John J. Kulczycki Boeken

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this book provides the first complete account of the Polish miners' union in the Ruhr and places it in the wider context of the German labor movement, from the pre-World War I mass strikes to the dramatic post-war events which eventually saw its dissolution. The author persuasively argues that the union's demise does not signal an inherent contradiction between national and social solidarity. Rather, the conflict between these two ideals lies chiefly in the pre-war and post-war history of the Polish Trade Union. With this book, the author convincingly furthers his revisionist challenge of the standard view of the Polish workers' relationship to their German counterparts.Praise for the author's previous book, The Foreign Worker and the German Labor Movement (Berg, 1994): 'a fine piece of scholarship which deserves a wide audience among anyone interested in Imperial Germany, labor history, migration, or nationalism' (Central European History).

Based on extensive research in Polish and German archives this book documents the major developments within the labor movement in the Ruhr, including the mass strikes of 1889, 1905 and 1912 and the so-called 'Polish Revolt' of 1899. The author argues that Polish militancy generally exceeded that of native miners and calls into question the standard view of the Polish workers' relationship to the labor movement. This revisionist book begs a reconsideration of the role that foreign labor plays in modern industrial societies.