Economic-union Books

"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" is abrilliant, riveting and invaluable expose that details the CIA's involvement in drug-running. Through McCoy's analysis, one can follow the CIA's drug-running trail from right after WWII, through the French Connection in Marseilles, to the golden triangle in Laos and Burma and on into Afghanistan.

"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" reveals the purpose behind the CIA's incolvement in drugs: at least since 1954 in Guatemala, the US has been involved in massive international terrorism throughout Central America. being clandestine, the CIA needed untraceable money and brutal thugs, so the CIA turned to narco-traffickers - like Manuel Noriega (long on the CIA payroll before his demise).

"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" remains one of the more important, relevant (in light of US involvement in the euphamism called a drug war in Columbia) yet obscure books of the previous quarter-century - a book that ultimately posits the question of whether the CIA, as an instrument of state policy, reflects the values of the American populace. Fascinating reading.

This in-depth academic study researches the central role that opium plays in the economy, politics, and wars of the region. It follows the trial from the highlands of Laos, where the opium is grown and harvested by the Hmong tribespeople, to the Golden Triangle, where it is refined into heroin. Published in 1972, this was the first printed account of the USA's massive engagement in a "secret" war in Laos. It documented the use of CIA helicopters to bring Laotian opium to market in Vietnam (where, ironically, it was sold to addicted US soldiers.) This was done to finance weapons for the army of Hmong highlanders, being led by CIA "advisors", who were fighting the Laotian communists.

There was only one edition of this book; immediately after its first printing, the entire publisher was bought by the U.S. government, and all warehoused copies were destroyed. However, with a bit of luck it can still be found in used bookstores.

I teach a survey course on Russia to graduate-level business students. I have used a variety of texts on Russia's economic transformation, always seeking one with the ideal combination of currency, readability, and insights and perspectives attuned to the businessperson rather than the typical academic. Brady's book is it. Brady's experience with BusinessWeek and her illustrative interviews with Russian citizens resonate particularly strongly with my students, who run the gamut from straight-from-undergrad-school/can't-find-Russia-on-a-map, to individuals who have done business in Russia (successfully or un- ) and want to know more about a unique (and uniquely frustrating) environment for operations and investment. I plan to continue requiring this text for my students and hope Brady provides updated editions as needed.

This is an fabulous book on how Russia turned from state socialism into a fragile, but market-based economy. Being a Business Week correspondent in Moscow the author could witness all stages of Russia's economic transformation -- starting from supply shortages and chaos of late 1991 to the formation of financial & industrial comglomerates in 1997. This book is an exciting reading because it is easy written and combines stories on both complicated economic issues and on lives of ordinary Russians, struggling to adapt to the changes.

The history of the emergence of the late codification called 'dialetical materialism' from earlier German philosophy must be one of the most confusing. This work resolves its perplexity by moving systematically from Fichte to Plekhanov and showing the stages of transformation of the Hegelian ideas of the Concept and the Universal and Particular in the Marxist legacy, as these notions directly entered the entire 'critique of political economy' that made up Marx's lifelong, much revised, and incomplete project, whose misleading end form is Capital. The root ideas of Fichte, Schelling,and the early Romantics, followed by the work of the Left Hegelian starting point constitute a genuine labyrinth and the author's trail is a rout of the dilletantes in this regard. One could express the late current distaste for the whole subject, yet the importance of this history is, and will remain, one to reckon with. One sees at a glance the dangers on all sides of the thrashing about in phantom views of the emergence of Marxism with its almost silent Hegelian echoes.

White's book is quite important. While recognizing the considerable influence of Hegel on Marx, it doesn't stop there. It asks how that influence changed. It finds a very substantial diminution from 1865 on. It also shows why Marx, after publishing the first volume of "Capital", went on to learn Russian and study Russia; that his own 'marxism' was in fact much in advance of what later became Russian Marxism associated with Plekanov and Lenin. 'Dialectical materialism' is NOT Marx, but the Russian interpreters, to their discredit.

I consider this book one of the most important within Marxism, along with Rosa Luxemburg's "Accumulation of Capital".

Ann Todd Baum provides an important insight into the role of the Communist youth organization and its part in shaping the early Soviet state, a period of history that has been largely neglected by historians and researchers alike until now. This book shows how the grass roots efforts of the Komsomol was an essential part of the implimentation of the First Five Year Plan and as a result the future course of the USSR. A very interesting read.

This book accurately depicts adolescent participation in major Soviet historical turning points.

A lot of big words, I think the author is a pompous professor type, but it is a wonderful piece of work.

Excellent referral source. Solid information with background information in clear concise format.

