Bellush Prize Winners

In 2012, the New York Labor History Association established the Bernard Bellush Prize for the best graduate research paper written during a given academic year.  With permission, an abstract of the winning paper is posted on the NYLHA website.  Please encourage your best graduate students to submit their work!

Papers on any aspect of labor or work history will be considered. Entries will be evaluated on the basis of scholarship and literary merit.

Most Recent Winner

2023: Salem Elzway, “Robots on the Line: The Technopolitics of Autowork at Lordstown”

ABSTRACT: The chapter provides a case study of the world’s first “mass” robotized factory—the General Motors Lordstown assembly facility in northeast Ohio—and the role of the industrial robot in the UAW’s infamous strike of the plant in 1972. First, it briefly traces the almost decade long process of GM’s planning and work towards building a new, highly-automated factory in Lordstown, OH where ground was broken on the plant in 1964. Second, it details GM’s history with industrial robots generally and with their first applications at Lordstown in the late 1960s specifically. Third, it historicizes GM’s selection of Lordstown as the home of the Chevrolet Vega in 1970 and the management takeover of the plant by the infamous General Motors Assembly Division (GMAD) in 1971 whose managerial style, according to one rank-and-file member, brought “a return of an old-fashioned line speedup and a ‘sweatshop style’ of management reminiscent of the 1930’s, making the men do more work at the same pay.” Fourth, the workers’ response to this is detailed to better understand how robots contributed to rising tensions between labor and management as GMAD established its dominance. And finally, the chapter will investigate what role “robotization”—both of the assembly line and of the workers—played in the lead up to and break out of the UAW’s infamous strike of Lordstown in 1972.

 

Previous Winners

2022: Rachel B. Tiven, “‘The Women Themselves:’ Working Women’s Opposition to Protective Labor Legislation in New York, 1913-1921”

ABSTRACT: This essay tells the story of working-class women who organized against Progressive Era protective labor laws meant to benefit women. The Women’s Equal Opportunity League opposed all single-sex labor laws, which they came to believe hurt women more than helped. Founded in 1918 by printers who had been advocating within the Typographical Union since 1913, the League leveraged political strategies newly available to female New Yorkers after enfranchisement. The group’s membership swelled when women entered “male” jobs during World War I and fought to keep them. The Equal Opportunity League successfully blocked and repealed wage and hour laws in New York and threatened the mandate of progressive reform groups like the Women’s Trade Union League and the National Consumers’ League. In the process these working-class women demanded economic opportunity for women and contested reformers’ idea of what it meant to be a good mother. Yet they are missing from the history of working women in the Progressive Era. This essay uncovers their role, challenges the story of working-class consensus about protective labor laws, and resets the chronology of feminist conflict over the early Equal Rights Amendment.

2021: Ben Schmack, University of Kansas, Department of American Studies, for his paper “Defending the Southland: The Ku Klux Klan’s War on Communism in the 1930s.”

ABSTRACT: The paper focuses on the Ku Klux Klan’s expressly anticommunist reaction to Communist Party USA organizing drives in the South. The Southern push of the CPUSA began in the late 1920s with the Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, continued into the 1930s with labor organizing throughout the region, and reached its highest notoriety through the legal defenses of the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon. Where this paper differs from other treatments of Southern CPUSA organizing is that it foregrounds the consistent clashes between Communists and Klansmen. This focus reveals the symbiotic manner in which fascist reactionaries and the State conspired against Leftist and antiracist labor organizing. In-particular, I focus on the Seventh Imperial Klonvokation held in Atlanta in 1934. The conference focused first and foremost on the need for the Klan to lead the fight against Communism’s spread into the Southland. Klonvokation speakers displayed a knowledge of both CPUSA leadership and organizing strategies in CP backed campaigns, suggesting the KKK placed importance on surveillance of the radical Left. Perhaps more importantly, the speeches delivered revealed, in detail, the synergistic manner in which the Klan and the State repressed Communist dissent through state and local government. I situate this within a long anticommunist history in the South, and the United States more broadly, which is so often tied to the Cold War and global competition with the Soviet Union. However, anticommunism has much deeper roots that reveal anti-Left and anti-labor repression to be much more foundational than situational.

