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| Format | Book Chapter |
|---|---|
| Author, Analytic | Beckert, Sven |
| Title, Analytic | Migration, Ethnicity, and Working-Class Formation: Passaic, New Jersey, 1889-1926 |
| Author, Monographic | Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler, eds. |
| Title, Monographic | People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820-1930 |
| Place of Publication | Cambridge |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press/German Historical Institute |
| Date of Publication | 1995 |
| Location in Work | 347-378 |
| View Online | |
| Abstract | In the spring of 1919 thousands of textile workers in a small New Jersey town went on strike, demanding the eight-hour day. It was not their first walkout. What was unprecedented, however, was the participation of skilled workers. During the previous thirty years, these workers had sided with the millowners during industrial conflicts and had refused to join the action of their less skilled colleagues. In a radical shift in policy, the employers had now laid them off, leaving them with few alternatives but to join the struggle. Divisions between skilled and less skilled workers are not uncommon, but in Passaic, New Jersey, they acquired a particular twist. The worsted mills were owned by German entrepreneurs who had hired most of their skilled work force directly from Germany, while staffing the unskilled positions largely with eastern and southern European immigrants. This essay demonstrates how an alliance between German immigrant capital and German immigrant workers was successfully fostered through the preferential treatment of skilled workers and through the support of the German employees' religious, educational, and cultural institutions by the millowners. It analyzes the relationship between the social organization of migration, the making of ethnicity, and working-class formation and also attempts to understand the German immigrants' experience in relation to other migrant groups as well as the internal structure of the immigrant community itself. |
| Call Number | Digital file (PDF) |
| MKI Terms | German Americans/ Social conditions/ Economic aspects/ Working class -- United States -- History/ Labor and laboring classes/ Labor movement/ Labor unions |