This text gives us an impossibly clear overview of labor laws from labor's perspective. The sections on organizing and the legality of different kinds of strikes are particularly helpful. A must-read for all BA's, Organizers and Union Officers. --Michael Murphy, Washington College of Law (formerly of Food and Beverage Workers Union, Local 32)

an absoulty amazing book covering America's labor struggle from the begining to current day.

This is not "Capitalism in America". It is not "Management in America". If you can accept the focus on labor and the concerns for labor, this may be a useful book for you.

I wasn't offerered a class in Labor in High School. It would have been a big help in entering the work world, if I had had the sense to listen to it then. Now I've been working decades but this book is still a big help. My sense of labor history has been terrible.

There were slaves. In colonial times, there were indentured servants. Within the past century, government forces have been used to imprison or kill people who went on strike. To the extent our government finds itself in war, it doesn't want to lose products and services to strikers, so there are laws that can be invoked to force people to work. Labor unions may have become content to do a minimal amount. Industrial unions have been heavily resisted by employers and the government, although even today the Industrial Workers of the World is making constructive efforts.

Haymarket. Homestead. Names worth knowing and honoring. Will worker conditions slide back? Knowing history helps, this isn't the first time unemployment, cheap labor, or new technology threatened labor. As capital has responded with welfare capitalism, with hi tech niceties like stock options and free soda, as McDonaldization spread workers out but under a common corporate control. as they are fewer tough workers like miners and longshoreman, as globalism undermines the benefit of local work forces's unity, understanding labor history and wisdom is as important as ever before.

Understanding labor issues is central to understanding one's life, to feeling deep in one's joints all the years one will be work. It will be up to you to turn this fact-filled book into a healthy path for yourself and perhaps others.

Ever since John Sweeny displaced the old guard at the AFL-CI0 and began to revive a moribund but important labor movement, we've read a great deal about this new face of labor. We've read about the focus on service employees -- who are predominantly women and people of color -- we've learned about aggressive organizing tactics and corporate campaigns, we've seen the leaders of the movement featured in labor publications and we've even heard about the members, activists and staffers who are the ground troops in this war.

Suzan Erem's book, Labor Pains, is unusual in that it makes us live through the beginnings of that movement. We don't just read about it; Erem's writing has the ability to bring you into it and you see if from the inside -- warts and all.

She does this by conncecting with reader not as an activist or leader -- but as a human being. The labor movement is made up of human beings who have the same problems and concerns that everyone else has, including raising children, paying the rent and even keeping warm during the long Chicago winter. It has been a shortcoming of writing about labor that the authors seem to think that the only humans are the "objects" of the organizing drives, the potential and actual bargaining unit employees, except, of course, when they have something bad to say about the leaders.

Erem doesn't have something bad to say -- or something good, for that matter. She just tells it as it is. Yes, the movement is made up of men and women struggling to create a better world, but these men and women can -- like everyone else -- be motivated by racism or nationalism, sexism and careerism. Not to say that is to patronize the reader and to call into question all of the "happy" truths of the movement. Those interested in the new labor movement can balance the truth about our humanity with the fact of our commitment.

I especially recommend this book to those many young people who come to the movement with high hopes of making a difference. It says that you have good reason for those hopes, but here are some landmines to avoid. These readers will all thank Erem for sharing the shortcomings of our activists and our movement -- including her own --with them, while also confirming that their hope to make a difference by organizing working people into unions is still well placed.

Often Poetic Picture of the Gritty Side of Labor Organizing

Labor Pains is a good read and a thoughtful and perceptive description of the work of a labor organizer for SEIU Local 73. The author, Suzan Erem, is a woman with the soul of a poet who fought on behalf of workers to organize. Much that I had read previously about such efforts to establish and maintain unions has been either inspirational, like the splendid song of the French Revolution, the Marseillaise, or tedious, like descriptions of Madam Lafarge's knitting. This is neither: it is the well-observed descriptive account of activities of a dedicated witness to, and participant in, the efforts by the labor movement to secure power and justice. In some senses it is about love and perhaps even the ecstasy of the moment but more important it is as the title, Labor Pains, perceptively suggests, about what comes after the love and the moment and before the exhilarating and painful moment of birth.

Labor Pains is about Suzan Erem's moments of discomfort and doubt. It is also about her persistence and her effort to maintain balance and idealism. She does not always succeed and tells us about the failure of her marriage and the organizing efforts that didn't work. But she also provides graphic descriptions of efforts that did work and the pleasure she took in those moments.

Erem is particularly good at describing the people she worked with and the role of the media in the struggle to organize. Her primary job was not only to organize, but also to get the story out. The story is not always happy or glamorous but it is well described. In one scene a small band of organizers hang a banner over an overpass to draw the media's attention to a strike they are organizing against a Chicago hospital. It is a very cold early winter Chicago morning on Lake Shore Drive and the effort seems almost futile, perhaps crazy. But it works and the media event draws attention to the union's struggle and helps in the winning effort organize the hospital and bring about an improved wage scale and other benefits through the protection of the union.

