History From the Shop Floor

...Trade unions and other institutions studied by traditional labor historians are subordinated to accounts of working people in their communities, and of the cultural and social expressions that provide the bedrock for political and economic activity...

...The school's magnum opus is E.P...

...Nonetheless, what makes Like a Family so special is the dense, three-dimensional picture that emerges of the workers' daily existence...

...The description of child labor is an example of the way our simple black-and-white expectations can be confounded by reality's gray-on-gray...

...The owners did not call all the shots, certainly not in communities where the supervisors were the relatives and neighbors of the people they were expected to supervise...

...Perhaps this is as it should be, and y et a reader can't help feeling that something else is at play here besides increased historical accuracy...

...Compromise was necessary on all sides if the work was to be done, and should everything else fail, a worker who could not get along with his boss was able simply to move to another town a few miles away and find a job in a different mill...

...Gaps appear...

...At the outset, workers, especially artisans and craftsmen, had considerable say over how and how much work got done...

...Once giant industries were constructed under the guidance of the Carnegies and Rockefellers, and millions of new immigrants arrived to swell the labor pool, the grip of the old craft unions was weakened...

...Consequently, their educational level was lower even than that of farm children...

...Gradually, inevitably, the workers shed their rural ways...

...and children made choices, however hedged about by their parents' authority and their bosses' power...

...Still, it is as much a compliment as a criticism to say that the final pages of this compelling book leave a reader wanting more...

...they accepted the only world they knew and made the best of it...

...Some were as young as seven...

...By contrast, it is an article of faith with the new writers that economic determinism-of the Marxist or the liberal variety-is to be avoided, that workers are to be perceived as active agents helping to shape their own destinies in a universe that is anything but preordained...

...For many children the excitement and relative freedom of the mills were far preferable to the forced tedium of the classroom, and they escaped the admonitions of the schoolmarm as soon as they were able...

...Here were households that didn't mention Santa Claus because parents couldn't afford decent Christmas presents for their children, that depended on gardens in the backyard to have enough to eat...

...By the 1920s, however, millhands had become full-fledged wage earners, locked into both the tempos of the industrial system and the values of the consumer society...

...Like a Family exemplifies a current trend in labor history that emphasizes a perspective "from the bottom up...

...Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of the "scientific management" campaign, recalled that when he was a young supervisor at Midvale Steel, "as was usual then, the shop was really run by the workmen, not by the bosses...

...Workers just off the farm and clustered in ramshackle towns had their own rhythms and expectations...

...Behind the new history, in other words, is a political agenda...

...Given the tensions within mill village life," the authors report, "we were struck by how fondly most workers recalled their communities...

...The process of industrialization in the Piedmont was a long series of pushes and pulls, of multiple interactions rather than unrelenting class warfare...

...Broadly outlined in this way, the book sounds like an alltoo-familiar narrative of economic injustice and brutal exploitation, and indeed there is enough about inadequate, pellagra-producing diets of beans, potatoes and cornbread, hazardous working conditions where a moment's inattention could mean the loss of an arm, and unrelieved grinding poverty to prod the conscience of anyone to the left of Jesse Helms...

...Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina, 468 pp., $34.95) lists as its authors Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly...

...Not for the first time are scholars interpreting the world in order to change it...

...Yet a committee from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina has managed to pull off a small miracle...

...The volume follows step by step the debtridden, unlettered farmers who in the last half of the 19th century gave up their independence to enter the primitive mill villages owned and controlled by their employers...

...Hall et al., writing about the Piedmont, say that during the strikes of the '20s " the issue in almost every case was rationalization and technological change...

...Now that unions are in a period of decline, labor historians are looking elsewhere, and asking the kinds of questions that they believe could revitalize the labor movement...

...Among its leading representatives is David Montgomery, Farnum Professor of History at Yale...

...Although their treatments are quite different-Montgomery's is drier, less accessible to the nonscholar- The Fall of the House of Labor and Like a Family deal with the same subject within the same time frame...

...It was estimated that in 1907 doffers, the boys who changed the bobbins, had about half of each day to themselves...

...It climaxes with the disastrous 1934 general strike of 400,000 textile operatives, "the largest single labor conflict in American history" and a turning point in the evolution of Southern labor relations...

...Repeatedly, Like a Family points up such human texture and complexity behind the historical abstractions...

...Disappointingly, Like a Family is weakest here...

...Radio and the automobile reduced their isolation and brought them closer to the American mainstream...

...New technology eliminated jobs...

...When the factories were busy, pupils were called out of the schools to tend the machines...

...They had their sorrows and their joys, and the joys may have outweighed the sorrows...

...Montgomery's latest book, The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge, 494 pp., $27.95), examines the years from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s...

...Night work was instituted...

...Other changes were no less important...

...Because the six authors had to depend on indirect sources for their information, these concluding chapters lack the depth, the camera's-eye realism, of the earlier sections...

...Outsiders, trained in the latest managerial techniques, were hired to supervise...

...The history of the Piedmont factories at this point is one of adjustment and accommodation, not tyranny and surrender...

...Between 1880 and 1910, approximately one out of four workers was under 16...

...In the new history, wages and hours, once considered the "bread-and-butter" items for American labor, are relegated to second place, after matters of control...

...Higher pay actually meant lower production...

...It has written a study of Southern textile workers around the turn of the century that is a delight to read and a revelation throughout...

...Mill work was a source of pride as well as pain, of fun as much as suffering...

...This was one of the bloodiest, most critical eras in labor history, punctuated by such mythic events as the Homestead and Pullman strikes and the Haymarket Riot...

...Depression hit the mills after World War I, and the owners introduced cost-saving measures that disrupted the tight-knit communities...

...When organized labor was strong and growing, historians reasonably viewed trade unions as the focus of their researches...

...By the mid-1920s," Montgomery concludes, "the designs of corporate management had clearly prevailed over those of its rivals...

...Work was irregular, not steady as in a modern plant, allowing youngsters to go swimming or squeeze in a game of baseball...

...The authors themselves observe that additional research will have to be done before the complete story can be told...

...Questions are unanswered...

...As control of the work processes passed into the hands of ever more distant bosses there were protests and strikes, culminating in the dramatic 1934 walkout...

...they were not about to abandon habits built up over generations...

...But Montgomery scants these abundantly covered moments to deal with a topic that has received far less attention-the long-term, often subtle battle waged on the shop floor to control the process of production...

...Early on, during good times when labor was scarce the employers had raised wages to attract workers and increase output, only to learn that this orthodox strategy was counterproductive with former farmers: Once they had earned as much as they felt they needed, they merely took off...

...Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, and its doyen is the late Herbert G. Gutman (a recent collection of whose essays, Power and Culture, contains an informative and fair-minded introduction to the new history by Ira Berlin...

...The general strike, lost after three weeks, was a traumatic event for everyone involved and few of the participants wished to discuss it...

...But the mills hardly demanded endless hours of Dickensian toil...

...Taylor devoted a lifetime to changing that, and he was aided by the broad currents then shaping the nation...

...Women began paying attention to fashion, while local musicians cut records and gained reputations across the South...

...Deprivation, though harsh, did not gnaw at them from sunup to sundown...

...Together, they have combined over 200 personal interviews and more standard source materials into a memorable account of the Piedmont (the region extending from southern Virginia through the heart of the Carolinas to northern Georgia and Alabama) during the 50 crucial years it grew from a backwater of marginal farms into the world's greatest textile producer...

...Childhood," said one interviewee, "I didn't have much...