Labor History Links

Who Built America? surveys the nation’s past to show the role that working people played in the making of modern America and the transformations wrought by the changing nature and forms of work. Explore more than 2000 historical documents in the History Matters Repository, read Historians Disagree essays written by prominent scholars, watch documentary films, and take A Closer Look at select topics. Use My WBA? to create shareable collections for use as course packets, assignments, or presentations. Produced by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Who Built America? surveys the nation’s past to show the role that working people played in the making of modern America and the transformations wrought by the changing nature and forms of work. Explore more than 2000 historical documents in the History Matters Repository, read Historians Disagree essays written by prominent scholars, watch documentary films, and take A Closer Look at select topics.

Use My WBA? to create shareable collections for use as course packets, assignments, or presentations.

The untold story of how U.S. development efforts in postwar Latin America helped lead to the dismantling of the U.S. welfare state. ... In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism." --Dust jacket

"This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North."--Jacket

This book is a journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, the Marxist feminist Andrea D'Atri traces the history of the women's and workers' movement from the French Revolution to Queer Theory. She analyzes the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends.

With the global working class made up of a disproportionate number of women, women are central in leading the charge for the next revolution and laying down blueprints for an alternative future. D’Atri makes a fiery plea for dismantling capitalist patriarchy.

Say the word "work," and most people think of some form of gainful employment. Yet this limited definition has never corresponded to the historical experience of most people--whether in colonies, developing countries, or the industrialized world. That gap between common assumptions and reality grows even more pronounced in the case of women and other groups excluded from the labour market. In this important intervention, Andrea Komlosy demonstrates that popular understandings of work have varied radically in different ages and countries. Looking at labour history around the globe from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Komlosy sheds light on both discursive concepts as well as the concrete coexistence of multiple forms of labour--paid and unpaid, free and unfree. From the economic structures and ideological mystifications surrounding work in the Middle Ages, all the way to European colonialism and the industrial revolution, Komlosy's narrative adopts a distinctly global and feminist approach, revealing the hidden forms of unpaid and hyper-exploited labour which often go ignored, yet are key to the functioning of the capitalist world-system. Work: The Last 1,000 Years will open readers' eyes to an issue much thornier and more complex than most people imagine, one which will be around as long as basic human needs and desires exist."-- Publisher's description

My Lady Vaudeville and her White Rats, 1909 Vaudeville was a theatre-based variety show that gained popularity in the 1880s. It became an important form of mass culture, drawing large audiencesthrough the 1920s. Vaudeville and other popular entertainment at the turn of the nineteenth century, includingcircus, minstrel shows, medicine shows, and sideshows,operated within the larger trends of mass society. This is an excerpt from the memoir, My Lady Vaudeville and her White Rats,written by vaudeville artist and labor organizer, George Fuller Golden. Includes documents and teaching guide

If the railroads won the Gilded Age, the coal industry lost it. Railroads epitomized modern management, high technology, and vast economies of scale. By comparison, the coal industry was embarrassingly primitive. Miners and operators dug coal, bought it, and sold it in 1900 in the same ways that they had for generations. In the popular imagination, coal miners epitomized anti-modern forces as the so-called “Molly Maguire” terrorists. Yet the sleekly modern railroads were utterly dependent upon the disorderly coal industry. Railroad managers demanded that coal operators and miners accept the purely subordinate role implied by their status. They refused. Fueling the Gilded Age shows how disorder in the coal industry disrupted the strategic plans of the railroads. It does so by expertly intertwining the history of two industries—railroads and coal mining—that historians have generally examined from separate vantage points. It shows the surprising connections between railroad management and miner organizing; railroad freight rate structure and coal mine operations; railroad strategy and strictly local legal precedents. It combines social, economic, and institutional approaches to explain the Gilded Age from the perspective of the relative losers of history rather than the winners. It beckons readers to examine the still-unresolved nature of America’s national conundrum: how to reconcile the competing demands of national corporations, local businesses, and employees.

