Labor History Links

Documentary on the Bracero Program, 1942-1965. Hidden within the historical accounts of minorities, workers and immigrants in American society is the story of the millions of Mexico's men and women who experienced the temporary contract worker program known as the Bracero Program.

Established to replace an alleged wartime labor shortage, research reveals that the Program intended to undermine farm worker unionization. Harvest shows how several million men, in one of the largest state managed migrations in history, were imported from 1942 to 1964 to work as cheap, controlled and disposable workers.

The documentary features the men and women speaking of their experiences and addresses what to expect from a new temporary contract worker program. The politics of the Bracero Program laid the foundation for Mexican workers to follow the path to the US. NAFTA further impoverished the farmers of Mexico, and another generation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans demand a just immigration policy. The film is profoundly relevant to deconstructing anti-immigrant policies, lending a historical explanation to the contemporary issues of immigration in the US and global debates on migration.

Consider pairing Harvest of Loneliness with the lesson plan entitled "Tejano Experience."

Shedding light on the current debate over immigration reform and the use of “guest workers” in American agriculture, this historical documentary examines what was known as the Bracero Program—a system put in place from 1942 to 1964 to recruit Mexican farm laborers for temporary work in the United States. The film presents ample testimony from surviving braceros as well as family members and descendants of these displaced workers, who typically went north expecting not just high wages but also humane treatment and working conditions—expectations that were rarely if ever met.

Featured experts include Mexican activist and politician Victor Quintana, Bracero Program in California author Henry Anderson, and several others. Extensive archival material is also included. The DVD contains both an English and a Spanish version of the program. (58 minutes)

The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans.

On May 3, 1886, unarmed strikers clashed with police at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works factory. The deaths of six workers became a call for direct action, and a public rally was called for the following day to be held in Haymarket Square. Again, the police and the strikers clashed, but this time a bomb was thrown, resulting in the death of seven policemen and many in the crowd were injured. The police, uncertain about the source of the bomb, fired into the crowd, killing four of the demonstrators.

The identity of the bomb thrower is still a mystery, but eight men were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit the act. All eight were convicted of the conspiracy charge even though it was understood none had made or thrown the bomb. August Spies, a German anarchist, laborer, and activist, and Albert Parsons, a socialist laborer, activist, and former Confederate soldier from Texas, had been among the fiery and well-known speakers at the rally. Spies and Parsons, along with Adolph Fischer and George Engel, were executed by hanging. Louis Lingg, the fifth condemned to die, committed suicide while awaiting his sentence by biting down on a blasting cap in his cell. Three other defendants—Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab—were sentenced to prison terms, but were pardoned in 1893.

Dyer D. Lum, a close confidant of the strikers and a well-known author and editor of anarchist texts, compiled A Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists in 1886, which carries his view that the eight men were victims of an inquisition to weed out and destroy labor activism.

documents and teaching guide, with an extended activity suggestedThe Transcendentalist reformer Orestes Brownson first published “The Laboring Classes” in his
journal, the Boston Quarterly Review, in July 1840. It is an attack on the entire wage system but particularly focuses on how factory jobs affect the mill girls: “‘She has worked in a Factory,’”
Brownson argues, “is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.”

Inre sponse, “A Factory Girl” published a defense of the mill girls in the December 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering, a journal of articles, fiction, and poetry written by and for the Lowell
factory operatives. The author was probably Harriet Jane Farley, a mill girl who eventually became editor of the Lowell Offering

In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains, a popular history now considered a classic. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County. His daughter Ginny drew on his notes and files, and her own research, to complete this book-length account of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-13.

An exciting yet relatively unknown episode in American labor history took place in New York City between 1965 and 1975. Rank-and-file members of numerous unions caught a "strike fever" as they challenged the entrenched power of some of the country's most powerful politicians, employers, and union leaders in a wave of contract rejections, wildcat strikes, and electoral campaigns. Workers in unions across New York wanted more than better contracts: they contested control of the work process, racism on the job, and workers' place in America's socioeconomic hierarchy while implicitly and explicitly demanding greater democratic control of their representative organizations. Some initial challenges were effective and succeeded in delivering better contracts and unseating undemocratic leaders. However, those early successes were short-lived. Glenn Dyer traces the way workers were met with employer recalcitrance and union attacks that proved too powerful to organize against. In the face of this resistance, workers retreated into a survivalist attitude of accommodation and resignation, contributing to the decline of social democratic New York and working-class power in the city. Ultimately, Dyer argues, the failures of the rank-and-file organizing efforts in New York City, which was the biggest center of organized labor in the country, shows how stunted workers' aspirations and numerous defeats not only uprooted the foundations of New York's uniquely social democratic polity but also ushered in a national era of increased working-class subservience that has resonance today

