"Every Factory a Fortress is a work of rich and exhaustive scholarship and makes a major contribution to the field. As well, it is a most commendable literary work."
Oscar Cole-Arnal
French trade unions played a historical role in the 1930s quite unlike that of any other labor movement. Against a backdrop of social unrest, parliamentary crisis, and impending world war, industrial unionists in the great metal-fabricating plants of the Paris Region carried out a series of street mobilizations, factory occupations, and general strikes that were virtually unique in Western history.
The unionization of the metal industry, following a series of anti-fascist demonstrations and plant seizures, would constitute the defining episode in modern French labor history and one of the great chapters in European social history. Yet little is known of these extraordinary events.
With a style that captures the vivid character of these experiences, Every Factory a Fortress tells the story of the Paris metal workers, who succeeded in organizing the largest Communist union in the Western world, reshaping the parameters of French social relations, and, ultimately, altering the course of French destinies.
Michael Torigian, before studying history at the University of California and sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, spent nearly a decade in the American labor movement. More info →
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Paperback
978-0-8214-1275-6
Retail price: $55.00,
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Release date: July 1999
320 pages
Rights: World
Children in Slavery through the Ages
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller
Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas.
Slavery and Slave Trade · Children's Studies · World and Comparative History · Childhood
Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996
By Gretchen Bauer
In this compelling study of labor and nationalism during and after Namibia’s struggle for liberation, Gretchen Bauer addresses the very difficult task of consolidating democracy in an independent Namibia. Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971-1996 argues that a vibrant and autonomous civil society is crucial to the consolidation of new democracies, and it identifies trade unions, in particular, as especially important organizations of civil society.
Political Science · Labor History · Nationalism · History | Modern | 20th Century · Namibia · African Studies
From Blackjacks to Briefcases
A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States
By Robert Michael Smith
From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that.By
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