Background
Barrett, James Robert was born on June 14, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Thomas Eugene and Catherine Marie (Ellis) Barrett.
( Chicago's packinghouse workers were not the hopeless cr...)
Chicago's packinghouse workers were not the hopeless creatures depicted by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, but active agents in the early twentieth century transformation that swept urban industrial America. In his case study of Chicago's Union Stockyards, Barrett focuses on the workers - older skilled immigrants, new immigrant common laborers, migrant blacks, and young women workers - and the surrounding neighborhoods. The lives and communities of these workers accurately convey the experience of mass-production work, the quality of working-class life, the process of class formation and fragmentation, and the changing character of class relations. Because Packingtown's struggle for existence was linked directly to the character of work and employment in the industry, unionization played an important role in the lives of these workers. Although unionization was associated with both improving the quality of life and creating a viable community, workers were divided by race, ethnic identity, and skill. Work and Community in the Jungle discusses a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors that resulted in class cohesion and fragmentation. Addressing the broader problem of relations between capital and labor, Barrett demonstrates the effects of government intervention on labor organization, negotiation, and conflict. Shop-floor workers banded together to develop new strategies and forms of organization in their struggle with management for control. Barrett employs contemporary social surveys and a computer-assisted analysis of census data to illustrate the physical and social characteristics of the workers' environment. He analyzes this data in the context of the relationships between community, ethnicity, family, work experience, and industrial characteristics.
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Barrett, James Robert was born on June 14, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Thomas Eugene and Catherine Marie (Ellis) Barrett.
Bachelor of Arts in History with honors, University Illinois, Chicago, 1972. Master of Arts in Comparative Labor History, University Warwick, Coventry, England, 1974. Doctor of Philosophy in History, University Pittsburgh, 1981.
Assistant professor of history, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 1981-1984; professor, University of Illinois, Urbana, since 1984; associate chair department history, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1988-1990, 91-93; chair department history, University of Illinois, Urbana, since 1997. Member Executive Committee Union of Professional Employees, Champaign, Illinois, since 1985, president, 1994-1996.
( Chicago's packinghouse workers were not the hopeless cr...)
( As the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, Stev...)
(Work and Community in the Jungle by James R. Barrett. Uni...)
Member American History Association, Organization American Historians, Illinois State History Society (board directors 1989-1992), Marho-The Radical Historians Association.
Married Jane May Wong, August 14, 1971. 1 child, Sean Eugene.