If you consider yourself a woman and want equal pay, it is better to be a pharmacist than a lawyer. To make partner, the private law firm rewards on-call availability for clients who demand specific attorneys; billing structures up the per-hour rate when an associate clocks more hours, while penalizing part-time and interrupted employment. A decade from their degree, women lawyers earn only seventy-eight cents to the dollar received by their male counterparts, and more of them migrate to jobs in the public or nonprofit sectors. By contrast, the rise of the corporate drugstore, standard medicines, and digital record keeping has made pharmacists interchangeable with each other. Though feminization had nothing to do with these changes, according to economic historian Claudia Goldin, women pharmacists have benefited from standardization: their incomes are generally greater than other women professionals and nearly the same as men, especially when measuring hourly wages. For Goldin, the culprit is not discrimination, especially since the demise of nepotism and other legal restrictions on women's work. It isn't corporate capitalism—after all, women pharmacists improved their standing laboring for branches of national companies. Rather, it is “greedy work,” a time bind that Arlie Hochschild highlighted nearly a quarter century ago, that Goldin finds upending the progressive story she charts on “women's century-long journey toward equity” (9). This subtitle expands the subject of the dismal science's economic man but falls short as an intersectional tale by focusing on college-educated, mostly white women's quest to combine “career and family.”This book is about choice—and overcoming most barriers to women's march through the professions, from feminized and lower-paid ones, like teaching and nursing, to male-dominated ones, like STEM, health, and finance. Goldin adheres to the Gary Becker school, which views households as rational actors that opt for specialization when it comes to caring for children and the elderly. “Greedy work,” she argues, “means that couple equity has been and will continue to be jettisoned for increased family income” because norms and socialization lead women in heterosexual households to take on more flexible and shortened schedules to be available for care (10). Those in professions like accounting and academia face the prospect of ending up with less prestigious or worse jobs if they fail to make partner or gain tenure within the specified time. Goldin assumes that the structure of work, which she rightly identifies as a problem, hasn't already evolved when in fact it has. All workers, including the creative classes, face less stability. Employees experience reclassification as managers, intensified contracting out, and contingent positions that push them outside labor standards and establish barriers to unionization and collective action. As any recent PhD in history knows, the academic workplace is no exception to these trends.Goldin depends on data sets sampled to catch the college educated, some generated from surveys of Harvard graduates. Occasionally she conflates the growing percentage of college-educated women with other women, but she rarely addresses the broader problem of juggling employment with family labor faced by those with even fewer resources or prospects. She defines family “as having a child—including by adoption—but not necessarily a spouse” and a career “as a long-lasting, sought-after employment for which the type of work . . . often shapes one's identity” (21). But hers is no dry economic treatise. She enlivens graphs and charts with engaging vignettes of high-achieving women as well as hypothetical case studies, some with characters drawn from popular culture—projecting the career trajectories of Perry Mason and Della Street, for example, from the 1950s into the 2000s, when Della “could become a Perry Mason herself—she just wouldn't be paid like him, yet. (And she likely wouldn't have a secretary as smart and savvy as Perry was privileged to have as his sidekick)” (177). She introduces her own experience becoming one of the few women in the 1970s tenured in economics, with a husband and dog but no children, having a career but not a family.Dividing the century into five demographic cohorts, Goldin offers a structural analysis grounded in the opportunities and legal and social constraints college-educated women faced in having children and pursuing a profession. Group 1, graduating college from 1900 to 1920, had a family or a career. Group 2, with degrees from 1920 to 1945, took jobs but later left them to have children—with careers disrupted by the Great Depression. In college from 1946 to 1965, Group 3—the subjects of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique—had families, then jobs, but often not careers; they benefited from legal changes but experienced soaring rates of divorce and found years out of the labor force hampered earnings. Goldin convincingly critiques Friedan by offering a longer time frame to suggest that the past was not better and even Friedan's generation was in the middle of a journey to greater equality when captured by The Feminine Mystique. Those in group 4, the women's liberation cohort in college from 1965 to 1975, postponed children for career, with some waiting too long. Group 5, college starters in the 1980s, took advantage of new reproductive technologies to delay childbearing as they aspired to have it all. Throughout the century, Black women maintained their labor force participation even after children.Goldin crafts a progress narrative in which each cohort sought to overcome earlier constraints. Technological determinism pervades her analysis, with opportunities expanded from changes in household appliances, commodification of housework, and enhanced reproductive technologies. Finishing this study during the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldin asks that we “make certain that they [women] do not sacrifice their jobs because of care issues and that they do not sacrifice their caregiving for their jobs” (222). She passes “the baton” to men: “to lean out at work, support their male colleagues who are on parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways” (18, 235). Such reforms may increase equity for the better-off, but are unlikely to upend larger inequalities.

