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This article examines the history of labor organizing in the service, distribution, and processing industries. It examines Local/District 65's (Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union) efforts to find a "home" for its differing "orientation" as it targeted low‐wage distribution, processing, and service workers, more often Black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish, in New York who worked in small, largely "invisible," 10–20‐person shops, using what it called a "catchall" or area‐based organizing strategy. The union's history helps us better understand the challenges the contemporary labor movement faces organizing in the Wal‐Mart era as low‐wage service, distribution, and processing (warehouse) jobs become the norm.

When one studies a specific society, hegemonic practice is so deeply rooted that it is often difficult to study it from outside that system. However, there are periods of dramatic social change when ongoing social practice in a geographic space is disrupted. On such occasions hegemonic forces can be seen, as it were, from outside of assumed practice. The northwest coast of North America provides such an opportunity. From 1818 to 1846, the British and American states shared jurisdiction over the territory with sovereignty under constant negotiation. The Hudson's Bay Company established a substantial commercial presence in the region from the 1820s to 1850s. During the 1830s and 1840s, massive immigration from the eastern United States shifted the population balance to favour those with ties to the United States. The imposition of the border across the northwest in 1846 marked a significant watershed in the evolution of social control in the region.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Disney and other United States-based companies found themselves in the position to create a "new world order." The National Labor Committee (NLC), Haitian grassroots labor organizers, a multimillion member international labor community, concerned shareholders, members of the U.S. Congress, and activists around the world pressured Disney to lead the way to a new global standard by paying a living wage and investing in local infrastructure wherever it did business. Whatever standards Disney enacted, they argued, the rest would follow. Rather than assume the "corporate mantle of responsibility," Disney ran from the United States to Haiti, then to China, in search of cheap labor, a bigger profit margin, and the ability to do business without scrutiny. Seeing itself as just one entity in a global garment supply chain, Disney claimed responsibility only for licensing its brand to the contractors (U.S.-based) and subcontractors (in Haiti and later China) who handled the actual production of Disney merchandise.

Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered "unorganizable" by other unions, the progressive New York City-based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. In this book, the author presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. This book shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for "unskilled," unrepresented workers and to destigmatize the kind of work they performed. Closely examining the strategies employed by District 65 from the 1930s through the early Cold War years, the author assesses the impact of the McCarthy era on the union's quest for economic equality across divisions of race, ethnicity, and skill. Though their stories have been overshadowed by those of auto, steel, and electrical workers who forced American manufacturing giants to unionize, the District 65 workers believed their union provided them with an opportunity to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs. The author recounts how District 65 first broke with the CIO over the latter's hostility to left-oriented politics and organizing agendas, then rejoined to facilitate alliances with the NAACP. In telling the story of District 65 and detailing community organizing efforts during the first part of the Cold War and under the AFL-CIO umbrella, this book reexamines the history of the left-led unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. -- Adapted from publisher's website.

For the short period from 1834 to 1863, the Pacific Northwest, centered in Cascadia, was an entity in the global economy. The region became a coherent economic unit under the management of the Columbia District of the Hudson's Bay Company, which developed an economic hinterland, a coherent economic and trade strategy, an aggressive marketing agenda and control of marketable resources in the region. It strategically built a resource base to meet market needs and played an extensive entrepreneurial function, for example selling Finish boots in California in 1840 and Puget Sound grain in western Siberia by 1843. This paper traces the broad outline of the rise and fall of this economic empire and draws attention to the role of state power, manifested at the levels of identity and legal construction, in ending the coherence of that regional entity. In a time when the logic of Cascadia on environmental and regional grounds is apparent to many, this paper highlights how the border and the attendant identities of political actors divided and ended its coherence. Its demise may offer insight into the forces which bolster the border which divides it today.