Bridging Solidarity is a digital map that fosters exploration of Pittsburgh’s long labor history. This project introduces audiences to fourteen strikes or strike-related conflicts across Allegheny County from the early nineteenth century to today, by combining secondary literature, newspapers, digital and physical archival material, visual media, and historic maps. Hosted in the platform HistoryPin, Bridging Solidarity promotes engagement with strikes across time and space, inspires an appreciation for local places, and highlights many diverging experiences within Pittsburgh’s labor movement. The article contextualizes this work within three historic subfields: digital humanities, place-based public labor history, and diverse local labor history. This project’s digital inception influenced its design, preservation, and writing, as informed by the insights of digital historians. Place-based history helps audiences better understand local labor history, grounding its interpretation in relevant sites that are publicly accessible and likely familiar to audiences. Additionally, this project centers marginalized people and the ambiguities of strikes past, presenting a complicated narrative that increases public awareness of how women and African Americans have influenced and experienced Pittsburgh’s history. Last, future expansions of this project will prompt further engagement with these historical subfields.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman’s Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923.

Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women’s groups. While the National Woman’s Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women’s movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority.

The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education—most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act—and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states - three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification.

Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a “unisex society” while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft.

In the following 1970 Senate hearing, author and editor Gloria Steinem argued that opposition to the ERA was supported by deep-seated societal myths about gender that exaggerated difference, ignored factual evidence of inequitable treatment, denied the importance of the women’s movement, and promoted male domination.

The labor struggles of the early 20th century, many of which ended in violence and death, engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations. The most important—the Commission on Industrial Relations—was appointed by newly elected Democratic president Woodrow Wilson early in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike erupted in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. One of the most famous accounts of what came to be called the “Ludlow massacre” was the statement of a young electrical engineer, Godfrey Irwin, who was traveling through southern Colorado and provided an eyewitness account to a New York World reporter, reproduced here.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium’s citizens after the German army’s sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. “Food Will Win the War,” declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts.

Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste—these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as “Hooverizing.” Women’s magazines also took up the home conservation crusade, some employing military analogies to promote the recommendations of the Food Administration. Presenting domestic work as patriotic effort, this U.S. Food Administration campaign in Good Housekeeping offered women a membership shield and even provided instructions for sewing a “patriotic” housekeeping uniform.

This is a speech by Charles Hamilton Houston at the International Labor Defense[ILD]Conference, July 15, 1939. Houston was a civil rights lawyer. At the time he made this speech he was the Chief Legal Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).The Scottsboro Case refers to the arrest and trial of twelveyoung African American men in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931, charged on suspiciously false testimony (later proved false) of rape.Both the NAACP and the ILD providedlegaladvice andservices, challenging the false charges.The legal battle for justicelasted for many years, and was widely coveredin the media

The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 has long been overshadowed by the assassination of its architect, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the political turmoil of that year.

In a major reinterpretation of civil rights and Chicano movement history, the author demonstrates how King's unfinished crusade became the era's most high-profile attempt at multiracial collaboration and sheds light on the interdependent relationship between racial identity and political coalition among African Americans and Mexican Americans.

The author argues that while the fight against poverty held great potential for Black-brown cooperation, such efforts also exposed the complex dynamics between the nation's two largest minority groups

William Penn’s colony of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, attracted many poor European migrants. Many colonists financed their migration by arriving as indentured servants. Indentured servants were an important source of labor in the colonies; those arriving in the 17th century usually signed contracts (known as indentures) for a fixed term and upon completion received their freedom and a suit of clothes, a similar practice to apprenticeship. However, the Germans whom Gottlieb Mittelberger observed in the mid-18th century had no formal contracts; instead they were auctioned off to he highest bidder upon arrival, a practice that Mittelberger labeled as barbaric, and “a sale in human beings.” Mittelberger, an organist and schoolmaster, found much in North America not to his taste, and returned to Germany in a few years where he wrote a book warning Germans of the dangers of emigration to the New World.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many colonists arrived as indentured servants or bondsmen who served a term of service before receiving their freedom. This practice meant that impoverished Germans and other Europeans financed their passage across the Atlantic. Between 1749 and 1754 more than 30,000 Germans came to Pennsylvania, and by mid-century they constituted about one third of the colony’s population. Gottlieb Mittelberger arrived in Philadelphia in late 1750 aboard the Osgood, along with 500 of his fellow countrymen. With fortunes better than most, he settled as an organist and schoolmaster in New Providence, a German farming community outside Philadelphia. He found much distasteful about his new home and returned in 1754 to write an expose warning Germans about fraudulent accounts of ideal conditions in America.