Israel, Jewish, New York, Palestine,

Known best by his knack for moneymaking, turn-of-the-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie nonetheless found a moment to pen a one-sided poetic tribute to the “eighth wonder” of the world—steel manufacturing in his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plant. This brief poem reflected how he (and other contemporaries) viewed the monumental process of steelmaking. The poem was notable for its use of passive voice and the absence of workers—miners, railroad men, or blast furnace crews—from the process by which “one pound of solid steel” came to be.
Source: Harold Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Boston: Little Brown, 1975), 189.

In this highly accessible social and intellectual history of American anarchism in the United States, Andrew Cornell reveals an amazing continuity and development across the twentieth century. Far from fading away, anarchists dealt with major events such as the rise of Communism, the New Deal, atomic warfare, the black freedom struggle, and a succession of artistic avant-gardes stretching from 1915 to 1975. This book traces U.S. anarchism as it evolved from the creed of poor immigrants militantly opposed to capitalism early in the twentieth century to one that today sees resurgent appeal among middle-class youth and foregrounds ecology, feminism, and opposition to cultural alienation"--Provided by publisher

At one time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodiment of America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for Black America, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation for nearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, the assaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencing of labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten among large segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large. The editors of Refraining Randolph have taken Randolphs dusty portrait down from the wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new, and often competing, lights. The contributors represent the diverse ways that historians have approached the importance of his long and complex career in the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-century African American history specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. The central goal of Refraining Randolph is to achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal. -- Publisher

This book compares sources of worker and employer power in Germany, South Africa, and the United States in order to identify the sources of comparative U.S. decline in union power and to more precisely analyze the nature of labor-movement power. It finds that this power is not confined to allied parties, union confederations, or strikes, but rather consists of the capacity to autonomously translate power from one context to the next. By combining their product, labor market, and labor law advantages through their dominant employers' associations, leading firms are able to impose constraints on labor's free collective bargaining regionally and nationally, defeating employer interests that are more amenable to labor in the process. Through an examination of these patterns of interest organization, the book shows, however, that initial employer advantages prove to be contingent and unstable and that employers are forced to cede to more far-reaching demands of increasingly organized workers"-- Provided by publisher
I. Power in Theory and Context
1. Contending Theories of Labor Power 3
1.1 Introduction 3
1.2 Worker Power: Lost in Isolation, Found in Translation 13
1.3 Why Size and Structure Aren’t Everything 21
1.4 Mind the Gap: Labor and Democratization 29
1.5 Method, Sources, and Case Selection Rationale 37
2. Contextualizing Workers’ Power 43
2.1 Introduction: Varieties of Labor Power and Logics of
Collective Action 43
2.2 Power-Resource and Employer-Centered Approaches 58
2.3 Faces of Power in the Politics of Production 65
2.4 Varieties versus Uniformity of Capitalism: The Firm in
Global Context 70
2.5 Conclusion: Collective Action at the Present Conjuncture 77
II. Employer Strategy and Collective Action
3. Varieties of Firm Strategy: Monopolization, Cartelization,
Concentration 85
3.1 Introduction: Trusts versus Cartels in Theory and Practice 85
3.2 U.S. Steel Trusts versus Cartels 89
3.3 German Steel Trusts versus Cartels 94
3.4 South African Mining 103
3.5 Conclusion 112
Contents
4. Varieties of Employer Associations: Origins, Development,
and Divergence 121
4.1 Introduction 121
4.2 German Employers’ Associations, from Kaiserreich to
Postwar Reconstruction 124
4.3 U.S. Employer Associations 130
4.4 South African Employer Associations 134
4.5 Conclusion 139
III. Workers: Outlaws, in the Law, and by the Law
5. Failed Incorporation and Union Response 147
5.1 Introduction: From Labor Exclusion to Ambiguous Inclusion 147
5.2 Codetermination in the German Workplace between the Wars 151
5.3 South African Unionization, from Its Origins to the Apartheid Era 161
5.4 Shop-Floor Contention in U.S. Manufacturing before the NLRA 173
5.5 Conclusion 182
6. Varieties of Juridification 188
6.1 Introduction: Labor Law and Juridification 188
6.2 Germany 195
6.3 The United States 199
6.4 Canada 210
6.5 South Africa 217
6.6 Conclusion 221
IV. From Postwar “Golden Quarter–Century” to
Post–Cold War Interlude
7. The “Golden Quarter-Century”: Revival, Containment, or
Decline? 229
7.1 Introduction: Cold War Stabilizations? 229
7.2 German Codetermination, from Adoption to Adaptation 232
7.3 South African Social Movement Unionism’s Rise and Fall 247
7.4 U.S. Business Unionism from the 1940s to the 1960s 250
7.5 Conclusion 252
8. Union and Employer Relations after the “Golden
Quarter-Century” 256
8.1 Introduction: Increasing Exit and Voice, Diminishing Loyalty 256
8.2 Workplace Rights and Contestation in Germany 260
8.3 Revolts of the Unrepresented in South Africa 273
8.4 Dissociations of Representation from Struggle in the United States 286
8.5 Conclusion 297EBSCOhost: eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) printed on 11/1/2025 4:54:48 PM UTC via NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY - FOUNDERS MEM LIB. All use subject to
https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use.
Contents vii
V. Collective Action Before and in the Global
Economic Crisis
9. From Tripartism to Global Economic Crisis 303
9.1 Introduction: The Absence of U.S. Tripartism in
Comparative Perspective 303
9.2 Failed Tripartism in South Africa 306
9.3 Failed Tripartism in Germany 322
9.4 Conclusion: Beyond Tripartite Bargaining 327
10. Conclusion: Doing the Work of Crisis without Crisis? 328
10.1 The Argument and Way Forward 328
10.2 What Is to Be Done? 334

