organized labour - book - 2001 - From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States
Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty
Illustrations by Joe Sacco
The New Press
2001
364 pages

    Hello out there on the Internet.  I borrowed From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States from Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

    From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States is a comprehensive yet concise chronicle of American organized labour.  The book starts with a description of working conditions for indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonial subjects in the new world, and moves through history ending with discussions of the disparities between workers wages and the salaries of corporate CEOs.  The text charts the struggles to maintain labour unions and the perpetual dialectic between workers and management in attempting to negotiate better conditions.

    From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend is a scholarly work by labour historians.  Priscilla Murolo is the Co-Director, Graduate Program in Women's History/History at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.  Much of Murolo’s work focuses on the labour history of women.  A.B. Chitty is a librarian at Queens College of the City University of New York.  As the authors' history of American labour moves out of the slave period and into an era where organizations gained strength, the reader (me) can become bogged down by the acronym names of all of the worker’s organizations that formed through the twentieth century.  Thankfully the authors included a glossary of acronyms at the beginning of the book although one union can sound like another if you do not keep careful track of how each group entered the text.  The book does not have footnotes or citations, but instead has a ‘Suggested Reading’ section near the end, with a list of other scholarly works pertaining to organized labour and the history of work.

    There are no photographs or other historical visual materials in Murolo and Chitty’s text.  Instead, award winning (American Book Award, Guggenhem Fellowship, Eisner Award) comics artist and writer, Joe Sacco, drew short interludes in comic book format.  Sacco's work detailed workplace situations and management attitudes that compelled the workers to organize.  Sacco also drew panels illustrating the most common professions of the different phases of American labour history: the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial eras.  Sacco’s illustrations are not necessarily scholarly (the ‘boss’ of his illustrations has the same features from comic to comic even if times and settings change) but they provide some relief from reading Murolo and Chitty’s dense text.  

    Murolo and Chitty’s histroy of American labour unions is comprehensive.  The authors detail the initial struggles for unions, often lead by European immigrants who arrived steeped in a radical tradition, to the rise of the radical Industrial Workers of the World that held a prominent position in labour politics through the early part of the twentieth century.  The authors also focus quite a bit on the unions that turned into powerful lobbyist bureaucracies, such as the American Federation of Labour, with lawyers for leaders rather than workers.  There is a frequent sense that worker’s organizations were sites where fairly normal people would temporarily become radical in their outlook and behavior, however the authors also describe a fair amount of conservatism among organized labour.  The authors also focused on the varying attitudes different unions held towards racial integration and the inclusion of women, which were not always progressive.  And at certain times and places unions were segregated and the rank and file would occasionally agitate to maintain that status.  The authors also identified unions that were willing to look beyond racial prejudice and build on class ties rather than race.  

    Murolo and Chitty’s text covers much notable successes and failures of organized labour in America.  What is missing in their text are accounts of efforts to organize that are thwarted.  There were a number of high profile stories from recent years, for example, of the workers at particular McDonalds or Wal Mart locations who attempt to unionize but fail.  Their failure occurred either because the workers fear repercussions or because corporate management closes the store, but it is this aspect of labour history that is not found in From The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend.  Researchers should rely on this text for the history of workers who successfully organized, and with regards to the history of established labour unions Murolo and Chitty’s book is quite strong.