Overview

On the Ground charts labor relations in the airline industry, unraveling the story of how baggage handlers--classified as unskilled workers--built tense but mutually useful alliances with their skilled coworkers such as aircraft mechanics and made tremendous gains in wages and working conditions, even in the era of supposedly ""complacent"" labor in the 1950s and 1960s. Liesl Miller Orenic explains how airline jobs on the ground were constructed, how workers chose among unions, and how federal labor policies as well as industry regulation both increased and hindered airline workers' bargaining power.

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9780252034336

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Reviews

""Mixing union and company archives, industry and labor newspapers, government documents, valuable oral history interviews, and a wealth of secondary readings, Orenic provides the definitive narrative of the rise of the airline fleet service clerks into a powerful wing of organized labor."" Leon Fink, editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

This wonderful treatment of an underexamined area of labor history is able to cut through mounds of tangled and confusing material to reveal a clear picture of how workers coped with an ever-changing industry... An important book. --Labor Studies Journal With sympathy and careful detail, Orenic offers a well-documented counterpoint to the story of post-World War II labor complacency by showing how airline ground crews used militant tactics to build their unions in the 1950s and 1960s. --Business History Review An important study ... which should interest union activities and academics. --Enterprise & Society

Mixing union and company archives, industry and labor newspapers, government documents, valuable oral history interviews, and a wealth of secondary readings, Orenic provides the definitive narrative of the rise of the airline fleet service clerks into a powerful wing of organized labor. Leon Fink, editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

Author Information

Liesl Miller Orenic is an associate professor of history and the director of American studies at Dominican University.

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