-striking workers than other groups.

How did digital networks come to resemble formless, decentralized ‘clouds’ in their shape? This chapter answers this question by examining a highly charged moment in 1961, when the Bell System was targeted by a series of bomb attacks that tore through Utah and Nevada, at the same time that engineer Paul Baran began to develop his theories on distributed networks. Using Senate hearings on the bombing, the chapter argues that the perfect network is an ideological fantasy, one that has, at its core, the principle of deviance: of having circuits—or people—that are unreliable and untrustworthy. The chapter then turns to the architectural collective Ant Farm, whose Truckstop Network offered a very different vision of a decentralized network in 1970 and 1971, to suggest that in order to approach the perceptual effects of the cloud, one must first think of the network unobscured by the effects of technology.

This chapter focuses on the farm labor strikes during the 1930s and 1970s that led to a struggle between the growers, farmworkers, and their sympathizers and scientists, along with state-based resources to maintain or transform the social and material order of California’s agriculture. Dependence of the niche market farm industries on the often-seasonal migrant workers has proven to be a problem for the growers as they have not been able to maintain control over the labor during the challenging times for them. The chapter presents the point of view of growers, laborers, and the state of California regarding farm labor, which can be problematic for California agriculture. It also presents the perspective of the critics who defined the labor problem as a social conflict and suggestions such as including improving the working conditions of farm laborers and dividing the farms into smaller units.

Labor unions are an important component of a society's network of institutions that give individuals an opportunity to shape their environments and to promote mutual assistance. Collective bargaining can be a constructive force at the workplace to resolve problems that arise from the necessary incompleteness of labor contracts. An assessment of unionism in a society may be organized around three classes of questions: Do unions produce a better distribution of income in society? Do unions contribute to a more efficient society? And do unions enhance a society's “social capital”? This chapter examines the retreat of unionism in the United Kingdom, as illustrated by the drop in the fraction of workers who are union members. It describes the state of unionism in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that, unlike in most other countries, British unionism was nurtured less by explicit statutory support and more by various indirect mechanisms. The chapter also discusses the impact of the change in economic policy on unionism, along with the government's posture toward labor strikes and the impact of unionism on labor productivity.

This chapter describes the impact of World War I on the lives of Scottish workers. The Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915 were the first important point of confrontation between the workers—or more accurately the wives of workers—and the government during the war. These strikes were a direct result of the start of the war and the greed of war-profiteering slumlords. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this profiteering was its acceptance by the British government.

This chapter discusses the Sugar Strike which began on September 1, 1946. This first strike marked the beginning of what one study termed a “three year ‘showdown’ which has been compared to the American Civil War,” this time a fight between the radical left and conservatives. It was a confrontation in which the union entered united. Balloting on 33 sugar plantations resulted in 99 percent of workers voting for a strike, as they demanded a minimum cash wage of 65 cents per hour, overtime pay after 40 hours per week, and a union shop. The Sugar Strike lasted 79 days with the union emerging victorious—a gigantic step in transforming Hawaii from an apartheid outpost to the closest thing to social democracy that existed under the US flag. This was the culmination of a process whereby roughly 30,000 workers predominantly from the sugar, pineapple, and waterfront industries had joined the International Longshore and Warehousemen's Union in the relatively brief period from 1944 to 1946.

This chapter, provided by Basil Mogridge, explores the maritime labour system in twentieth century Britain. It is particularly concerned with the nature of strikes, but also explores wages, manning, crew costs, the supply and demand of maritime labour, and flag discrimination. The British system is compared and contrasted with the Norwegian system due to their historically similar approaches to maritime labour. It concludes that labour relations and labour costs were not a contributing factor to the slow growth of British shipping in the post-Second World War period, despite their negative impact after the First.

This chapter describes the changing role of Ellen Dawson in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although she was not the first activist to arrive on the scene, she played a central and highly visible role in the 1928 strike of unskilled textile workers, a strike that lasted six months and involved more than thirty thousand women and men. She worked with all of the strikers, but especially with the women workers, who were a majority of the textile workers in New Bedford. Dawson helped organize and direct their activities, helped keep them motivated, and helped expand the strike to other textile centers within New England.

One of the last organized events of the textile workers strike occurred when Dawson and other Textile Mill Committee leaders took a group of children to the office of the New Bedford school superintendent to protest the brutal treatment these children had received in school from teachers and classmates, and to ask the school system to provide food and clothing for the children of the strikers. When the superintendent declined, the committee called for a student strike. On October 6 of that year, the mill owners of New Bedford announced that they would open their mills on the following day. After almost six months, the New Bedford textile strike was over. The unskilled workers had been sold out by the skilled workers in a bargain between the Textile Council and the Manufacturers' Association. Most unskilled workers felt they had no choice but to return to work.

