Singlejack Solidarity Stan Weir Edited and with an afterword by George Lipsitz Foreword by Norm Diamond Excerpt Table of Contents		$19.95 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4294-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4294-6 $60.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4293-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4293-9
The writings of the lifelong activist and worker’s advocate collected here for the first time. Blue-collar intellectual and activist publisher, Stan Weir devoted his life to the advocacy of his fellow workers. Weir was both a thoughtful observer and an active participant in many of the key struggles that shaped the labor movement and the political left in postwar America. He reported firsthand from the front lines of decisive fights over the nature of unions in the auto industry, the resistance to automation on the waterfront, and battles over racial integration in the workplace and within unions themselves. Written throughout Weir’s decades as a blue-collar worker and labor educator, Singlejack Solidarity offers a rare look at modern life and social relations as seen from the factory, dockside, and the shop floor. This volume analyzes issues central to working-class life today, such as the human costs of automation, union policies, mass media images of work, and intergenerational relations in working-class families. It also provides humorous commentaries, historical vignettes, and moving portraits of people Weir encountered, including James Baldwin, C. L. R. James, and Eric Hoffer. Gathered here for the first time, Weir’s writings are equal parts memoir, labor history, and polemic; taken together, they document a crucial chapter in the life story of working-class America. Stan Weir (1921–2001) was a rank-and-file labor activist for more than fifty years as a seaman, autoworker, teamster, housepainter, and longshoreman. He earned a doctorate from the Union Institute in Cincinnati and was professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois. Weir founded Singlejack Press to publish writing by workers. George Lipsitz is professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger, Time Passages, and Footsteps in the Dark. 384 pages | 17 halftones | 5 7/8 x 9 | 2004 Critical American Studies Series TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword by Norm Diamond I. Working-Class Cultures Meetings with James Baldwin What Ever Happened to Frisco Jeans? C. L. R. James: Revolutionary Artist The Role of the Individual and the Group in the Creation of Work Cultures Work Force Writers on the Rise I Am Lonely II. The Human Costs of Automation New Technology: A Catalyst for Crises in Collective Bargaining, Industrial Discipline, and Labor Law The Human Cost of Automation Containerization Makes for a Lonely Waterfront Luddism Today Effects of Automation in the Lives of Longshoremen III. Solidarity Networks Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job The Need for Labor Networking Rank and File Networks: A Way to Fight Concessions Introduction to Coordinadora Strike in Spain Reveals Sickness and Cure Longshoremen and Marine Clerks of Spain Building New Kind of Union IV. Workers, Politics, and Social Change Eric Hoffer: Far-Right True Believer The Artificial Isolation between Radicals and Workers Workers: Second-Class Citizens Bill Akagi and the Union The First Recorded Strike in History: 1170 BC Early U.S. Labor Policy Revealed by Archives Find V. The Vanguard Party and Worker Self-Activity A Leninist Vanguard Party Dying in a Foreign Land Life in a Vanguard Party After the War The Vanguard Party: An Institution Whose Time Has Expired Contribution to a Discussion on Bert Cochran's Labor and Communism The Vanguard Party: An Obstruction to Worker-Intellectual Alliances VI. Primary Work Groups The Informal Work Group Just a Matter of Gloves West Coast Longshoremen and Informal Workers' Control Review of Punishment and Redress in a Modern Factory by Carl Gersuny VII. The Failure of Business Unionism, the Rank and File Alternative American Labor on the Defensive: A 1940s Odyssey USA: The Labor Revolt Doug Fraser's Middle-Class Coalition The Failure of Business Unionism The Australian Dock Strike Stan Weir and George Lipsitz Stan Weir: Working-Class Visionary George Lipsitz Notes Publication History Index