Labor History Links

Long a bastion of Jewish labor power, garment unions provided financial and political aid essential to founding and building the nation of Israel. Throughout the project, Jewish labor often operated outside of official channels as non-governmental organizations. Adam Howard explores the untold story of how three influential garment unions worked alone and with other Jewish labor organizations in support of a new Jewish state. Sewing the Fabric of Statehood reveals a coalition at work on multiple fronts. Sustained efforts convinced the AFL and CIO to support Jewish development in Palestine through land purchases for Jewish workers and encouraged the construction of trade schools and cultural centers. Other activists, meanwhile, directed massive economic aid to Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine, or pressured the British and American governments to recognize Israel's independence. What emerges is a powerful account of the motivations and ideals that led American labor to forge its own and reshape both the postwar world and Jewish history"-- Provided by publisher

This excerpt is from ananonymously written article by a Chicago school teacher abouther work and personal life.It was published during the depthsof the Great Depression,in The Saturday Evening Post, July 1,1933.The Saturday Evening Postcarried stories on current events, human interest, and editorials, and was one of the most widely circulated magazinesin the United Statesin the 1930s. Includes document and teaching guide.

This is an excerpt from the diary of an anonymous Chicago public school teacher, written duringthe depths of the Great Depression.The excerpt is from a longer portion of the teacher’sdiary published intheNovember 1933 issue ofThe Atlantic Monthlymagazine. The Atlantic Monthlywas a widely read magazinethat reached a national audience, featuring many articles on political and social topics like education, along with literature and poetry. Includes teaching guide

Many immigrants to the United States wrote letters back home. At the time they were written, the missives shaped the expectations of those who would soon make the same journey; today, they gave historians invaluable first-hand testimony of the immigrants’ own experiences. These seventeen letters involved the children of a retired Polish farmer named Raczkowski. Adam Raczkowski went to the United States in 1904 with the financial assistance of his sister Helena Brylska [later Dabrowskis] and his brother Franciszek, who had both previously immigrated. He settled with his brother in Wilmington, Delaware, and obtained factory work. The letters included here cover the years 1904 to 1912 and were written between both Adam and Helena and their sister Teofila, who remained in Poland.

Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations.

Traces the two-hundred-year history of corporate America's battle to achieve constitutional freedom from federal control, examining the civil rights debates and key events that shaped the controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision to extend constitutional protections to businesses. -- Provided by publisher
Introduction: Are corporations people?
Part 1. Corporate origins. In the beginning, America was a corporation
Part 2. The birth of corporate rights. The first corporate rights case ; The corporation's lawyer
Part 3. Property rights, not liberty rights. The conspiracy for corporate rights ; The corporate criminal ; Property, not politics
Part 4. The rise of liberty rights for corporations. Discrete and insular corporations ; Corporations, race, and civil rights ; The corporation's justice ; The triumph of corporate rights
Conclusion: Corporate rights and wrongs
Chronology of corporate rights

Museums and the Working Class is the first book to take an intersectional and international approach to the issues of economic diversity and class within the field of museum studies. Bringing together 16 contributors from eight countries, this book has emerged from the significant global dialogue concerning museums' obligation to be inclusive, participate in meaningful engagement and advocate for social change. As part of the push for museums to be more accessible and inclusive, museums have been challenged to critically examine their power relationships and how these are played out in what they collect, whose stories they exhibit and who is made to feel welcome in their halls. This volume will further this professional and academic debate through the discussion of class. Contributions to the book will also reinforce the importance of the working class - not only in collection and exhibition policy, but also for the organisational psychology of institutions. Museums and the Working Class is essential reading for scholars and students of museum, gallery and heritage studies, cultural studies, sociology, labour studies and history. It will also serve as a source of honest and research-led inspiration to practitioners working in museums, galleries, libraries, archives and at heritage sites around the world"-- Provided by publisher

This set of documents teaching guide helps instructors use a specific primary source set, in the classroom. It offers discussion questions, classroom activities, and primary source analysis tools. It is intended to spark pedagogical creativity by giving a sample approach to the material. Please feel free to share, reuse, and adapt the resources in this guide for your teaching purposes.
Bituminous coal mining spread throughout the newly formed state of West Virginia in the years following the Civil War. Coal was used to heat homes, generate cheap electricity, and produce steel; it was therefore important for a reunited country experiencing a second industrial revolution. Most West Virginia mines were owned by out-of-state interests who took little interest in the mines’ day-to-day work. Before unionization, each miner worked in a specified territory and was paid per ton of coal extracted. Miners got their wages in scrip, a company-created currency accepted in the company store and all but worthless outside the camp. Forced to pay for rent, clothes, food, medical and burial expenses, and even their mining equipment out of meager wages, miners were often trapped in a system that had them “owing their souls to the company store.” This cycle of debt, paired with dangerous working conditions, continuous threats of layoffs due to the market price of coal, and a lack of sanitary housing or adequate schools, left miners angry and ready for change.