Abstract Richard Gosser was a national leader in the United Auto Workers (UAW) union and a contemporary of James R. Hoffa. Both men had similar backgrounds, had similar ties to organized crime, and faced similar allegations of corruption, but the results of those allegations differed dramatically. Hoffa was singled out by a congressional investigative committee, and his name became a byword for the menace of labor racketeering. After an initial period of controversy, Gosser enjoyed a reputation as a labor statesman. A comparison of their careers highlights the political nature of union corruption probes. Gosser's career also provides a historical perspective on the sources of the recent corruption scandals that have shaken the UAW.

Abstract In 1949 the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) successfully bargained for a pension and social insurance system, opening the door for social insurance and pension bargaining across organized labor throughout the post–World War II era. Indeed, the explosion of security bargaining after World War II facilitated the growth of America's unique but flawed public-private welfare system. Many historians have viewed labor's postwar turn to collective bargaining in a negative light and have argued that due to the weakening of labor's political power in the immediate postwar era, labor abandoned its progressive postwar vision and instead opted for a more insular, less socially oriented agenda achieved at the bargaining table. This argument still holds true, but a close inspection of the USWA's postwar work highlights a more nuanced picture. The USWA was one of the few labor unions to challenge the constitutionality of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act (1947). The union's fight against Taft-Hartley came into conflict with the union's dire need to bring long-term security to its members, especially after many steel corporations began arbitrarily terminating steelworkers at age sixty-five in 1946. Ultimately, the issue of delivering long-term security to USWA members overshadowed the union's effort to defeat Taft-Hartley. This article focuses on the USWA's effort to bring long-term security to its members from 1946 to 1949 and looks at the postwar retiree crises in steel, the weakness of the public and private welfare systems in that era, the Inland Steel decision, the USWA's challenge to Taft-Hartley, and 1949 bargaining.

Perhaps the tremors began with the criminal charges filed against Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 and Bill Cosby in 2015, or the lawsuit of Gretchen Carlson against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in 2016. The real earthquake, though, was the election of President Donald Trump just weeks after footage leaked of him boasting that he liked to "grab 'em by the pussy." Global women's protests on the day after his inauguration in January 2017 featured a pink sea of clever hand-knitted "pussyhats." That set the context when, eight months later in October 2017, New York Times and New Yorker reporters broke allegations of sexual assault by the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Actress Alyssa Milano used a #MeToo hashtag on Twitter, echoing the "Me Too" phrase introduced eleven years before by Tarana Burke. The tremendous consequent outpouring exposed numerous men as alleged serial sexual harassers, dethroning them from positions of power. The very long list would include, among others, NBC Today host Matt Lauer, CBS

Abstract The Black soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of the Native Guard (also known as the Corps d'Afrique) stationed at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, and the laundresses who served them and their white officers were formerly enslaved people who had seized their freedom by joining and aiding the Union cause. Over the course of six weeks, in December 1863 and January 1864, they engaged in open munity to protest racial and sexual violence inflicted by white Union officers. In so doing they made visible the violent terms of interracial interaction that informed the meaning of wartime freedom and Black labor (terms that were still very much rooted in the prisms and discourses of enslavement). More importantly, as free labor Black women began to negotiate a deeply abusive racial and sexual terrain.

Everybody knows that service jobs have replaced industrial jobs and that a huge part of those service jobs, about 20 million, are in health care—in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and home care. But the interrelated process through which that happened and the consequences for labor markets are rarely as palpable as they are in Gabriel Winant's new book on Pittsburgh, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Epic in scope, Winant explores the inner and outer workings of two iconic industries across the entire period from World War II to today, showing how union-won health insurance birthed and shaped the US health care system. By focusing on one city, or metropolitan area, Winant is able to combine the complicated economics of steel and health care with sensitive, often intimate, observations of working-class life in workplaces, families, and neighborhoods based on interviews, diaries, and memoirs. Also distinctive is the consistent attention the book pays to the racial and gender relations in a predominantly white male steel industry, its families and neighborhoods, and in health care workplaces that are overwhelmingly female and African American, especially at the lower-wage end. Jack Metzgar, whose part-memoir Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered was one of Winant's wide variety of sources, challenges several of Winant's big-picture claims.