Abstract In the early 1980s, amid a collapse in manufacturing employment and the worst economic crisis in half a century, a number of US manufacturers founded retraining programs for their laid-off employees. Two of the highest-profile programs were the Ford-UAW National Development and Training Center (NDTC) and the GM-UAW Joint Skill Development and Training Committee (JSDTC), both established in 1982. This article examines the institutional and ideological relationship between such programs and the so-called new industrial relations. In the context of rapid deindustrialization, the NDTC and the JSDTC would struggle to deliver the kinds of occupational and social mobility that their architects promised. They were more successful, however, in keeping the spirit of “jointness” alive through an era that would be characterized by shuttered factories, mass layoff notices, and double-digit unemployment. Retraining programs have not typically been the purview of labor historians, but bringing them into view can enrich our understanding of the precipitous decline in labor militancy after 1979.
Abstract This article uses inquiry into the medical subfield of industrial medicine in the early twentieth-century United States to build on recent work in the history of occupational safety and health and the broader history of injury and harm in working-class people’s lives. It focuses especially on Lori Flores’s concept of “amnesic landscapes,” arguing that the concept can do much to advance the integration of the history of occupational hazards into labor history and enrich our understanding of class per se. It attempts to make this case by examining how medical forms helped organize the labor of specialists in industrial medicine. Those forms made it so that industrial physicians’ medical practice became interwoven with what the article calls the work of forgetting, meaning that industrial physicians helped normalize harms to workers specifically by making them relatively palatable to company management. It further suggests that industrial physicians are representatives of more general social patterns: Wherever we find class, we tend to find violence, and wherever we find the violence of class, we also tend to find work that normalizes and depoliticizes that violence. Flores’s concept helps show how that work can be made the object of historical inquiry.
Abstract This article looks at the career of City Councilman Peter V. Cacchione, a Communist Party member. The article argues that Cacchione’s political success was possible because of the unusual dynamics of New York City in the late 1930s and 1940s: in particular, the reform coalition that made proportional representation possible. It was also driven by the unusual strategies of the Communist Party during the Popular Front period and the wartime years, when the party was able to present itself as closely aligned with the national interest. This conjuncture produced a new vision of municipal politics and a left-wing vision of the city, which lasted into the postwar years, even as Cold War currents doomed proportional representation, Communist council members, and Cacchione himself.