Erem describes her work in the labor movement both as an attempt to "scratch our mark on history" and to tell the story of the workers, a story that might otherwise not be told. She has done this well in Labor Pains and she has also told us her own story. It was a story worth telling. I expect she will have more stories to tell us.

This book offers an insightful description and well-reasoned analysis of Stolypin's land reforms. Those who know nothing about Stolypin's land reforms can get a good understanding of them solely from this book. Others more familiar with Russian history might gain from this book new economic understanding of important issues, such as the meaning of "land shortage" and the relationship between land prices and the land reform.

Stolypin's land reforms also offer some important insights into ongoing challenges of re-arranging economic rights. I discuss these issues in more detail elsewhere. This book provides a good case study for considering general issues concerning property rights and liberal democracy.

This book is about far more than Russian land reform in the decade before the 1917 revolution. Judge Williams details that story, to be sure, exquisitely and clearly. But the larger question he examines is whether liberal democracy can be brought about from above, for which the efforts of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin offer unexpectedly useful answers. They do so because throughout his discussion, Williams employs the tools of modern law and economics, especially the work of Douglass C. North in institutional economics. The book is thus a sophisticated yet readable treatment of both its immediate and its larger subject, with wide-ranging applications to modern political transitions, including in Russia today.

This book provides evidence that worker centers are effective in organizing new migrant workers and may provide an alternative to conventional union collective bargaining. They are not a replacement, but the authors argue that they complement the process by providing another mechanism for labor organizing. The editors provide excellent analysis and contributions on worker centers as necessary in defending the most vulnerable workers. I liked the section on ROC-NY and the case studies on a range of worker enters representing people in a range of industries. The editors supplement this work with essays on the benefits new migrants to the U.S. provide through remittances and economic development.

A comprehensive account of NYC labor migration and resistance to employer exploitation.

I've been driven to take action. I will not remain complacent.Wow, what an eye opener.This book and author tell it like it is, no sugarcoating what hell was like, is like, but won't be like much longer for immigrants. Excuse me, not just immigrants, minorities are apart of this struggle.

I have always been a huge fan of labor. I believe in the cause of the average guy. I am a proud pro-labor Democrat and a proud supporter of organized labor. I am a proud believer in the ideals behind the New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society liberalism. I believe that government's job is to protect the weakest among us. Social and moral justice is a must. Thus, when I saw this book, I knew I would love it - and I did! This has labor's pro-worker political, economic and social agenda outlined clearly and concisely. Here you see what the working person in the U.S. needs - decent wages, good health care, education, training, a decent job atmosphere and a society which values families. Here you see the right wing's awful attack on labor through a cut buying power for the Minimum Wage, attacks on Medicare and Social Security and attacks on the right to collective bargaining. The fact is that, despite its often mentioned corruption from the leadership, labor remains one of the most credible sources for average political participation. Nowhere else can one who is honestly concerned about families find an organization or source which allows such participation politically and socially. Other groups - on left and right - do not allow this. The trial lawyers, health insurance groups, doctors associations, business groups and right wing anti-labor groups are all greedy bandits. The religious right manipulates persons and scares them. The civil rights organizations are the closest thing we have to labor groups. Yet, labor wins for labor is a group with an agenda which spans all parts of America. After all, who does not benefit from the right to join and strike with a legal union, universal health care, social investments in day care, education, jobs and training and family leave? Who does not win when the least among us get fed, clothed, housed and get a dignified job? The agenda outlined here is what we need in this right wing era. The U.S. desparately needs a health care system in which all have care. We need a rejuvinated public education system. We need fair labor laws. We need fair civil rights and equal protection laws. We need day care, family leave and a fair Minimum Wage. Full employment is still necessary. This book is great. For anybody who wants to find out where this country should be headed, this one is a true winner!

Jo-Ann Mort's book is a collection of articles about the changes that have been taking place in the new AFL-CIO. Under the leadership of John Sweeny and Linda Chevez-Thompson, the AFL-CIO has been reivigorated and has taken on many new project, such as "America Needs a Raise," a call for all Americans, Union or not to have a living wage and a rising standard of living. In prior years organized labor just tried to hold onto what it had, and saw its influence with the democratic party decline. But today's movement has focused on recruiting new members, and building membership in America's unions to secure a voice for all Americans. Many of the articles, such as "Part-time America Won't Work," which is about the 1997 UPS-Teamster's strike against the transitionto a part-time work force, are important to most people. Prior to 1995, it would have seen likely that organized labor would slip away. But today, with the new AFL-CIO's energy and issues that address the economic plight most American, seem to have momentum. Who would have thought of IBM employees trying to unionize fifteen years ago?