"While so much of Montgomery's writings were focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the worlds of work he described have ended up having far more in common with the way we work today than even he might have anticipated. Many of the service-sector workers who have started to organize in recent years—healthcare workers, teachers, screenwriters, actors, and, yes, academics—are people who have strong professional and ethical codes for their work and have become accustomed to some measure of workplace autonomy. They see their freedom at work and their sense of power to do it well threatened by the arbitrary power of their bosses and the sometimes faceless forces of capital. The American workers of today come from many backgrounds and many parts of the world, their politics shaped in part by their experiences in their countries of origin, as was the case for the immigrant workers of the late 19th century whose stories Montgomery told. They are people spurred to action by a rebellion against the imperatives of a new age of scientific management and drawn together by their common plight. They are artists whose day jobs in game stores and coffee shops foster just enough passion and solidarity to try to organize a union. All of this might have been familiar to the iron molders, glass blowers, coopers, and others of the early years of the 20th century."
Kim Phillips-Fein at The Nation reviews A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance.
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