Tour #1: Boott Cotton Mills Boardinghouses
#2: John Street Congregational Church
#3: Kirk Street Agent’s House
#4: Lowell High School

Deaths shootings, marches, route of the Mulkeytown march

Site documents the Illinois mine wars, including images, interviews, and locations where events occurred. In March 1932, the wage contract between Illinois coal operators and United Mine Workers District 12 miners expired. With coal demand and prices waning, operators sought to substantially reduce miner’s pay. District leadership negotiated a reduction from $6.10 per day to $5.00. However, the contract was subject to rank and file approval.

A vote was held in July 1932, and the union membership soundly rejected the agreement. District President John Walker called on UMWA President John L. Lewis to come to Illinois to convince miners accept the deal. However, when Lewis or Walker spoke publicly in support of the new agreement, they were often met with catcalls and organized protests from the rank and file.

On August 6, a new election was held. Before the tallies could be made public, the ballots were stolen. Instead of retrieving the ballots or holding a new election, John L. Lewis immediately declared an emergency and imposed the $5.00 per day agreement on the workers. (Later, the license plate number of the robbery get-away car was traced to District 12 Vice President, Fox Hughes.)

In protest, miners organized mass pickets in a number of coal towns in Central Illinois. On August 24, a mass march was organized to win the support of workers in the Southern part of the state. The huge caravan was met by scores of deputies and thugs at Mulkeytown, Illinois. Vehicles were upended and workers were shot at and beaten.

Eight days later, delegates representing tens of thousands of miners assembled in Gillespie, Illinois. They voted to break from the UMWA and form a new union, the Progressive Miners of America (PMA).

The audio documentary, We Were Not Ladies. We Were Women. is a feature-length audio documentary that chronicles the story of Agnes Burns Wieck and her tumultuous year as president of the Illinois Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America 1932-1933

In September, 1932 thousands of Illinois miners split from the United Mine Workers of America to form a dissident union, the Progressive Miners of America. More than a factional dispute, the Illinois mine war would determine whether a union’s power could be wielded autocratically by its leaders, or if the miner’s union would be governed democratically by its members. And under Agnes Burns Wieck’s leadership, the women of the coal fields would assert themselves as equal partners in the struggle.

Narrated by Kim Holmes, this story is told through first-person accounts, many taken from the Oral History Collection of the University of Illinois Springfield, interviews with scholars, and historical reenactments featuring Diane Pritchard as Agnes Burns Wieck.

"In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, soon became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the lean, austere car magnate; on the other, the Amazon, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Indigenous workers rejected Ford's midwestern Puritanism, turning the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. And his efforts to apply a system of regimented mass production to the Amazon's diversity resulted in a rash environmental assault that foreshadowed many of the threats laying waste to the rain forest today."--Publisher description

Jay Fox (1870-1961) was a journalist, intellectual, and labor militant, whose influence rippled across the country. In Writing Labor's Emancipation, historian Greg Hall traces Fox's unorthodox life to shed light on the shifting dynamics in US labor radicalism from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Radicalized as a teenager after witnessing the Haymarket tragedy, Fox embarked on a lifetime of organizing for labor unions, helping build anarchist communities (including Home, Washington), and, perhaps most notably, working as a writer. Thanks to his accessible writing style, insightful working-class perspective, and sharp wit, he became a popular and influential voice, often in dialogue with fellow anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons. Drawing on previously unused sources, Hall both explores Fox's life and shines a light on the utopians, revolutionaries, and union men and women with whom Fox associated and debated. Hall's research ultimately provides valuable knowledge of the lived experiences of working-class Americans and brings to light alternative visions for activism and social change"-- Provided by publisher

Democracy Now's interview with Greg Mitchell on the movie produced about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when police in Chicago shot at and gassed a peaceful gathering of striking steelworkers and their supporters, killing 10 people, most of them shot in the back. Most of the interview uses scenes from the documentary. It was a time like today, when unions were growing stronger. The workers were on strike against Republic Steel, and the police attacked them with weapons supplied by the company. The tragic story is told in a new PBS documentary. "The mass media, right up to _The New York Times_, was supporting the police story that they had no choice but to open fire on this mob," says Greg Mitchell, who directed the new PBS documentary, _Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried_, and edited a companion book that is the first oral history on the tragedy.

