History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Resistance in the Digital Workplace: Call Center Workers in Bell Telephone Companies, 1965-2005(2021) Goldman, Debbie J; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Resistance in the Digital Workplace analyzes the ways in which a predominantly female unionized workforce contested the degradation of the labor process and downward pressure on living standards and job security in the automated call centers of two leading telecommunications companies, AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In their struggles with employers, the call center workers and their union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), fought for good, secure, humane jobs amidst the digital revolution, neoliberal policy regime, the financial turn in capitalism, and the decline of unions. The study argues that the very forces that were driving change in the call centers also shifted and frequently narrowed the terrain upon which these call center workers struggled with management for control and power. While CWA and its call center members scored impressive victories in placing limits on abusive surveillance, work speed-up, and some forms of outsourcing, the study also demonstrates the boundaries of collective worker power in the highly automated call center environment. Resistance in the Digital Workplace examines key questions of labor history: workers’ struggles for job control in automated workplaces; the opportunities and constraints of the U.S. enterprise-based collective bargaining system; the failure of U.S. labor law to protect workers when organizing; alternative organizing models such as CWA’s bargain to organize strategy; the impact of neoliberal regulatory and economic policies on the decline of union power; the rise and fall of labor-management partnerships in the 1990s; the financial turn in capitalism; the fissuring of employment systems; global outsourcing of service work; and the successful strike against the corporate giant Verizon in the year 2000. The contests of CWA and its call center members, operating in one of the most dynamic and important sectors of the U.S. and global economy, highlight the opportunities, challenges, and constraints that so many U.S. service workers face in their struggles for power in the post-industrial service economy.Item Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing and the Origins of the New Economic Divide (1968-1985)(2015) Windham, Anna Lane; Greene, Julie M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: KNOCKING ON LABOR'S DOOR: UNION ORGANIZING AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW ECONOMIC DIVIDE (1968-1985) Anna Lane Windham, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Julie Greene, Department of History The 1970s were a pivotal decade for the creation of twenty-first century economic inequality, and the loss of union power was one important driver away from shared U.S. prosperity. Yet why did U.S. labor grow so weak? Much recent scholarship shifts blame for labor's decline to unions and the working class, and asserts that private-sector workers were simply no longer trying to organize by the mid-1970s. The dissertation instead paints the 1970s as a decade of working-class promise and reveals a previously-unstudied wave of half a million workers a year who tried to form unions in the private sector. Many of these workers were the women and people of color who had long been excluded from the nation's best jobs and from some unions, yet who had recently gained new access through Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once these workers got the coveted jobs, many went knocking on labor's door. This dissertation explains how after World War II union organizing became the narrow door through which workers could access the most secure tier of the U.S. employer-provided social welfare system: collective bargaining. Increased resistance to union organizing among employers by the 1970s, however, thwarted these workers' organizing attempts. When fewer workers could access unions, the stage was set for growing economic precarity and inequality. This dissertation features four case studies: the largest union election ever in the South which was among Newport News, Virginia shipyard workers in 1978; campaigns in 1974 and 1985 by Cannon Mills textile workers in Kannapolis, North Carolina; the 1979 campaign among 5300 department store at Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, DC; and the women office workers' group "9to5" in Boston who forged a new kind of labor organizing. Sources include government statistics, oral history, local and national union records, business organization archives, polling, periodicals and previously unexamined anti-union consultant records.Item `HE LOVES THE LITTLE ONES AND DOESN'T BEAT THEM': WORKING CLASS MASCULINITY IN MEXICO CITY, 1917-1929(2014) Gustafson, Reid Erec; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how Mexico City workers, workers' families, state officials, unions, employers, and others perceived, performed, and shaped masculinity during the period of the Mexican Revolution. I argue that Mexico City's workers, officials, and employers negotiated working-class gender beliefs in such a way as to express multiple, performed, and distinctly working-class masculinities and sexualities. Scholars who study gender in Mexico argue that during the 1930s a particular type of working-class masculinity became dominant: the idea of the male worker as a muscular breadwinner who controlled both machines and women. I agree with this claim, but the existing scholarship fails to explain how this "proletarian masculinity" developed prior to the 1930s. My dissertation studies the period right before this proletarian masculinity became dominant and explains the processes through which it gradually developed. During the 1920s, the state held a relatively unstable position of power and was consequently forced to negotiate terms of rule with popular classes. I demonstrate that the 1920s represent a period when no one form of masculinity predominated. A complex range of multiple masculine behaviors and beliefs developed through the everyday activities of the working class, employers, officials, and unions. A Catholic union might represent a rival union as possessing an irresponsible form of manhood, a young man might use bravado and voice pitch to enact a homosexual identity, and a single father might enact a nurturing, self-sacrificing form of manhood. My sources include labor arbitration board records, court records, newspapers, plays, poetry, and reports by social workers, police, doctors, labor inspectors, juvenile court judges, and Diversions Department inspectors. Each chapter in this dissertation analyzes a particular facet of workers' masculinity, including worker's masculine behaviors among youth, within the family, in the workplace, in popular entertainment venues, and within unions.