Mary Harris Jones, called Mother Jones, was one of the labor leaders who advocated for such change. In a 1912 speech during the Paint Creek mining strike, Jones said: “This day marks the forward march of the workers in the state of West Virginia.” Jones described working conditions in the mines and living conditions in the camps as twentieth-century slavery. Many divisive and bloody actions took place in the southern West Virginia coalfields in response to the call for unionization, including the Paint Creek Massacre, the Matewan Massacre, and the Battle of Blair Mountain. These events were pivotal for the prospect of unionized labor in America, but were little more than side notes in American history until the 1987 movie Matewan and the 1987 book Storming Heaven. This set will help students understand the labor movement among coal miners and serve as a springboard for broader exploration of unionized employment in the United States.

The 3 volumes of photographs in this collection provide a unique gallery of individuals involved in the movement for the equal representation of African Americans in the construction workforce of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Many of the photographs include identification of the individuals pictured, generally in the form of labels affixed to the face of the pictures themselves. While this limits their value as pure visual images, the specific identification of individuals, organizations and dates constitutes an important historical resource. Photographs of Nate Smith include views of him speaking at Operation Dig and meeting with Jesse Jackson concerning Operation PUSH in Chicago. Meetings regarding the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program audits of many construction jobs are also depicted. Photographs of rioting in the Hill District after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are present, as are unique photographs of the officers of Local 11 at the union's offices.

THis museum profilest the African American experience in Iowa while seeing exhibits that interrogate the connection between labor and civil rights.
There are also digitized materials online from this site.

Work in all its guises is a fundamental part of the human experience, and yet it is a setting where emotions rarely take centre stage. This edited collection interrogates the troubled relationship between emotion and work to shed light on the feelings and meaning of both paid and unpaid labour from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Central to this book is a reappraisal of 'emotional labour', now associated with the household and 'life admin' work largely undertaken by women and which reflects and perpetuates gender inequalities. Critiquing this term, and the history of how work has made us feel, Feelings and Work in Modern History explores the changing values we have ascribed to our labour, examines the methods deployed by workplaces to manage or 'administrate' our emotions, and traces feelings through 19th, 20th and 21st century workplaces in Europe, Asia and South America. Exploring the damages wrought to physical and emotional health by certain workplaces and practices, critiquing the pathologisation of some emotional responses to work, and acknowledging the joy and meaning people derive from their labour, this book appraises the notion of a 'work-life balance', explores the changing notions of professionalism and critically engages with the history of capitalism. In doing so, it interrogates the lasting impact of some of these histories on the current and future emotional landscape of labour"-- Provided by publisher

Agnes Nestor’s mother was a textile mill worker. Her father was a machinist and a one-time member of the Knights of Labor who became a city alderman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family migrated to Chicago during the depression of the 1890s, and the teenage Agnes went to work in a glove factory. The sixty-hour work weeks exhausted her. “I have been so tired all day I could hardly work,” she regularly noted in her diary.

This reminiscence by Nestor described how the oppressive conditions of the glove factory pushed her to take a leading role in a successful strike of female glove workers in 1898. Soon she became president of her glove workers local and later a leader of the International Glove Workers Union. She also took a leading role in the Women’s Trade Union League, serving as president of the Chicago branch from 1913 to 1948.

Source: Agnes Nestor. “I Became a Striker.” Woman’s Labor Leader (Rockford, Ill.: Bellevue Books, 1954). Reprinted in Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women: A Documentary History—1600 to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 176–182.

In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as "Little Steel." The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle ensued, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure.

The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. It was in many ways the last great strike in modern America. Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback at most for steelworkers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However, The Last Great Strike tells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history"--Provided by publisher

In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign. Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism a radical and militant program that drew them into the union's ranks in great numbers. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat and it had to be stopped. In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, uncovers the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and lays bare disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society"-- Provided by publisher

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role.

This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism.
While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. and insular government offices and textile and garment businesses incorporated women of the New South and Puerto Rico into manufacturing in distinct yet interrelated ways. Despite these complexities, Crystal Lee Sutton, a mill hand and union member in North Carolina, became the focus of media attention in the early 1970s. She was the basis for the movie Norma Rae (1979). Instead of itemizing the film’s inaccuracies, this module describes how to study the larger historical context, analyze why and how a particular popular culture television show or movie was made, and why it erased or highlighted certain people or details.

