The department is pleased to congratulate Chad Pearson on international recognition for his dissertation, completed at SUNY-Albany in 2008, on "’Organize and Fight’: Communities, Employers, and Open-Shop Movements, 1890-1920." The Labor History journal chose Chad's dissertation as one of the best three dissertations in labor history for the year, giving it an "honorable mention."
Chad teaches world history and western civilization courses and US history survey courses at UAH and at Calhoun Community College. He is also teaching an upper-level course on US Labor History at UAH in the fall 2009 semester.
"Organize and Fight" explores organized employers and anti-union activism in three cities: Cleveland, Ohio, Buffalo, NY, and Worcester, Massachusetts. He points out that hundreds of employers were active movement-builders, union-busters, and political activists. In the study, he highlights the difficulties of building union-busting associations, the tensions between employer-organizers and rank-and-file members, the drama of breaking strikes and busting unions, and the ways in which employers used public relations in their struggles. This work seeks to explain the chief reasons why organized labor failed to achieve many of its goals during the so-called Progressive Era.
Chad is currently revising the dissertation and has begun working on a new chapter on organized employers and open-shoppery (a philosophy that insists that workers have the right to refuse to join labor unions) in Huntsville and Chattanooga.
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