The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

This excellent community history of the lumber region around Eureka, California, deserves a wide readership. Cornford (San Francisco State) takes on a big question: How did the radical "republican" tradition of the American Revolution lead to the conservative corporate hierarchy of the 20th century? His case study looks at how timber and sawmill workers' attitudes toward work and politics changed from the Civil War to World War I. The author sees 19th-century America's stress on equality as double-edged: critical of the corporate enterprise, yet accommodating to paternalistic capitalism. Nineteen hundred divides US history between republic and empire; in Eureka, workers briefly developed a sense of class struggle before the mill owners permanently defeated them. Highly recommended. James W. Oberly, Univ. Of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

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A decade of political infighting over comprehensive immigration reform appears at an end, after the 2012 election motivated the Republican Party to work with the Democratic Party's immigration reform agendas. However, a guest worker program within current reform proposals is generally overlooked by the public and by activist organizations. Also overlooked is significant corporate lobbying that affects legislation. This updated edition critically examines the new guest worker program included in the White House and Congressional bipartisan committee s immigration reform blueprints and puts the debate into historical and contemporary contexts. It describes how the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO agreed on guidelines for a new guest worker program to be included in the plan. Gonzalez shows how guest worker programs stand within a history of utilizing controlled, cheap, disposable labor with lofty projections rarely upheld. For courses in a wide variety of disciplines, this timely text taps into trends toward teaching immigration politics and policy.Features of the New Edition"