Includes Essay, primary sources, bibliography

This webinar provides a brief overview of how Arab Americans were involved in the industrial transformation of the US, from working in its factories to being on the frontlines of labor activism. Equally, this webinar highlights this history by focusing on the story of early Arab American labor, and how to teach this elided narrative in a K–12 curriculum.

Arabs have largely been ignored in narratives of American history, appearing only at its margins. Nineteenth-century Orientalist representations, a subsequent century of Hollywood images, public policies, and coordinated media campaigns, as well as recent decades of militarized encounters in the Middle East have formed and fed a concept of the “Arab” as the “Other”: someone who is physically and morally alien to America, harboring and villainously acting upon beliefs contrary to American core values. Yet Arab Americans have been part of the United States for over 150 years, and their experiences are intimately woven into the narrative of modern America.

Al Davidoff's memoir of the low-wage service workers organizing a union at Cornell University. It describes the stages of creating a healthy, progressive union, including organizing, bargaining, forming campus and community coalitions, and engaging in creative strikes.Al Davidoff, the Cornell student leader who became a custodian and the union's first president, tells the story with passion, sensitivity and wit.
Becoming the union. Mophead
Yes, yes, no
Custodians-that's all you'll ever be
We meet the enemy and it is us
Frankie McCoy
Blackness on the Cornell plantation
Noah's amalgamated ark
Putting power behind our truth. Figuring it out
"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee"
Sustaining struggle : building the union during the "off season"
From grassroots up to grassroots out
In the shadow of the tower

Workers in the United States are losing sleep. In the global economy a growing number of employees hold jobs—often more than one at once—with unpredictable hours. Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety.

Dangerously Sleepy is the first book to track the longtime association of overwork and sleep deprivation from the nineteenth century to the present. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation—and masculinization—of wakefulness in the United States. Since the nineteenth century, men at all levels of society have toiled around the clock by necessity: steel workers coped with rotating shifts, Pullman porters grappled with ever-changing timetables and unrelenting on-call status, and long-haul truckers dealt with chaotic life on the road. But the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized when the entrepreneurial drive of public figures such as Thomas Edison and Donald Trump encouraged American men to deny biological need in the name of success. For workers, resisting sleep became a challenge of masculine strength.

This lucid history of the wakeful work ethic suggests that for millions of American men and women, untenable work schedules have been the main factor leading to sleep loss, newer ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related morbidity and mortality. Dangerously Sleepy places these public health problems in historical context.
Preface
Chapter 1. Sleep Is for Sissies: Elite Males as Paragons of Wakefulness
Chapter 2. In a Drowsy State: The Underregulation of Overwork
Chapter 3. The Long Turn: Steelworkers and Shift Rotation
Chapter 4. Asleep and Awake at the Same Time: Pullman Porters on Call
Chapter 5. Six Days on the Road: Long-Haul Truckers Fighting Drowsiness
Conclusion. The Employers' Dreams

Fighting Toxic Ignorance explores conflict over access to information regarding health hazards encountered in the US workplace during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Alan Derickson considers risks posed by toxic chemicals and physical and biological agents of disease. By the 1970s, occupational disease was estimated to kill up to 100,000 Americans a year.

Derickson unravels the social and political forces and the conflictual process that gave rise to a sustained social movement for a workers' right to know about often-insidious threats. He argues that the decades prior to the emergence of this movement were not a dark age of victimization brought about by enforced ignorance but a time of recurrent battles over the disclosure of needed facts. Workplace warnings—informative signs, labels, and instructions—often saved lives.

Fighting Toxic Ignorance covers a broad range of dangerous substances, deals with a large share of the national workforce, and illuminates the many ways that activists endeavored to see that warnings reached workers, especially immigrants and workers of color.

Bituminous coal miners in Central Pennsylvania were among the most militant and class-conscious workers in the United States in the post-World War I era. Class-Conscious Coal Miners examines the development of working-class consciousness as they fought to sustain their union, jobs, communities, and work pejoratives, what they described as the Miner's Freedom, against mechanization and operator open shop drives in the 1920s. Their struggles brought them into conflict with coal companies, a pro-business federal government, and the business-unionist leadership of the United Mine Workers of America. After the collapse of the bituminous coal industry in Central Pennsylvania starting in the 1950s, working-class consciousness gradually diminished until, in the present century, there has been a marked shift toward political conservatism.

