Note: there are a number of topical listings within the chronological page on this site.
Here is a list of some topics available there, within specific chroonological time frames.
Native American Labor
Indentured Servants
Slave Labor
Asian
Labor (and reaction to) in the late 19th century
U.S. Sweatshops/Child Labor late 19th-early 20th
Miners and mine strikes
Labor and Religion in 19th century
Radicals of the Early 20th century labor movement
Global Labor
I will have more topical listings on this page in the future
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The system, simplified:
Thanks to Steven Barleen for recommending this. Click picture to order |
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Radicals |
Primary Sources /Bibliography
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Industrial Workers of the World (see chronological page as well)
- Jim
Crutchfield's site -an amazingly site, with many many primary sources.
These include s views
of the IWW by outsiders
- IWW site
- even more wonderful materials from their library
- Memories
of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl” (speaking
at Northern Illinois University in 1962)
- Sabotage,
by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
- Why I am A Member of the IWW
- 19
documents from the IWW from Michigan State University website
- Trial
of Big Bill Haywood, 1907
- Bill
Haywood, The General Strike (1911)
- Lucy
Parsons, Knights of Labor activist and anarchist, became a member
of the IWW
- Lucy
Parsons, 1853-1942 — Industrial Workers of the World leader
- Lucy
Parsons (1853-1942): The Life of an Anarchist Labor Organizer —
by Joe Lowndes, Free Society
- The Lucy
Parsons Project Links to articles and primary documents about
Parsons
- Life
of Albert Parsons by Lucy Parsons (1889-entire book)
- Ben
Fletcher – the renowned African-American Wobbly Organizer
- Emma
Goldman
- THE
LIFE AND TIMES OF EMMA GOLDMAN A Curriculum for Middle and High
School Students (free speech fights)
- When
Toil Meant Trouble: Butte's Labor Heritage IWW Frank Little
- Holt
Labor Library site on the Bread and Roses strike —has poem,
numerous links, bibliography
- Camella
Teoli Testifies about the 1912 LawrenceTextile Strike
- The
Paterson Strike Pageant Program
- Eight
Hours in the Forenoon, Eight Hours in the Afternoon”: An IWW Organizer
Describes the Horrors of Rural Work
- Hunter
bear’s reflections on Little
- More
Old Time Wobbly Stuff by Hunter gray
- Hunter
Bear’s perspective on the Wobblies influence
- T-Bone Slim Pens “The
Lumberjack’s Prayer”
- Historical
background to the Everett Massacre, 1916 (free speech fight, repression)
- Socialist
Songbook
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Repression then and now
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- Freedom of Information site of the FBI. Declassified FBI records, many labor-oriented
- Use of the Illinois National Guard in Labor Conflicts
- From Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22. (doc file)
- Pinkerton Labor Spy (1907, entire book) by Morris --expose' of sabotaging of Colorado labor unions
- Coming soon
- The Confessions of Harry Orchard (1907, entire book)Under threat of death, Harry Orchard "confessed" to Pinkerton agents that the Western Federation of Miners had assassinated the former Idaho governor. This is the well-distributed result.