In the 1870s, print trade unions joined an international effort to fight for a ‘nine-hour’ or ‘short-time’ working day. Several key print trade labour strikes followed in the wake of this. This chapter focuses on six compositor and printer labour strikes in London, Toronto, Edinburgh, and Dublin that took place during the 1870s, linked to the nine-hour working day movement. Though some were deemed failures at the time (and in four cases cataclysmic in terms of trade organization effectiveness), several resulted in key social and organizational changes in relevant regions, some intended, others not, and ultimately are important moments in Victorian labour history.

Circus has always figured in the common sense as a place of extreme exploitation with dangerous working conditions, wretched living conditions, miserable wages, irregular working hours, physical and mental harassments, and insecure employment and life. But, strangely, if we look at the history of trade unions in India we would hardly find a circus workers’ union. This chapter talks about the Akhil Bharat Circus Karmachari Sangh organized under the Communist Party in late 1960s, which succeeded to an extent to establish a workers’ circus—owned, worked, and managed by the workers. The chapter also discusses the emergence of the only existing circus workers’ union in India now, the Indian Circus Employees Union, under the tutelage of Indian National Congress.

Chapter 8 analyzes how legal testimonies and documentation became “testimonios of resistance” that crafted an effective narrative that southern prisons and prison labor constituted slavery. The chapter begins with the story of David Ruíz and follows with several other Chicano testimonios. By telling Ruiz’s story, this chapter considers the terror of racial violence, the necessity of self-defense, and the agony of self-mutilation. The chapter then broadens the movement to include the Black Panther Jonathan Eduardo Swift and a cadre of political organizers who spread the word of prisoner empowerment. Once the testimonies had developed into a mass movement, the prisoners planned the first ever system-wide prison labor strike just as the Ruiz case was going to trial. As black and Chicano radical organizers, they waged a public campaign to make the conditions of the southern prison plantation visible by insisting that the Texas control penology and agribusiness model was built on a lie—that incarceration amounted to twentieth-century slavery.

The epilogue reflects on what happened to the prisoners who brought civil suits to Texas and frames the legal and political legacy of Ruiz within the current political moment of national prison strikes and the ongoing struggle over mass incarceration. The chapter considers Ruiz’s legacy through the lens of the Tennessee prison hostage crisis of 1985 as well as ongoing contemporary prisoner politicization over mass incarceration. It considers the development of the Prison Litigation Reform Act as part of carceral federalism’s effort to overturn judicial intervention in favor a return to state’s rights and control of its prison systems. It concludes with an analysis the country’s first national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 as critical moments tied to Ruiz and the case’s political legacy.

The New Bedford strike pitted the skilled workers against the unskilled workers, and as a result exacerbated Dawson's relationship with the United Textile Workers of America (UTW). The unskilled workers of New Bedford were united under the banner of the communist-led United Front Committees, the same group that led the striking workers during most of the Passaic strike in 1926. As a result, Dawson and the other communist activists came in direct conflict with the New Bedford Textile Council, which included skilled unions represented by the American Federation of Labor. This proved to be the final straw as far as the UTW's national leadership was concerned.

This chapter examines the significance of the 1958 student strike organized by middle class universitarios in support of striking bus drivers. It argues that, despite the protest's short duration (August 22 to September 4), this event should be interpreted as one of the most important student actions of postrevolutionary Mexico that would partly influence the rise of Mexico's New Left. Following the 1958 strike, students began to see themselves as a unifying front—“el estudiantado”—a “movement” that could challenge the institutionalized barriers of class differences that had traditionally kept students from different institutions apart. In particular, this chapter argues that the uprisings of 1958 emerged to a large extent as a direct response to the consolidation of charrismo as a mechanism of control across the domains of labor and education.

This chapter discusses the stevedores' strike in Hawaii that lasted from May 1, to 24 October 1949. It was the longest strike to that point in the maritime industry and, arguably, the most important strike in Hawaii's history—surpassing the Sugar Strike of 1946. Around 2,000 men tied up the ports and heightened anxiety at a time when the Red Scare was rising. Decades after it ended, Dave Thompson of the International Longshore and Warehousemen's Union argued that the stevedores' strike “did two things”: “It set the stage for tremendous gains by the union[,] since we won. At the same time it isolated the union from a part of the community,” due to the economic distress the strike caused and the effectiveness of the Red-baiting—buoyed by trans-Pacific currents—to which the union was so deftly subjected. The strike jerked Hawaii forcefully into the mainland's consciousness, in a way unseen since December 7, 1941.

This chapter presents an essay on the life of Mahatma Gandhi as a trade union leader. Before Gandhi stepped onto the centrestage of Indian politics, he led a labour strike at Ahmedabad in the spring of 1918, during the First World War. Though the strike attracted little attention, it had significant long-term results and implications as an experiment in the application of Gandhian ideas to industrial relations. This chapter traces the sequence of events immediately before and after the strike and attempts to place them in a historical perspective.