The Alan Lomax collection of Michigan and Wisconsin recordings (AFC 1939/007) documents Irish, Italian, Finnish, Serbian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Croatian, French Canadian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Swedish songs and stories, as well as occupational folklife among loggers and lake sailors in Michigan and Wisconsin. Lomax's itinerary took him from Detroit through the Saginaw River valley to the northern counties of the Lower Peninsula, including Beaver Island. Crossing the Straits of Mackinac, he collected across the Upper Peninsula to the far northern Calumet area and then along the Lake Superior coast to easternmost Wisconsin.

This biography of Roy Reuther examines his tumultuous life, including the triumphs and tragedies in the labor and civil rights movements. It also serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers activists may face as they confront entrenched societal powers. As the brother of famed labor leader Walter Reuther, Roy was a key figure in the historic Flint sit-down strike that gave birth to the United Auto Workers (UAW). He became the political director of the UAW and was deeply involved in struggles to pass civil rights legislation. This book explores his passion for increasing voter participation and his vow to help downtrodden farmworkers.

Many of the injustices that Reuther fought continue to plague America today. This book provides important context for the current efforts of workers to organize, for the Black Lives Matter movement, and for efforts to reform the filibuster rule and stop voter suppression. It shows how dedicated individuals can overcome enormous odds to win great victories for social justice and emphasizes the potential connections between the labor and civil rights movements, offering hope for a more just future.--from the Publisher
ContentsPrefacePrologue
Part I. Formative Years1. Crucible 2. Disciple
Part II. Initial Skirmishes3. Forging a New Path 4. The Long Arm of GM 5. Fania
Part III. The Flint Sit-Down Strike6. Sit-Down 7. Pitched Battles 8. Chevy 4 9. Emergency Brigade 10. Victory
Part IV. Battling Employers and Union Rivals 11. Continuing Battles 12. Fighting on Two Fronts 13. Donnybrook in Milwaukee 14. Defeat and Danger 15. Tool and Die Strike
Part V. Marriage, Fatherhood And Victory 16. A New Beginning 17. The Winding Path Forward 18. Battle on the Boardwalk 19. Fatherhood and Triumph Part VI. The Shootings 20. Shotgun Blasts 21. Changed Lives
Part VII. Political Action 22. Building Political Powe r23. Changing Tides 24. Fighting LBJ 5. A New Home 26. The Campaign
Part VIII. Common Cause 27. Bright Vision 28. Dark Cloud 29. Getting Out the Vote (GOTV) 30. Race Traitor 31. Marching for Freedom
Part IX. Civil and Voting Rights 32. Transition 33. Showdown 34. Controversy and Landslide 35. Three Martyrs
Part X. Denouement 36. Changing Times 37. Fear and Hatred 38. Schisms 39. Battling Texas Rangers 40. Things Fall Apart
Epilogue Author’s Note and AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

The Alaska Labor News published its first issue on September 30, 1916, in its role as the official paper of the Alaska Labor Union. It was printed by Charlie Herron's Anchorage Publishing Company, which he used to publish the Anchorage Daily Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer and the Anchorage Weekly Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer which he owned. Editors of the Alaska Labor News included R.E. Hegner, Charles Granty, and Lena Morrow Lewis.

Herron canceled the printing contract with the Alaska Labor News after less than a year, due to alleged anarchist influence from members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and it ceased independent publication on June 30, 1917. Shortly after, on July 14th, Herron renamed his Anchorage Weekly Times to the Anchorage Weekly Times and Alaska Labor News, adding in union coverage. He emphasized his past support of the Alaska Labor Union and indicated that this new paper still had their approval.

This marriage of general and union news started with one page per issue dedicated to labor matters and issues and the hiring of Charles H. Packard, a former president of the Alaska Labor Union, to be the editor of the labor content in his new paper. In practice, though, the labor content seems to have often been limited to one or two columns scattered throughout the paper. The last issue of the Anchorage Weekly Times and Alaska Labor News was on August 15, 1918, but any semblance of a labor section in the paper had disappeared long before that. On August 22, 1918, the paper changed its name to the by then more accurate title, Anchorage Weekly Times.

In the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly was desperate to distance his organization from the accused anarchists and maintain the order’s respectability. The day after the bombing he stated that it was the duty of every organization of working men in America to condemn the outrage committed in Chicago in the name of labor. Though there were exceptions, most assemblies of the Knights followed Powderly’s lead. Albert Parsons, a long-time member of the Knights and one of the Haymarket defendants, viewed Powderly’s lack of support with bitterness and wrote the following letter from jail on his tenth anniversary of joining the Knights, July 4, 1886.