- Bill Millikan on the Citizens' Alliance of Minneapolis- early 20th through 1930s(see also section on 1934 strike-scroll down)
- The CIA in St. Louis (large pdf) see also section of Radical Unionism website
- Bethlehem Mines Corp. Police Department Report 1926
- Thugs for Hire: Ads for Security Guards
- Plugging the Leaks: A Specialist Spies on Union Activities, 1903
- Union-Busting at Cripple Creek
- Pride and Joy: Specialists in Breaking Strikes, 1917
- “I Was Not Wanted Any Longer”: A Retail Worker Joins the Union in 1914 and Gets Fired
- Pinkertons in the Couer d’Alene Uprising of 1892
- strike breaker number one (article on Pearl Berghoff 1930s strikebreaker)
- Rosemary Feurer, "Union City, Company Towns" (essay, pdf) includes seminal role of A.A. Ahner Agency in midwest in 1930s
- Section of Radical Unionism material about spies and agents at community level in 1930s, and the Mohawk Valley Formula
- New name, same mission: Employer's Association continues the anti-union work of its predecessor, the Citizen's Alliance By Bill Millikan
- Bustin' unions: Under ‘Crape-Hanger’ Davidson, businesses perfected ways to crush workers (Minneapolis)
- The Labor Spy Racket by Leo Huberman (entire book for download- follow link to pdf file)
- The 1983 Morenci Mine Strike
- Private Police: Armed & Dangerous Covert Action Quarterly on the reemergence of goon squads UNFAIR ADVANTAGE Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards by Human Rights Watch, 2000
- Kate Bronfenbrenner No Holds Barred (2009 report) The Intensification of
Employer Opposition to Organizing
- Annual Survey of violations of trade union rights
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Ads from a St. Louis business journal
Members of the St. Louis Posse Comitatus in the 1900 streetcar strike, organized by the St. Louis businessmen's Citizen's Industrial Alliance. (large pdf file)
Special Response Corporation Guards Taping locked out Celanese workers at the plant gates, Meredosia, Illinois, 2005. SRC's owners in Meredosia videotapes children outside the homes of locked out workers to raise the tensions of workers, in a common tactic used--provoke violence in order to get stronger injunctions |
Labor Day
May Day |
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Occupational Safety and Health |
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Women at Work and In the Labor Movement
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- Reference sources for Women and Labor
- WORKING WOMEN'S HISTORY PROJECT
- Women Working 1800-1939 provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including 7,500 pages of manuscripts
- 3,500 books and pamphlets 1,200 photographs"
- Alexander Street site for women social movements history, has numerous documents and lesson plan ideas ; this is the list of materials available chronologically some of these, such as How Did the Perceived Threat of Socialism Shape
the Relationship between Workers and their Allies in the
New York City Shirtwaist Strike, 1909-1910? are restricted to subscription access only, through a university. Sometimes the site allows free access-inquire.
- Women workers in Industry, from the University of Pittsburgh --documents 20th century examples, including Fannie Sellins
- Women Pioneers in American Memory: On the Job
- What the pay gap costs families: Equal pay has been the law since 1963, but the reality has not caught up with the law
- Gender Pay Gap by Occupation
- Gender Gap of Earnings Navigate to about midway through the webpage, go to Race and Sex, then see paragraph and charts beginning with “News on the Gender Gap” and through to the end of that section on women. The source of the information is at the bottom of the page
-
Women
as Bread Winners—the Error of the Age” An AFL spokesman
presents an argument against women as workers, 1897
- Hours
and Conditions of Mercantile Jobs for Women, Indiana, 1914 (entire
book)
- Report
on conditions of women and children in 19 volumes, 1912-1916 (entire
book/volume; other selected volumes slowly becoming digitized)
- Beyond
Bed Pans: The Life of a Late 19th-century Young Nurse
- A
Separate Peace: Alice Henry on Women and Unions (1915)
- Dissatisfied
With the Lives They Live: Farm Women Describe Their Work in a 1913 U.S.
Department of Agriculture Report
- Housewives
in Uniform: Domesticity as Military Duty (WWI)
- “Sadie’s
Servant Room Blues”: 1920s Domestic Work in Song
- “Experiences
of a ’Hired Girl’”: An Early Twentieth-Century Domestic
Worker Speaks Out
- “When
the Whistle Blows . . . I Come Home and Get Supper”: Women and
Work in the Interwar Years
- U.S.
Labor And Industrial History World Wide Web Audio Archive
including UE’s Nathan Spero who argued for comparable worth for
women in the 1940s, Teach In with the Labor Movement (1997), Sam Darcy
- Rosie
the Riveter: Real Women Workers in World War II
- WORKING
WOMEN'S HISTORY PROJECT – documents from the 1970s about work,
organizing
- Mr.
Smith, Take a Memo from Womankind (1971) The intensely sexist
world of clerical work as told by an insider.
- Cleaning
Up from Womankind (1972.) A first person account from a City
Hall janitress about her fight against race and gender discrimination.
On
Being a Waitress from Womankind (1972) An experienced waitress
explains what it is like to serve your food. Not always an appetizing
job.
