Ravenswood
I was very excited to receive in the mail this week all of the books and syllabi for my first courses at the U-Mass Labor Studies program. I’m taking Labor Law, with Harris Freeman, and Labor Research, with Tom Juravich. I decided to start lightly with “Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor,” which Juravich co-wrote with Kate Bronfenbrenner, and which is included in the syllabus for the Labor Research course mostly, I assume, to add color to the discussion. Ravenswood was an early 90’s lock-out at an aluminum processing plant of which I had never previously heard. Juravich and Bronfenbrenner argue that this little-remembered labor struggle presaged the revitalization of the labor movement experienced later in the decade, and represented the first time that American unions successfully combined a labor action with a corporate campaign, boycotts and international solidarity; a recipe for what they differentiate from […]