Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day

by Philip S. Foner, David R. Roediger

Overview

Our Own Time retells the story of American labor by focusing on the politics of time and the movements for a shorter working day. It argues that the length of the working day has been the central issue for the American labor movement during its most vigorous periods of activity, uniting workers along lines of craft, gender and ethnicity. The authors hold that the workweek is likely again to take on increased significance as workers face the choice between a society based on free time and one based on alienated work and unemployment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780860919636
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	11/17/1989
Series:	Haymarket Series
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Philip S. Foner (1910–1994) was Professor Emeritus of History at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. He was the author of more than 110 published works, including History of the Labor Movement, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Women in the American Labor Movement and American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century.

David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.

Table of Contents

Preface
Time, Republicanism, and Merchant Capitalism: The Consciousness of Hours before 1830
Shorter Hours and the Transformation of American Labor, 1830-1842
Mill Women and the Working Day, 1842-1850
Hours, Labor Protest, and Party Politics in the 1850s
The Civil War and the Birth of the Eight-Hour Movement
Victory, Defeat, and New Alliances, 1867-1879
Haymarket and Its Context
The Rightward Drift of the AFL and the Temporary Decline of the Hours Issue, 1887-1908
Class, Reform, and War: The Working Day from 1907 to 1918
Trade Unionism, Hours, and Workers' Control in the Postwar United States
The Great Depression, the New Deal, and Shorter Hours
The Hours Statement since 1939
Bibliographic Essay
Index

Editorial Reviews

This definitive study of the working day shows how workers defined the reality of their lives and reshaped our concept of time.”—George P. Rawick

“This groundbreaking book ... is crucial reading not only for labor historians but for all those who have ever punched a clock.”—Elizabeth McKillen, International Labor and Working Class History

“Roediger and Foner show us once again that people want to work to live, not live to work.”—James Green

“Shows that shorter hours captured the imagination and aspirations of the worker not only in his or her role as worker but also as citizen, consumer, leisure-seeker and family member.”—Rose Feurer, Labor Studies Journal

From the Publisher