Labor's War at Home: The CIO In World War II (Labor In Crisis)

By: Nelson Lichtenstein

Narrated by: Greg Littlefield

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement - especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations - and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration. He argues that tensions within the labor movement and within the ranks of American business profoundly affected government policy during the war and the nature of organized labor's political relations with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. Moreover, the political arrangements worked out during the war established the foundations of social stability and labor politics that came to characterize the postwar world.

The book is published by Temple University Press.

©2003 Temple University (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"An impressive work which offers a useful perspective on the origins of the crisis the labor movement faces." (The Nation)

"Lichtenstein has compiled a splendid, well-researched book, written in an engaging and confident style." (The Economic History Review)

"This book is essential reading for students of American labor." (Contemporary Sociology)

Learned a lot I had never heard about before

Quite interesting tale about labor history during WWII and how it led to the prosperous period America faced after the war. Many people look the 1950s as a time of prosperity, but few realize it's because of the right's that workers won in the 1940s.