- “I
Climbed Poles, I Ran Cable, I Ran a Jackhammer:” Faith Robinson
Describes Harassment On the Job
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African
American-Labor History—20th century |
- African-American Labor History --lots of links, chronologies, booklists, video lists, some primary documents
- Black Worker resources
- Workplace Toxins and African Americans
- Still Cookin by The Fireside: African-Americans in Food Service
- A. Philip Randolph, 1889-1979 on-line exhibit
- Black History –slide show from the California Federation of Teachers, slide show
- Black Workers Remember by Jacquelyn Jones, article in the American Prospect
- Behind the Veil African American Life in the Jim Crow South
- The Power of Remembering: Black Factory Workers and Union Organizing in the Jim Crow Era — by Michael Honey, Organization of American Historians, 3/13/2001
- I AM A MAN : An Exhibit Honoring the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike
- National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis 1968 garbage strike
- Race and Money—statistics of income and jobs
Documents
- A Black Migrant Recalls Life in Philadelphia
- Digging for Answers: A Black Miner Ponders Racism, 1891
- The Sayings of Henry Stephens Carl Sandburg, 1917 (pdf)black miner in Springfield Illinois
- Selected documents from the Gompers papers --contains some on black workers
- “Can I Scrub Your White Marble Steps?”
- We Are Literally Slaves”: An Early Twentieth-Century Black Nanny Sets the Record Straight
- Industrial Conditions Among Negro Men in Boston by John Daniels, Charities (Oct. 7, 1905). (to be posted)
- The Negro in Times of Industrial Unrest in 3 labor strikes in Chicago 1900-1905, by R. R. Wright, Charities (Oct. 7, 1905). (to be posted)
- “Drug Him Through the Street”: Hughsey Childes Describes Turn-of-the-Century Sharecropping
- “Still Livin’ Under the Bonds of Slavery”: Minnie Whitney Describes Sharecropping at the Turn-of-the-Century
- AMERICAN NEGRO PROBLEMSWorkers Library Publishers originally published this pamphlet, an arm of the Communist Party. This pamphlet is quite scarce in the original.
- The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the CIO—perspective by Bill Fletcher
- "The Bottom of
the Economic Totem Pole": African American Women in the Workplace
(1960s)
Members of the National Negro Labor Council protest Sears' refusal to hire African-American women as clerks.
The 9 month protest resulted in victory, 1953. See (pdf) |
- We Remember—website about the 1968 Memphis garbage workers strike; few people recognize that when King was killed, he was supporting garbage truck drivers in a strike. This was in the midst of his poor people’s movement, a movement designed to unite poor people of all colors
- The Poor People’s Movement—oral history memories of King’s poor people’s movement, designed to unite people—incredible, heartbreaking
- We Must Destroy the Capitalist System that Enslaves us: Stokely Carmichael advocates black Revolution
- Excerpts from the Kerner Commission on Civil Unrest and the relationship between economic deprivation and urban uprisings. Powerful report, unfortunately, this was never acted upon
- Kerner Commission Report on Civil Unrest: The American Dream does not exist for All people another excerpt
- Moving Beyond the Notion of the “Black Rioter”— the reality of institutionalized racism in jobs and education. Powerful
- King's last speech in Memphis (Mountaintop speech);
- League of Revolutionary Black Workers — by A.Muhammad Ahmad. African-American labor organization formed in Detroit in the 1960s
- Steelworkers vs. Weber - On the affirmative action lawsuit that ended discrimination against African-Americans in the steel mills
- Ten Myths about Affirmative Action—one of the most polarizing issues of the era was based on much mythology
- “The White Man’s Law”: African-American Migrant Workers Tell Congress Their Version of a Strike, 1970
- Women on Welfare -- (pdf) 'Having babies for profit is a lie that only men could make up." Johnnie Tillmon testimony, 1971.
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Uncategorized:
On-Line look at Union Labels
History of Migration and Immigration Laws in the United States
United Construction Workers Association politics of fair employment in Seattle
Filipino
Cannery Unionism Across Three Generations 1930s-1980s
Farmworker
Organizing in Washington
Children
& Youth in America: A Documentary History on-line book that includes
much about child labor and apprenticeships
Jewish
Labor Committee The Jewish voice in the labor movement, and the voice of
the labor movement in the Jewish community.
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