On the Ground charts labor relations in the airline industry,
unraveling the story of how baggage handlers--classified as unskilled
workers--built tense but mutually useful alliances with their skilled
coworkers such as aircraft mechanics and made tremendous gains in wages
and working conditions, even in the era of supposedly "complacent" labor
in the 1950s and 1960s. Liesl Miller Orenic explains how airline jobs on
the ground were constructed, how workers chose among unions, and how
federal labor policies as well as industry regulation both increased and
hindered airline workers' bargaining power.