David Montgomry, a leading American historian and former CP trade unionist, provides classic historical essays from a shop-floor and syndicalist sort of approach.
A collection of essays on workers' efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to assert control over the processes of production in US. It describes the development of management techniques and includes discussions of various worker and union responses to unemployment.
Preface; Introduction; 1. Workers' control of machine production in the nineteenth century; 2. Immigrant workers and managerial reform; 3. Machinists, the Civic Federation, and the Socialist Party; 4. The 'new unionism' and the transformation of workers' consciousness in America, 1909–22; 5. Whose standards? Workers and the reorganization of production in the United States, 1900–20; 6. Facing layoffs; 7. American workers and the New Deal Formula; Bibliographical essay.