Utilizing the work of Thorstein Veblen, I argue that the interrogation of 'symbolic exploitation' should be of pressing concern to sociologists who hope to end economic exploitation. Contesting economic exploitation must begin with the destruction of traditional sovereign action patterns of desire that ensnare agents. Such a work of destruction must simultaneously be a work of construction, the construction of counter-hegemonic cultures of solidarity that reject the normative systems of status distribution associated with pecuniary capitalism. With this self-recognition on the part of the laboring classes, the end of economic exploitation becomes both palpable and possible.

Nationwide, academic sociologists at all types of higher education institutions face the challenge of working to improve students’ writing skills. In this article, we describe a collective effort by a group of faculty members in one undergraduate sociology program to implement several effective writing-improvement strategies. We advocate aiming to improve students’ writing by working together on a united front rather than working in isolation. After explaining the origins of the collective emphasis on writing that emerged in our group and briefly outlining the writing-improvement strategies that we utilize, we use student survey data to reflect on major themes before concluding with a discussion of the merits of our collective approach.

Labour's struggle was an industrial war, with labour's forces led by manly proletarian generals against the effeminate bosses and childlike scabs. 24 And, despite the centrality of women workers to many of the labour struggles in the 1930s, "What is noticeably absent from these cartoons is any representation of the worker (and especially the union worker) as female." 25 At best, women were a d j u n c t s, a u x i l i a r i e s, o r, p e r h ap s, p roletarian mothers in need of p at r i a rchal pro t e c t i o n. Black Fury is overtly a film about class and class struggle. But as a film about class, it is simultaneously and necessarily a film about gender, about the proper place of women in relation to working men. At the same time, as a film about class and gender, Black Fury is also (and perhaps necessarily) a film about "race" and racial constructions. The film appeared eleven years after the restriction acts that put an end to the great, post-1890 immigration wave that brought masses of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these "new" immigrants were often represented in popular and scholarly discourse as racially separate from the native-born Anglo stock that made up much of the American labouring population. But with the influx of new immigrants, racial categories slowly began to change. A new language of ethnicity emerged to describe these foreigners who were not quite white, yet not entirely black. In the binary racial divide that had captivated the American political imagination since the eighteenth century, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and Slavs became what the historians David Roediger and James R. Barrett call "in-between peoples", neither wholly white nor entirely "other." For these "in-between peoples," race-making was a "messy process." Racial categorizations did not change overnight, but evolved slowly, in response to changing social, political, and economic conditions. By 1935, some representations of ethnicity suggested a conditional whiteness for the new immigrants (that is, i f t h ey we re pro p e rly "Americanized"), while other representations continued to associate a racial alterity with the new immigrants. Black Fury takes a "progressive" position regarding these new immigrants. 26 Although neither the words "race," nor "ethnicity" appear in the film, the narrative posits an invisible boundary that separates white Americans from the immigrants who populate the coal fields, while, at the same time, criticizing that very boundary .27 Black Fury begins with a shift whistle sounding and an industrial montage with images that dissolve and shift from a smokestack planted in a background of farmland; coal cars and company towns; miners, faceless in the shadows; to a scene of domestic support, as a mother and daughter prepare a meal for their men. Mike comes into the kitchen, yawning. "Where's Joe?" "He's not up yet," Mike's wife responds, "I woke him the same time as you. …Ah, that fella. Every morning the same thing,-Joe" she knock...

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This essay explores the implications of Paul Massing's findings that CIO union members were slightly more resistant to authoritarianism than AFL affiliated unionists. I begin by sketching the contours of the different forms of union consciousness produced by the AFL's craft unionism and the CIO's industrial unionism. Then, paying special attention to the 'ethnic' constituency of CIO unions, I argue that the CIO offered a particularly egalitarian vision of union democracy, at least until the onset of World War II. In the second half of the essay, I examine cinematic representations of race and the manner in which those representations corresponded to a changing racial consciousness among American workers. I end with a discussion of the contours of Cold War unionism, the decline of union democracy as a result of the wartime 'no-strike' pledge and Taft-Hartley, and the manner in which the American union movement displaced exploitation onto a racialized 'Third World' work force.