Joseph McCartin

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Joseph A. McCartin (May 12, 1959) is a professor of history at Georgetown University whose research focuses on labor unions in the United States.

Contents

[edit] Early life and education

McCartin was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1959, and is the son of Joseph and Marybeth (Maier) McCartin.

He received his bachelor's degree in history from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1981. Attending the State University of New York at Binghamton, he received a master's degree in 1985 and a doctor of philosophy in 1990.

From 1990 to 1992, he was a lecturer at the University of Rhode Island.

In 1992, he was appointed an associate professor at the State University of New York at Geneseo. In 1996, he married Diane Reis. They have two daughters.

In 1999, McCartin left SUNY-Geneseo and took a position as an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he is now an associate professor.

[edit] Research focus

McCartin's research focuses on the history of labor unions in the United States during the 20th century.

McCartin is a historical institutionalist. As a labor historian, his research shies away from the "new labor history" (which focuses on social and cultural trends and the experiences of workers themselves rather than unions as organizations). Nevertheless, McCartin's work is highly regarded:

Several years ago, labor historians returned to studying institutions. In the process, they began to examine the relationship between labor and the state, specifically the relation of labor, policy, and the law. Important conceptual work by Melvyn Dubofsky, Colin Gordon (scholar), Joseph McCartin and a few others have neatly mapped out the contested relationship between labor and the state on the national level.[1]

However, McCartin's work does not largely ignore the individual contributions and experiences in the way that the work of Philip Taft or Joseph Rayback did. For example, McCartin is a strong advocate of industrial democracy, an economic arrangement in which workers share in the management of the workplace:

Speaking recently at a panel discussion on labor’s future at the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Associate History Prof. Joseph McCartin championed the language of democracy.
"The rise of organized labor in the 20th century accompanied the emergence of industrial democracy as labor’s rallying cry. There was no coincidence in this, for the ideal of industrial democracy worked effectively as a simple, potent, and broadly uniting concept that accomplished things for labor that the present-day workers’ rights formulation does not."[2]

McCartin is also seen as something of an iconoclast. He has challenged many of the labor movement's closely-held beliefs, including the idea that the PATCO air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 began, rather than culminated, an attack on labor rights in the United States.[3] Indeed, McCartin is currently at work on a new book which argues that the decline of organized labor in the U.S. began in the 1960s.

[edit] Awards

McCartin's 1997 book, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21, won the 1999 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award for the best book on labor history.

McCartin's article, " 'Fire the Hell Out of Them': Sanitation Workers' Struggles and the Normalization of the Striker Replacement Strategy in the 1970s", won the Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas prize as the best article on labor history published in 2005.

McCartin was named a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993 and again in 2002. In 2003, he was named a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University.

[edit] Published works

[edit] Solely authored books

  • Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8078-4679-1

[edit] Co-authored books

  • McCartin, Joseph A. and Dubofsky, Melvyn. American Labor: A Documentary Collection. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 0-3122-9564-2

[edit] =Co-edited books

  • Kazin, Michael and McCartin, Joseph A, eds. Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8078-3010-0
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Abridged edition. Joseph A. McCartin, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ISBN 0-2520-6905-6

[edit] Solely authored articles

  • "Re-Framing the Crisis of U.S. Labor: Rights, Democracy, and Political Economy." Labour/Le Travail. 2007.
  • "Bringing the State’s Workers In: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced U.S. Labor Historiography." Labor History. 47:1 (2006).
  • " 'Fire the Hell Out of Them': Sanitation Workers’ Struggles and the Normalization of the Striker Replacement Strategy in the 1970s." Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas. 2:3 (2005).
  • "Democratizing the Demand for Workers’ Rights: Toward a Reframing of Labor's Argument." Dissent. 2005.

[edit] Solely authored book chapters

  • "Utraque Unum: Finding My Way as a Catholic and a Historian." In Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives. Nick Salvatore, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ISBN 0-2520-3143-1
  • "Managing Discontent: The Life and Career of Leamon Hood, Black Public Employee Union Activist." In The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation. Eric Arnesen, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ISBN 0-2520-7380-0

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Richard A. Greenwald, "Review of Thomas Ralph Clark's Defending Rights: Law, Labor Politics, and the State in California, 1890-1925," Journal of Policy History, 16:2 (2004), pp. 188-190.
  2. ^ Tula Connell, "Whose America?", AFL-CIO Blog, July 4, 2006. http://blog.aflcio.org/?tag=Joseph%20McCartin, accessed December 6, 2006.
  3. ^ Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21, 1997.

[edit] References

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