Racial Competition and Class Solidarity

Couverture
SUNY Press, 9 mars 2006 - 268 pages

It sometimes seems that racial conflict is an intractable impediment to class solidarity in the United States. Yet in a time of economic depression and overt racism, the unions of the CIO did, on a number of occasions, forge interracial solidarity among industrial workers of the 1930s and 1940s. This book explores the role of racism and racial solidarity in union organizing efforts or strikes during the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, covering both those conditions and actions that enabled unions to realize interracial solidarity and those more common circumstances in which union organizing was defeated by racial competition.

The authors combine theories of racial competition, specifically split labor market theory, with game theory models of collective action to compare the patterns of race relations that accompanied nine American labor organizing drives and strikes. They conclude that racial competition thwarted solidarity when minorities were recent immigrants or where employers used racist paternalism. Where conditions were more favorable, unions overcame racial divisions by institutionalizing their rhetoric about racial equality in the form of black organizers and black union officials, in what came to be known as the "miners' formula." This formula worked, and the CIO unions today remain among the country's most integrated institutions and most powerful advocates of working class interests.

 

Table des matières

1 Introduction
1
2 Theories of Racial Competition and Organizing Solidarity
19
3 Migration and MarketsThe Origins of Split Labor Markets
45
4 Sojourner LaborThe Pattern of Discrimination against Chinese Immigrants 18501882
61
5 Racial Competition in the Great Steel Strike of 1919
85
6 The FormulaInterracial Solidarity in the Coal Steel and Auto Unions19271941
109
7 Operation DixiePaternalism andEmployer Discrimination in Southern Textiles 19461953
155
8 ConclusionsOrganizing Solidarity
189
AppendixQualitative Comparative Analyses of Strikebreaking and Solidarity
199
Notes
218
References
233
About the Authors
252
Index
255
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À propos de l'auteur (2006)

Terry Boswell is Professor of Sociology at Emory University and the author (with Christopher Chase-Dunn) of The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy.

Cliff Brown is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire.

John Brueggemann is Associate Professor of Sociology at Skidmore College.

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