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The earliest efforts by janitors to employ the militant tactics that came to be known as the Justice for Janitors campaign occurred in Denver, Colorado, in 1986. SEIU president John Sweeney spent three days at the beginning of the campaign talking with Denver janitors and observing the action, and …

In this atmosphere, a number of building service companies rethought past practices. Some offered lower prices to the building owners for their services, thanks to wage and benefit reductions with nonunion labor. Other, unionized contractors pursued an increasingly common practice invented in the c…

The disappearance of auto manufacturing jobs from California in the late twentieth century was a story that could be told of many other industries that experienced similar catastrophic shrinkage.

Steel production facilities in Vernon, Fontana, and San Francisco downsized dramatically or closed t…

The future of automation had clearly arrived twenty years after the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement. Continuous technological change seemed a given, outside the reach of a labor movement playing defense. Like the ILWU, the UAW boasted militant origins; but the Autoworkers union hadn’t sus…

Bridges articulated the members’ fear of automation: “Machines when they came appeared as merciless monsters, more deadly by far than slack times, because jobs swallowed never came back, as one could hope would happen when slack times eased.” The machines in this case were container cranes, already…