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Union Renegades

Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

ISBN-13: 9780252085406
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Dana M. Caldemeyer
Price: AUD $64.99
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 11/01/2021
Format: Paperback 256 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Cultural studies [JFC]

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In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age.

Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Deceived: Producers in a Dishonest World
2 Undermined: Winter Diggers, Union Strikebreakers
3 Judasesa: Union Betrayala and the Aborted 1891 Strike
4 Outsiders: Race and the Exclusive Politics of an Inclusive Union, 1892-1894
5 Unsettled: Non-Union Mobilization and the 1894 Strike
6 Wolves: Fractured Unions in the Gilded Age, 1894-1896
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

"For anyone who assumes that joining a union in the late-nineteenth-century coalfields reflected a simple choice, Union Renegades is a stunning catalog of the various factors that shaped the complex calculation that workers had to make. Caldemeyer’s deeply researched study joins a growing list of scholarship exploring attitudes about unions, capitalism, and power in the rural-industrial heartland. Its lessons are important for our time."--Kenneth Fones-Wolf, coauthor of Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

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Union Renegades

Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age