124: A Workplace of their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy

This week we are joined by María E. Montoya to discuss her new book, A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor’s Battle Over Industrial Democracy, just published by Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-workplace-of-their-own-9780197551691?cc=us&lang=en&

The book opens with a question: who owned the American workplace in early 20th-century? This question was particularly urgent in the period of the Colorado labor wars. Those conflicts featured a series of strikes punctuated by the deadly violence of Ludlow in 1914 and in Columbine in 1927. These two notorious episodes of industrial violence frame the story and demonstrate what was at stake in the Mountainous West. Many different groups-- including laborers, unions, governments, and capitalists – had ideas about how to deal with the dramatic problems raised by industrial labor and who should be making those decisions. Montoya focuses on the strategies of two industrial capitalists – John D. Rockefeller Jr and Josephine Roche – easterners who each controlled mining companies in Colorado. They both attempted to solve the divide between labor and capital and shape industrial democracy but through very different ideas about company towns, arbitration, maternalism, and engagement with unions. In Colorado their ideas confronted the regional specificities of the industry in that place.

Dr. Montoya mentioned Robyn Muncy's biography of Josephine Roche, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton UP, 2016) https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173528/relentless-reformer

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