Labor History Links

"Although federal and state regulations require employers to provide toilets, government agencies, incredibly, do not require employers to permit workers to use them. Marc Linder, a labor lawyer and political economist, and Ingrid Nygaard, a physician specializing in urogynecology, place this regulatory breakdown in the wider context of the history of labor-management struggles over rest periods. They emphasize the physiological consequences that workers suffer when they are not allowed to interrupt work to rest or urinate." "Linder and Nygaard explain how protective rest period legislation has shrunk over time. Ironically, because most statutes singled out women for rest breaks, they were invalidated by Title VII's ban on sex discrimination. The authors explain other countries' regulations and conclude with a recommendation for legislation to mandate rest and bathroom breaks for all workers."--Jacket
Introduction : From "let them eat cake" to "let them pee in their pants"
From Taylorism to ergonomics : a managerial basis for rest periods
Bringing incontinence out of the (water) closet
Women at rest : the legal status of rest periods before Title VII
Sexual equality or "the equality of having no protective laws whatsoever"?
Judicial and legislative struggles : repeal or extension of gendered rest periods?
How the other half rests : how many modern workers have rest periods?
Rest in the rest of the world
"Go to the bathroom, please ... we'll wait for you" : from at-will employment to at-will voiding
Appendix 1. State rest- and meal-period laws
Appendix 2. Percentage of employees not receiving paid rest periods, 1979-1993

"This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North."--Jacket

The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma between the founding of the union in 1905 and its demise in 1930. In Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, Nigel Anthony Sellars describes IWW efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers in the state and relationships between the union and other radical and labor groups such as the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor. Focusing on the emergence of migratory labor and the nature of the work itself in industrializing the region, Sellars provides a social history of labor in the Oklahoma wheat belt and the midcontinent oil fields. Using court cases and legislation, he examines the role of state and federal government in suppressing the union during World War I. Oil, What, & Wobblies concludes with a description of the IWW revival and subsequent decline after the war, suggesting that the decline is attributable more to the union's failure to adapt to postwar technological change, its rigid attachment to outmoded tactics, and its internal policy disputes, than to political repression. In Sellars's view, the failure of the IWW in Oklahoma largely explains the failure of both the IWW and the labor movement in the United States during the twenties