This collection of essays explores the dynamic new face of Southern labour since 1950. Life and Labor in the New New South weaves together the best work of established scholars with emerging cutting-edge research on ethnicity, gender, prison labour, deindustrialization, rapidly changing demographic and employment patterns, and popular response to globalisation.

Contributors include Jane Berger, Michael Bess, Robert Bussel, Robert Chase, David Ciscel, Michael Dennis, Tami Friedman, Michael Honey, Max Krochmal, Timothy Minchin, Bruce Nissen, and Michael Pierce. The essays examine such topics as southern deindustrialization, union activism in the healthcare industry, labour-community coalitions, the politics of southern anti-unionism, and immigrant labour in southern agriculture.

One chapter uses a dual biography of two postwar Mexican-American activists in Texas to reconstruct the Chicano-Black coalitions in 1960s Dallas and San Antonio. The volume as a whole creates a distinguished profile of a southern workforce that has been dramatically transformed since 1950, with the pace of change accelerating over the past two decades.

Robert Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Florida and author of For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865