2020: Pamela Nogales, a recent Ph.D. whose thesis was awarded “with distinction” from New York University, for “Plebian Radicals in New England and the Fight for the Shorter Working Day.” 

Abstract for “Plebian Radicals in New England and the Fight for the Shorter Working Day” by Pamela Nogales: The article takes up the political contributions by New England reformers during the campaign for shorter hours, when operatives across textile mills fought in concert to better factory conditions and shorten the length of the working day. I argue that the new laborer in the manufacturing towns of New England diverged from the Jeffersonian image of the independent producer, upheld by agrarian labor reformers of the 1820s and ’30s as the ideal subject of the American republic. Northeastern manufacturing centers called for a new type of wage-dependent factory worker, who had no hope of becoming an employer. While the vision for agrarian independence remained influential among laborers, from the 1830s onward, calls for shorter hours deployed a new language of urban labor reform that placed the “producing classes” as leading figures in the democratization of industry. No longer the frustrated landless citizen, urban reformers cast the factory operative as a protagonist in the future reorganization of production. I show how New England reformers went beyond the classical republican framework in order to develop new solutions to declining wages and urban unemployment. Sources include debates in labor publications, Loom and Spindle and Factory Girl, speeches by the Chartist émigré, John Cluer, editorials by labor leader, Sarah Bagley, printed in Lowell’s Voice of Industry; laborers’ petitions for shorter hours; responses in Massachusetts Committee Reports; and Ira Steward’s papers. 

2019: There were two winners of the Bellush Prize for 2019, Henry Himes for “The USWA’s Path to Private Security: The Postwar Retiree Crisis, Politics, and Postwar Communism,” and Ryan Driskell Tate for “Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers in the 1970s and Labor’s Last Stand in the American West.”

Abstract for “The USWA’s Path to Private Security: The Postwar Retiree Crisis, Politics, and Postwar Communism” by Henry Himes:

When surveying the extensive body of scholarship on the intersection of unions and the creation of the public-private welfare state, Himes found a glaring deficiency. The United Steelworkers of America (USWA) – a union he justifiably describes as “arguably one of  the most dynamic and influential industrial unions of the twentieth century” – was largely left out. That’s why his essay, which focuses on the USWA amid the backdrop of a postwar conservative backlash, is such a vital piece of the ever-growing world of labor scholarship. As Republicans came into legislative power via the election of 1946, Himes writes, they signed into law the notorious Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. Given the anti-labor animus creeping throughout federal and state-level legislatures across the nation, the USWA made an influential strategic calculation: use their economic power to win private forms of security, rather than double-down on the push for a more expansive welfare state. This calculation was brought about, in part, by the postwar retiree crisis faced by steelworkers across the nation. Employers like Inland Steel and U.S. Steel were driving steelworkers into retirement at age 65, forcing retirees to make ends meet on a limited Social Security payment, which still left them treading in postwar poverty. At subsequent USWA conventions, in 1946 and 1948, it became clear to USWA President Philip Murray that his union would need to balance retirees’ reality and that era’s delicate political economy. Himes’ exceptional paper goes further into the micro-level cost-and-benefit analysis undertaken by USWA leaders and members, with a particular emphasis on the tradeoffs made by refusing to fight Taft-Hartley’s anti-communist provisions. Himes concludes that “USWA leaders were very cognizant and empathetic to the concerns and demands of steelworkers at the district and local level, and that the immediate security needs of steelworkers came to overshadow the union’s effort to defy Taft-Hartley.”

Abstract for “Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers in the 1970s and Labor’s Last Stand in the American West” by Ryan Driskell Tate:

This paper provides a timely look into the coalmines of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. In his essay, Tate details the evolution of coal mining in a region responsible for less than one percent of all American coal mined in 1960, and the boom that propelled those states into producing more than half of the nation’s coal by the mid-1990s. “Today,” he writes, “the region’s strip mines and power plants rank among the largest carbon polluters on the planet.” The bulk of his research centers around the 1970s – a decade that brought to American workers a shift in labor relations, as union density and wages began to decline at a slow, but alarmingly steady, pace. Tate notes that coal companies deliberately decided to build their sprawling energy complexes in the region, given the lack of union power and, thus, the opportunity to squeeze more profits from working people. In response, energy workers in the region – who largely worked in the very same unsafe conditions that spurred the creation of mineworker unions in Appalachia more than a generation before – attempted to organize. Ruthless opposition from mine owners, which included instances of violence hurled at union supporters, defeated the United Mine Workers of America-led “Western Campaign,” and developed the Powder River Basin as the coal industry’s first union-free stronghold, unshackled from the supposed limitations of unionized mines in Appalachia. In sum, Tate says, “[t]he coal industry’s defeat of the United Mine Workers of America, and concerted e orts to gouge class politics from the region, solidified the workers’ embrace, not of unionism, or class consciousness, but of extractivism as a political identity.” The planet – and the working people toiling in western mines – have yet to recover.

2018: The winner of the 2018 Bernard Bellush Prize was Erin Durham, a doctoral student at the University off Maryland, College Park, MD, for “Strike for Labor Rights: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland during the Early Twentieth Century.”

Abstract: Highlighting the labor actions of inmates and organized labor, this paper explains the transition from a contract labor system to a state-use system in Maryland’s state prisons. While many northern states abolished the contract labor system by 1911, Maryland continued contract labor into the 1930s. Efforts of prison administrators to maintain discipline and fund prison operating costs despite the labor actions of inmates and working men and women reveal the close relationship of prison labor and revenue generation. By situating prison labor within the broader history of the labor movement in Baltimore, this paper lends insight into the post-1960s rise in mass incarceration, and is vital to the project of understanding the connections between the criminal state, corporate profit, and incarcerated populations.

2017: There were two winners of the Bellush Prize for 2017, Marc Kagan for “An Early Challenge to the Age of Austerity and Inequality: Re-Examining New York City’s 1980 Transit Strike from the Bottom-Up” and Luke Elliot-Negri for “Wall to Wall: Industrial Unionism at the City University of New York, 1972-2017.”

Abstract for “An Early Challenge to the Age of Austerity and Inequality: Re-Examining New York City’s 1980 Transit Strike from the Bottom-Up” by Marc Kagan:

New York City’s fiscal crisis birthed a now four-decade- long era of working-class austerity, and the its eleven day 1980 transit strike was the first significant attempt to oppose it. I examine the strike’s genesis and outcome in the context of transit worker culture, pre-existing union structures, and the long-established strategies of union leaders and oppositionists. Workers and dissident transit activists shared the premise that a better top-down leadership – a sort of bureaucratic radicalism – was all that was needed to secure better contracts. The strength of this idea was its rhetorical clarity and easy appeal to workers, who were only required to “throw the bums out;” its weakness that it inhibited preparation for a strike or the development of shop-floor mobilization and consciousness. Elections reaffirmed the union’s fracture along occupational and racial lines. The union’s president retained his post with only a plurality of votes. With only a narrow majority on the union’s Executive Board, leftist-led dissidents stymied a proposed contract and forced a strike but were unable to seize control of the negotiations. The resulting deal was an economic victory but a psychological defeat for workers. The union leadership was able to take credit for a substantial raise, while blaming the loss of pay and onerous fines on the opposition, whose earlier decision to avoid discussion about the necessity of a strike now came back to haunt them. Other New York union leaders, eager to rebuff dissidents in their own ranks, joined the chorus of nay-sayers. The transit strike became just an odd blip on the radar of what was soon to be called neo-liberalism, rather than a significant blow against it in its American birthplace.

Abrstract for “Wall to Wall: Industrial Unionism at the City University of New York, 1972-2017” by Luke Elliot-Negri:

The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the industrial model union representing full and part-time faculty, professional staff and graduate student-workers, across some two dozen urban campuses at the City University of New York (CUNY), was chartered as an American Federation of Teachers in 1972, through the merger of two previously existing unions. This paper explores both the benefits and the tensions that this expansive bargaining unit produces. Under what conditions have contingent workers gained from their formal connection with tenured faculty through the PSC? In what ways has this broad organizational model facilitated or hindered part-timer access to benefits generally and to university governance specifically? I argue that contingent workers in the CUNY system face an extension dilemma: on the one hand, they benefit from the resources generated by the dues base of more highly paid full time faculty; on the other hand, their goals are often submerged by those same organizational partners. The paper explores the historical variation in what contingent workers have been able to achieve, as they choose one horn or the other of this dilemma – and as they develop creative “inside/outside” strategies. The paper concludes with implications for organizing under a Trump Supreme Court, which will likely end agency fee shops via Janus vs. AFSCME, a case already making its way through the 7th circuit.

2015: There were two winners of the Bellush Prize for 2015, Jonathan D. Cohen for “This is Your Hometown: Collective Memories, Industrial Flight, and the Fate of Freehold, New Jersey”, and Doug Genens for “Fighting Poverty in the Fields: Legal Services and the War on Poverty in Rural California.”

Abstract for “This is Your Hometown: Collective Memories, Industrial Flight, and the Fate of Freehold, New Jersey” by Jonathan D. Cohen:

Freehold, New Jersey faced two major moments of deindustrialization in the post-World War II period. In the late 1950s, the rug mill that sat at the center of the town’s economic and cultural life began to close down. In 1986, a 3M audio-visual tape plant that had helped the town avoid economic ruin shut down as well. This paper illustrates the continuities between these closings, challenging the dogma in labor history that plant closings occur because of management’s desire to avoid an entitled and demanding workforce. Though workers at both plants were unionized, neither the rug mill nor the 3M workers made major demands on their employers in the postwar period. Thus, this paper analyzes the conditions that prompted shutdowns in Freehold, illustrating the role of broader market forces as well as internal company dynamics in driving capital flight. Furthermore, a close look at the 3M closing reveals the importance of working-class culture in assessments of responses to deindustrialization. Following 3M’s announcement of its plans to shut down the Freehold plant, workers began a national media campaign to save their jobs. At the heart of this campaign, I illustrate, was the memory of the rug mill that had closed 25 years earlier. This paper demonstrates the role of memory as an active force in shaping workers’ experience with deindustrialization and the way unions have struggled to codify the relationship between capital and community in the twentieth century.

Abstract for “Fighting Poverty in the Fields: Legal Services and the War on Poverty in Rural California” by Doug Genens:

Between 1966 and the end of the 1970s, California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) helped farm workers unionize, fight for safer workplaces, and resist the exploitation of their labor by the state’s large growers. Part of the War on Poverty’s Legal Services Program, CRLA allows scholars to rethink the parameters of the poverty war. Historians have typically seen the War on Poverty as hobbled by the decline of New Deal social democracy, a focus on racial instead of class inequality, and a way of thinking about the poor that saw a “culture of poverty” as the primary force creating inequality. CRLA attorneys, however, viewed poverty not as a problem of culture, but of political economy. Its work linked the provision of legal services with interventions in workplace struggles as it sought to rein in growers, empower workers, and restructure a deeply unequal system. Unlike other studies of the Legal Services Program that stress the actions of lawyers, this paper illuminates the role of farm workers and the rural poor as well. This paper traces the development of CRLA, some of its major cases, its high profile conflicts with politicians like Ronald Reagan, and, ultimately, the declining efficacy of its legal strategy. While CRLA continues to help farm workers and the rural poor in the present day, the weakening of the UFW, the restructuring of the agricultural economy in the early 1980s, and the inability of court victories to effectively manage grower intransigence spelled the end for a strategy focused on worker mobilization.

2014: The winner of the 2014 Bernard Bellush Prize was Trish Kale, of the Department of History of the University of Chicago, for her paper entitled “The Graveyard Shift: Energy Industry Reorganization and Rank and File Rebellion in the UMWA, 1963-1973.”

Abstract: The rise of the Miners for Democracy (MFD) in the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) has typically been remembered as a struggle to oust a particularly corrupt union leader, Tony Boyle. The incredible tumult which destabilized Boyle’s rule and made possible the victory of the only union democracy slate to win control of a union at the international level, however, was much broader than internal corruption in the union. Rank-and-file rebellion in the UMWA emerged at the beginning of a broader economic and social transformation which would later be termed neoliberalism. Caught at the intersection of struggles over energy production, workplace safety, and environmental politics, coal miners were among the most vulnerable to these changes, but also among the best placed to shape their eventual outcome. Miners grappled with an energy economy in transition as oil conglomerates diversified their interests, investing in coal, uranium, and natural gas at the same time they were faced with a safety crisis in the mines and an epidemic of black lung. Boyle, in a bid to preserve his own power, linked these issues, but the MFD used these connections to channel miners’ anger into rebellion. In particular, the development of a class-based ecological consciousness played a central role in turning rank-and-file miners’ anger over corruption and ineffective leadership in the union and the government into political and workplace action. As such, their understanding of these issues–and the action miners took around each–mirrored each other: the environmental issues of strip mining and the development of nuclear power were understood as safety issues, while working conditions were understood as an environmental issue as well as a safety issue. Yet ultimately, the miners were unsuccessful in shifting national energy policy. Once the oil companies expanded into energy conglomerates, it was no longer adequate to challenge specific elements of capitalist energy policy—the entire system had to be restructured. It was a challenge the miners were unable to meet. Still, this story remains important. It challenges the idea that union power in energy-extractive industries is necessarily at odds with environmental justice and suggests an environmental labor history of the long seventies may provide a more comprehensive explanation of changes in capitalism, work, and working-class life during neoliberal transformation.

2013: The winner of the first annual Bernard Bellush Prize was William S. Cossen, Pennsylvania State University, for his research paper entitled “The Rise and Decline of a Catholic Labor School: Hartford’s Diocesan Labor Institute and the Education of the American Worker.”

Abstract: Seeking to overcome the traditional disjuncture between labor history and religious history, this paper analyzes the role of Catholic labor education as a central point of contact between the Catholic Church and workers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Spearheaded by the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Social Action Department and by labor priests and lay workers in dioceses, parishes, religious orders, and Catholic colleges across the country, a national network made up of dozens of Catholic labor schools flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s. These schools endeavored to reach out to workers to assure them that the Catholic Church was concerned with their practical and moral welfare. Priest-teachers sought to foster a more cooperative, amiable relationship between labor and management; they also attempted to inform workers of their legal rights and aimed to train their students in effective unionization and debating techniques. The schools’ reach often extended beyond the classroom, as evidenced by several priests’ repeated interventions in union affairs and by their active opposition to communist influence in the labor movement.

This study takes as its primary subject Hartford, Connecticut’s Diocesan Labor Institute (DLI), founded in 1942 by Joseph F. Donnelly, a priest of the Diocese of Hartford. Hartford’s program is of particular historical interest due to its relative longevity, its extensive public reach, its role as a model for the establishment of similar labor schools, and its function as a clearinghouse for written materials that served as the foundation of several other schools’ core curricula. The DLI provides a useful window through which to view the motivations and activities of labor priests and Catholic workers in the postwar era, an important period of both economic adjustment and labor organizing in one of the country’s most industrialized states. This paper argues that the history of the DLI and similar labor institutes provides compelling evidence that the Catholic Church was an active player in the postwar labor scene and that gender and class transformations — particularly the increasing entry of women into the workforce and a perceived climb up the class ladder by many Catholic workers — in addition to an ever-present hostility toward communism were substantial, interconnected factors in both the rise and decline of Catholic labor education in Connecticut and in the United States.