Description: In Conflict in the Community, the efforts of working people to gain a voice on the job and in their community through their union, and the efforts of employers to crush those unions, take center stage. Previously untapped historic sources such as labor spy reports, union newspapers, coded messages, and artifacts shine new light on this epic, and ultimately tragic, period in American labor history.
Brief description:
Gary Kaunonen is currently in Michigan Technological University's Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. Both of his grandfathers worked in the mines of the Mesabi Iron Range in northeastern Minnesota, and, before becoming an academic, Kaunonen, himself, charged blast furnaces and operated a bull-ladle in an iron foundry.
Review Quotes:
"In Community in Conflict, Kaunonen and Goings have truly created a working-class history of the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike, presenting valuable new information and perspectives that enrich our understanding of the strike from the bottom up. They have served up an essential antidote to the majority of earlier histories, which treated the strike as a temporary aberration in an otherwise idyllic mining region and the strikers and their larger working-class community as faceless, one-dimensional economic actors."
--John P. Beck, Associate Professor, Labor Education Program, Michigan State University, and Co-Director, Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives