Timothy J. Minchin

From the Reagan years to the present, the labor movement has faced a profoundly hostile climate. As America's largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO was forced to reckon with severe political and economic headwinds. Yet the AFL-CIO survived, consistently fighting for programs that benefited millions of Americans, including social security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care. With a membership of more than 13 million, it was also able to launch the largest labor march in American history--1981's Solidarity Day--and to play an important role in politics. In a history that spans from 1979 to the present, Timothy J. Minchin tells a sweeping, national story of how the AFL-CIO sustained itself and remained a significant voice in spite of its powerful enemies and internal constraints. Full of details, characters, and never-before-told stories drawn from unexamined, restricted, and untapped archives, as well as interviews with crucial figures involved with the organization, this book tells the definitive history of the modern AFL-CIO.

A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979

Labor Under Fire

In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters. Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.

A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States

America’s Other Automakers

"Despite the prominence of the Stevens campaign, this is the first book-length account, and it draws on a rich body of underutilized archival material. Blending these records with oral histories and press accounts, Minchin highlights the important influence that the case had on American labor relations, especially in encouraging other firms to copy the Stevens company's tactics. For the first time, Minchin also explores the role that race played in determining the fate of organizing efforts, showing how difficult it was to build grassroots interracial unions."--BOOK JACKET.

The J.P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South, 1963-80

Don't Sleep with Stevens!

In the 1960s and 1970s, the textile industry's workforce underwent a dramatic transformation, as African Americans entered the South's largest industry in growing numbers. Only 3.3 percent of textile workers were black in 1960; by 1978, this number had risen to 25 percent. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin crafts a compelling account of the integration of the mills. Minchin argues that the role of a labor shortage in spurring black hiring has been overemphasized, pointing instead to the federal government's influence in pressing the textile industry to integrate. He also highlights the critical part played by African American activists. Encouraged by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black workers filed antidiscrimination lawsuits against nearly all of the major textile companies. Still, Minchin notes, even after the integration of the mills, African American workers encountered considerable resistance: black women faced continued hiring discrimination, while black men found themselves shunted into low-paying jobs with little hope of promotion.

The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980

Hiring the Black Worker

John David Smith

"Drawing on a broad knowledge of primary sources and his own extensive archive of more than two hundred interviews with southern workers, Minchin offers an overview of the past seventy years of southern labor history in combination with a lively and intimate sense of the human experience. His oral histories include men and women, both black and white, who offer their insights not just on the workplace but also on their living conditions, political activities, and race relations."--Jacket.

A History of Southern Labor Since World War II

Fighting Against the Odds

With the economy struggling, there has been much discussion about the effects of deindustrialization on American manufacturing. While the steel and auto industries have taken up most of the spotlight, the textile and apparel industries have been profoundly affected. In Empty Mills, Timothy Minchin provides the first book length study of how both industries have suffered since WWII and the unwavering efforts of industry supporters to prevent that decline. In 1985, the textile industry accounted for one in eight manufacturing jobs, and unlike the steel and auto industries, more than fifty percent of the workforce was women or minorities. In the last four decades over two million jobs have been lost in the textile and apparel industries alone as more and more of the manufacturing moves overseas. Impeccably well researched, providing information on both the history and current trends, Empty Mills will be of importance to anyone interested in economics, labor, the social historical, as well as the economic significance of the decline of one of America’s biggest industries.

The Fight Against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry

Empty Mills

The rise in standards of living throughout the U. S. in the wake of World War II brought significant changes to the lives of southern textile workers. Mill workers' wages rose, their purchasing power grew, and their economic expectations increased--with little help from the unions. Timothy Minchin argues that the reasons behind the failure of textile unions in the postwar South lie not in stereotypical assumptions of mill workers' passivity or anti-union hostility but in these large-scale social changes. Minchin addresses the challenges faced by the TWUA--competition from nonunion mills that matched or exceeded union wages, charges of racism and radicalism within the union, and conflict between its northern and southern branches--and focuses especially on the devastating general strike of 1951. Drawing extensively on oral histories and archival records, he presents a close look at southern textile communities within the context of the larger history of southern labor, linking events in the textile industry to the broader social and economic impact of World War II on American society.

The TWUA in the South, 1945-1955

What Do We Need a Union For?

John A. Salmond

Martin Luther King's 1965 address from Montgomery, Alabama, the center of much racial conflict at the time and the location of the well-publicized bus boycott a decade earlier, is often considered by historians to be the culmination of the civil rights era in American history. In his momentous speech, King declared that segregation was "on its deathbed" and that the movement had already achieved significant milestones. Although the civil rights movement had won many battles in the struggle for racial equality by the mid-1960s, including legislation to guarantee black voting rights and to desegregate public accommodations, the fight to implement the new laws was just starting. In reality, King's speech in Montgomery represented a new beginning rather than a conclusion to the movement, a fact that King acknowledged in the address. After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965 begins where many histories of the civil rights movement end, with King's triumphant march from the iconic battleground of Selma to Montgomery. Timothy J. Minchin and John Salmond focus on events in the South following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After the Dream examines the social, economic, and political implications of these laws in the decades following their passage, discussing the empowerment of black southerners, white resistance, accommodation and acceptance, and the nation's political will. The book also provides a fascinating history of the often-overlooked period of race relations during the presidential administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, and both George H. W. and George W. Bush. Ending with the election of President Barack Obama, this study will influence contemporary historiography on the civil rights movement.

Timothy J. Minchin

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