Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packing-House Workers, 1894-1922 (Working Class in American History) - Hardcover

Barrett, James R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252013786 ISBN 13: 9780252013782

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 1987

Inhaltsangabe

Chicago's packinghouse workers were not the hopeless creatures depicted by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, but active agents in the early twentieth century transformation that swept urban industrial America.
 
In his case study of Chicago's Union Stockyards, Barrett focuses on the workers - older skilled immigrants, new immigrant common laborers, migrant blacks, and young women workers - and the surrounding neighborhoods. The lives and communities of these workers accurately convey the experience of mass-production work, the quality of working-class life, the process of class formation and fragmentation, and the changing character of class relations.
 
Because Packingtown's struggle for existence was linked directly to the character of work and employment in the industry, unionization played an important role in the lives of these workers. Although unionization was associated with both improving the quality of life and creating a viable community, workers were divided by race, ethnic identity, and skill. Work and Community in the Jungle discusses a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors that resulted in class cohesion and fragmentation.
Addressing the broader problem of relations between capital and labor, Barrett demonstrates the effects of government intervention on labor organization, negotiation, and conflict. Shop-floor workers banded together to develop new strategies and forms of organization in their struggle with management for control.
 
Barrett employs contemporary social surveys and a computer-assisted analysis of census data to illustrate the physical and social characteristics of the workers' environment. He analyzes this data in the context of the relationships between community, ethnicity, family, work experience, and industrial characteristics. 
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James R. Barrett is a member of the history department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A co-author of Steve Nelson, American Radical, he is also the editor of an annotated edition of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.
 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1987
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252013786
• ISBN 13: 9780252013782
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 14
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar