Despite the downward spiral of union membership and power during the period they explore, these two fine studies of late twentieth century U.S. labor history both are surprisingly optimistic. Minchin provides a straightforward institutional history of the AFL-CIO starting in 1979, the last year of George Meany’s 24-year reign at the organization’s helm, up to just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His main sources are the Federation’s archives, where he studied many documents not previously exploited by scholars, and sixty original interviews with AFL-CIO leaders and staffers. Perhaps because of his extensive reliance on this material, Minchin’s narrative largely reflects the viewpoint of the D.C. labor establishment and at times uncritically reproduces the official “glass half full” perspective that its spokespersons often promote. Windham was an AFL-CIO staffer herself for a decade prior to embarking on an academic career (indeed she was one of Minchin’s interviewees), but her approach is quite different, focusing primarily on rank-and-file workers. She carefully reconstructs four union organizing drives that took place in the 1970s, none of which have been previously documented in any detail. All four involved categories of workers who had been influenced by the social movements of the 1960s: women, young workers, and African Americans. Windham’s optimism is rooted in her finding that workers were eager to unionize when they had the opportunity to do so, despite rapidly increasing employer resistance. Although Minchin and Windham focus on distinctly different levels of labor movement activity and slightly different time periods, both inquiries shed new light on the ways in which the neoliberal turn affected American

中文翻译：

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美国劳工和新自由主义转向

尽管在他们探索的时期工会成员资格和权力呈螺旋式下降，但这两项关于 20 世纪后期美国劳工史的精美研究都出人意料地乐观。Minchin 提供了 AFL-CIO 从 1979 年开始的直截了当的机构历史，这是乔治·米尼 (George Meany) 掌舵该组织 24 年的最后一年，直到 2016 年美国总统大选之前。他的主要资料来源是联合会的档案，在那里他研究了许多以前未被学者利用的文件，以及对 AFL-CIO 领导人和工作人员的 60 次原始采访。也许是因为他对这些材料的广泛依赖，Minchin 的叙述在很大程度上反映了 DC 劳工机构的观点，有时不加批判地再现了其发言人经常宣传的官方“玻璃半满”观点。在开始学术生涯之前，温德姆本人曾在 AFL-CIO 工作了十年（她确实是明钦的受访者之一），但她的方法完全不同，主要关注普通工人。她仔细重建了 1970 年代发生的四次工会组织运动，之前没有任何详细记录。所有四个都涉及受 1960 年代社会运动影响的工人类别：妇女、青年工人和非裔美国人。温德姆的乐观态度源于她发现，尽管雇主的阻力迅速增加，但工人一有机会就渴望加入工会。尽管 Minchin 和 Windham 关注的劳工运动活动水平明显不同，时间段也略有不同，