Essay About Labor Studies Journal And Floridas Working-Class Past

Casino Management Case Study
Essay Preview: Casino Management Case Study
Report this essay
318 Labor Studies Journal 36(2)
owned by Steven Wynn, casino management became more professional and more
skilled in resisting labor claims. Nevertheless, labor was still able to secure victories
in this era, as their skillful negotiations with Hilton show.
As the lines between labor and management grew starker, Krafts story reaches its
climax in the 1984-1985 strike. To some extent, this was the last gasp of the old labor
power, now weakened by stronger management and by internal conflicts within labor.
Kraft correctly points out that the old system of working to find a solution at one facility
and then using it to leverage contracts at other facilities, such as the UAW did, was
less successful in the face of unified management. The threat of permanent replacements,
now approved by state and federal authorities, also eroded support for the strike. In the
end, while all–operators and workers alike–lost ground in this battle, the strike was
“the most important setback for organized labor in the history of Las Vegas” (p. 198).
As the United States continues to move from an industrial economy to a service
economy, the importance of the labor movement in nontraditional venues continues to
grow. Vegas at Odds presents some lessons that should be heeded by labor leaders not
only in hotel and restaurant unions, but also throughout the movement.
Cassanello, Robert, and Melanie Shell-Weiss, eds. Floridas Working-Class Past: Current Perspectives
on Labor, Race, and Gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2009. 304 pp. $29.95 (paper).
Reviewed by: Marcos Feldman, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0160449X11406405
The essays that make up Floridas Working-Class Past, edited by Robert Cassanello
and Melanie Shell-Weiss, deftly analyze the interaction of race, ethnicity, gender, and
migration in Floridas labor histories and shed light on the challenges to and possibilities
for worker empowerment and justice in the twenty-first century.
The volumes editors contextualize the essays with a review of how Floridas labor
history was written in the past, highlighting the ever-present force of mobility affecting
community and labor relations. “Neither typically southern nor northern” (p. 2),
Floridas position makes its labor history ideal for examining patterns that increasingly
affect urban and rural workers elsewhere. The essays span four centuries and deal with
working conditions from slavery and the earliest manipulations of “free labor” in
Floridas early agricultural industries to contemporary urban and rural wage earners.
The first four chapters cover pre- and post-Civil War labor histories and emphasize
the social and ecological damage caused by newcomers seeking to control and develop
land, and the emerging role of race and mobility as forces with oppressive and libratory
potential. Tamara Spikes analysis of the tribute system that supported Spanish
Book Reviews 319
colonies “hunger” for Apalachee Indian corn and Edward Baptists depiction of slave
labor as the foundation for mid-Floridas cotton and sugar industries contribute to our
understanding of race and labor management as “methods for making the bodies of
enslaved people into factors of production” (p. 32).
Contrary to the notion that migration and mobility undermine worker justice, Brent
Weismans chapter highlights how Black Seminoles mobility was crucial to their semiautonomous
existence between the worlds of white men and Seminoles. Conversely,
Mark Long describes how, in the post-Civil War period, mobility emerged as a way
for early agro-industrialists like Henry Sanford to circumvent black and white workers
“resistance to proletarianization” (p. 93) by importing Swedish workers, who themselves
eventually developed a “decidedly mutinous spirit” (p. 101).
Cassanello turns our attention to Floridas emerging labor movement in the years
surrounding World War I, focusing on how race and gender were used as tools to divide
workers and insulate white male privilege among telephone operators, streetcar drivers,
and cigar makers, although later becoming the impetus for early and promising attempts
at interracial unionism. Thomas Castillos essay on Miamis burgeoning chauffeur business
demonstrates how in the racial compromise that protected blacks right to drive,
“the ideas of black servility and racial uplift merged neatly as Miamis white business
elite sought to protect the viability of the citys tourist economy” (p. 143).
Alex Lichtensteins analysis of Communist Party labor organizing among cigar,
citrus, and shipyard workers in the 1930s