Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

• Date: 01 July 2015
• Published date: 01 July 2015
• Author: Janice Kimball,Terence K. Huwe
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12101

Recent Publications

Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and

Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

TERENCE K. HUWE, Director of Library & Information Resources

JANICE KIMBALL, Library Assistant

America’s Assembly Line. By David E. Nye. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2013. 978-0-262-52759-0. 352 pp. $16.95.

Nye examines the paradigm-shifting innovation of the fast-paced assembly line, which was

a key factor in making the United States wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly

line was developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of

Model Ts. It also had the unplanned consequence of transforming industrial labor. Other

countries followed suit, reinventing the assembly line as their own economies grew. Japan

developed its own system of “lean manufacturing,”and Japanese techniques challenged

American industry, which struggled to integrate lean manufacturing. Nye describes the

new reality of increasingly automated factories, with the resulting impact of fewer indus-

trial jobs in America and potentially dangerous working conditions in developing coun-

tries.

Badass Teachers Unite! Reflections on Education, History, and Youth

Activism. By Mark Naison. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. 978-1-

60846-361-9. 216 pp. $16.95.

Activist Mark Naison presents a series of essays that are based on years of research in New

York boroughs as well as his own experience on the front lines of the “education wars.”He

offers a strong defense of teachers and students who face educational “reform”policies. He

argues that the present-day matrix of reform policies has the actual effect of undermining

teachers’power and creativity. He deconstructs dominant education policy to demonstrate

how it causes unwanted disruption and harms the students it claims to support. In response

to this state of affairs, he lays out strategies that can begin to refocus the conversation on

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 54, No. 3 (July 2015). ©2015 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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