Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II

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CUP Archive, 1983 M01 28 - 331 pages
Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American political 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. Professor 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 arrangements worked out during the war established the foundations of social stability and labor politics that came to characterize the postwar world.
 

Contents

Preface page ix
1
The unfinished struggle
8
CIO politics on the eve of war
26
Responsible unionism
44
Union security and the Little Steel formula
67
Equality of Sacrifice
82
The social ecology of shopfloor conflict ΠΟ
110
Incentive pay politics
136
Holding the line
157
IO The bureaucratic imperative
178
Reconversion politics
203
Labor in postwar America
233
Notes
246
Bibliographical essay
301
Index
309
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