The first film to fully explore the 1937 tragedy in Chicago, when police shot and killed ten pro-labor marchers--and the shocking film cover-up that followed. This haunting episode transformed union organizing in the U.S. while revealing the dangers of official secrets and media suppression, with profound lessons for Americans today. Directed by Greg Mitchell and Produced by Lyn Goldfarb.Film and book explore the tragic, but largely forgotten, 1937 incident in Chicago when police shot 40 steel workers and supporters (mainly in the back) and killed ten of them. Then Paramount suppressed the only footage of the murders, until a famed investigative reporter and crusading U.S. senator brought it to light.

Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labour relations, and politics. Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations' differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I's impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labour; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics. Throughout, many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other's trade union and political cultures
Table of Contents:
Quite Like Ourselves: Opposition to Military Compulsion during the Great War in the United States and Australia / Robin Archer
Workers against Warfare: The American and Australian Experiences before and during World War I / Verity Burgmann and Jeffrey A. Johnson
Domestic "Dogs of War" Unleashed: The Comparative Fates of Municipal Labor and Socialist Politics in the United States and Australia during the Great War / Shelton Stromquist
In Not a Few Respects, a Common History: Women, Wartime Lawmaking, and the Prosecution of Dissenters / Diane Kirkby
From Whips to Wages: From Coercive to Incentive-Driven Labor / Jennie Jeppesen
Union-Avoidance Strategies in the Meat Industry in Australia and the United States / Marjorie A. Jerrard and Patrick O'Leary
Catholic Irish Australia and the labor movement: race in Australia and nationalism in Ireland, 1880s-1920s / Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall
Gatekeepers and "Americanizers": Irish Americans and the Creation of a Multicultural Labor Movement in the United States, 1880s-1920s / James R. Barrett
Causes of Railroad Labor Conflict: The Case of Queensland, Australia, and the Northern US Plains, 1880-1900 / Bradley Bowden and Peta Stevenson-Clarke
Comparative Mutinies: Case Studies of Working-Class Agency in the 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 1863, and the Australian Imperial Force, 1918 / Nathan Wise
How to Build a Trade Union Oligarchy: Guidance from the United States and Australia, 1886-1970 / Scott Stephenson
Experience of Labor in the Age of Reform: Workers' Subjectivity, Welfare Legislation, and Liberal Hegemony in 1930s Australia and the United States / Benjamin Huf
Controlling Consumption: A Comparative History of Rochdale Consumer Cooperatives in Australia and the United States / Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave
Anarchy at the Antipodes: Australian Anarchists and Their American Connections, 1885-1914 / Tom Goyens
An Agitator Abroad: P.H. Hickey, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, 1900-1930 / Peter Clayworth
Harry Bridges's Australia, Australia's Harry Bridges / Robert Cherny
Conclusion: Harvesting the Fruits of Transnational and Comparative History / Shelton Stromquist and Greg Patmore

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy.

Gregg Andrews's Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures"-- Provided by publisher

Edwards was a world lecturer, journalist, social worker, labor organizer, womens rights advocate, and civil rights activist, an undeniably important figure in the social struggles of the first half of the twentieth century. This the first book-length biographical study of this remarkable, historically significant woman.

Edwards, granddaughter of runaway slaves, grew up in Jim Crow era Houston and started her career there as a teacher. She moved to Gary, Indiana, and Chicago as a social worker, then to New York as a journalist, and later became involved with the Communist Party, attracted by its stance on race and labor.

She was mentored by famed civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, who became her special friend and led her to pursue her education. She obtained scholarships to college, and after several years of study in the U.S. and then in Denmark, she became a womens labor organizer and a union publicist.

In the 1930s and 1940s, she wrote about international events for black newspapers, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and the Soviet Union and presenting an anti-imperialist critique of world affairs to her readers. Edwards's involvement with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, her work in a Jewish refugee settlement in Italy, and her activities with U.S. communists drew the attention of the FBI.

An exploration of the idea of selective and forced slave breeding in the U.S. based on the collective memory and folktales of the descendants of enslaved people