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"One of New York City's most powerful unions, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO, represents almost 40,000 workers. Shaun Richman's history places the labor organization within the context of American industrial and craft unionism and reveals how it came to influence politics and economic development in the city and beyond. From the start, New York's organized hotel workers experimented with and adapted how they organized and governed members and related to other labor unions. Richman follows union fortunes from early IWW activity through the Communist-led affiliates of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s and 1930s, the shaping of breakthrough negotiating strategies, and the postwar era. As Richman shows, workers adopted a radicalism and militancy seldom associated with an AFL organization while openly negotiating the Communist Party's power and influence within the union, until the Party's eclipse in the 1950s. An inspiring story of action and perseverance, We Always Had a Union profiles a foundational American labor union and offers lessons for today's workers and organizers"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
- The Unsafest Proposition in the World, 1912–1913
- Bolsheviki Methods, 1913–1918
- Practical Trade Union Tactics, 1919–1924
- Strange as It May Seem, 1925–1929
- Political Sentimental Giddiness, 1929–1934
- An Industry Has Been Freed, 1934–1938
- Status Quo, 1938–1939
- Only the Question of Final Alliances Remains, 1939–1941
- We Cook, Serve, Work for Victory, 1941–1945
- In Normal Order, 1945–1947
- The Crack, 1947–1950
- Trusteeship, 1950–1953
Afterword
Notes
Sources
Index
About the author
Shaun Richman teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University. He is the author of
Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century.
