Este artículo examina cómo sectores del catolicismo chileno articularon un discurso en donde destacaba la idea de contribuir a la consolidación de la clase media chilena para responder a los ...problemas del país durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Con tal propósito, se analizan los planteamientos elaborados por los católicos en el marco de la inauguración de la Universidad Católica de Valparaíso ocurrida en 1928. A partir de la revisión de documentación y prensa de la época, el artículo sostiene que la posición de los católicos que fundaron la Universidad tendría por objetivo promover una formación práctica para aportar al desarrollo económico y para favorecer la pre-sencia del catolicismo en la vida pública de Chile. La combinación de ambos aspectos ayudaría a perfi lar la existencia de un nuevo sector social –la clase media– que actuara de acuerdo con los valores del catolicismo, desempeñara un rol específi co en el contex-to económico local y, en defi nitiva, demostrase un mejoramiento de la condición moral y material de la sociedad de la época.
This paper explores how sectors of Chilean Catholicism articulated a dis-course that promoted the making of the middle class in order to face the challenges experienced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It focuses on the orga-nization of the Catholic University of Valparaíso in 1928. By analyzing documents and newspapers, this paper argues that the founders of the university developed this project to promote a practical education to contribute to the economic progress and to stimulate the presence of Catholicism in Chile’s public life. Th e combination of both aspects would shape the existence of a new social sector, the middle. Class which would behave accord-ing to Catholic values, playing a specifi c role in the local economic context and, ulti-mately, demonstrating an improvement of the moral and material conditions of society.
In Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century Arthur der Weduwen presents the first comprehensive account of the early newspaper in the Low Countries, composed of detailed introductions ...and extensive bibliographical descriptions.
When the Detroit newspaper strike was settled in December 2000, it marked the end of five years of bitter and violent dispute. No fewer than six local unions, representing 2,500 employees, struck ...against the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, and their corporate owners, charging unfair labor practices.
The newspapers hired permanent replacement workers and paid millions of dollars for private security and police enforcement; the unions and their supporters took their struggle to the streets by organizing a widespread circulation and advertising boycott, conducting civil disobedience, and publishing a weekly strike newspaper. In the end, unions were forced to settle contracts on management’s terms, and fired strikers received no amnesty.
In The Broken Table, Chris Rhomberg sees the Detroit strike as a historic collision of two opposing forces: a system in place since the New Deal governing disputes between labor and management, and decades of increasingly aggressive corporate efforts to eliminate unions. As a consequence, one of the fundamental institutions of American labor relations—the negotiation table—has been broken, Rhomberg argues, leaving the future of the collective bargaining relationship and democratic workplace governance in question.
The Broken Table uses interview and archival research to explore the historical trajectory of this breakdown, its effect on workers’ economic outlook, and the possibility of restoring democratic governance to the business-labor relationship. Emerging from the New Deal, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act protected the practice of collective bargaining and workers’ rights to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment by legally recognizing union representation. This system became central to the democratic workplace, where workers and management were collective stakeholders. But efforts to erode the legal protections of the NLRA began immediately, leading to a parallel track of anti-unionism that began to gain ascendancy in the 1980s. The Broken Table shows how the tension created by these two opposing forces came to a head after a series of key labor disputes over the preceding decades culminated in the Detroit newspaper strike. Detroit union leadership charged management with unfair labor practices after employers had unilaterally limited the unions’ ability to bargain over compensation and work conditions. Rhomberg argues that, in the face of management claims of absolute authority, the strike was an attempt by unions to defend workers’ rights and the institution of collective bargaining, and to stem the rising tide of post-1980s anti-unionism.
In an era when the incidence of strikes in the United States has been drastically reduced, the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike stands out as one of the largest and longest work stoppages in the past two decades. A riveting read full of sharp analysis, The Broken Table revisits the Detroit case in order to show the ways this strike signaled the new terrain in labor-management conflict. The book raises broader questions of workplace governance and accountability that affect us all.
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