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred nearly all Chinese from US shores for ten years. Gyory traces the origins of the Act, contending that rather than confronting divisive problems such as class conflict, politicians sought a safe, non-ideological solution to the nation's industrial crisis.

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.
Introduction: Karl Marx, Ghost in the American Machine
1. American Revolutionary: The US Civil War
2. Working-Class Hero: The Gilded Age
3. Bolshevik: The Russian Revolution
4. Prophet: The Great Depression
5. False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism
6. Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism
7. Humanist Liberator: The New Left
8. Theorist: Academia in the Age of Reagan
9. Specter Haunting: Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

In the mid-twentieth century, corporations consolidated control over agriculture on the backs of Mexican migrant laborers through a guestworker system called the Bracero Program. The National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU) attempted to organize these workers but met with utter indifference from the AFL-CIO. Andrew J. Hazelton examines the NAWU's opposition to the Bracero Program against the backdrop of Mexican migration and the transformation of North American agriculture. His analysis details growers' abuse of the program to undercut organizing efforts, the NAWU's subsequent mobilization of reformers concerned by those abuses, and grower opposition to any restrictions on worker control. Though the union's organizing efforts failed, it nonetheless created effective strategies for pressuring growers and defending workers' rights. These strategies contributed to the abandonment of the Bracero Program in 1964 and set the stage for victories by the United Farm Workers and other movements in the years to come.

By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s

This book explores the political economy of labor repression, expanding the meaning of repression by looking at the relation of politics to economics. It explains how and why this relation leads to the repression of labor and considers how labor repression develops over time from the social relation of capital and labor, and how this is expressed over the course of US history

In his testimony before the U.S. Senate, Slavic steelworker Andrew Pido described the discrimination faced by some immigrant workers and how that discrimination - along with long pay and poor conditions—encouraged them to unionize and strike.

From the era of Irish Famine migration to the passage of quota restrictions in the 1920s, household domestic service was the single largest employer of women in the United States, and, in California, a pivotal occupation for male Chinese immigrants. Servants of both sexes accounted for eight percent of the total labor force - about one million people.

In Brokering Servitude, Andrew Urban offers a history of these domestic servants, focusing on how Irish immigrant women, Chinese immigrant men, and American-born black women navigated the domestic labor market in the nineteenth century - a market in which they were forced to grapple with powerful racial and gendered discrimination.

Through vivid examples like how post-famine Irish immigrants were enlisted to work as servants in exchange for relief, this book examines how race, citizenship, and the performance of domestic labor relate to visions of American expansion. Because household service was undesirable work stigmatized as unfree, brokers were integral to steering and compelling women, men, and children into this labor. By the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government became a major broker of domestic labor through border controls, and immigration officials became important actors in dictating which workers were available for domestic labor and under what conditions they could be contracted. Drawing on a range of sources - from political cartoons to immigrant case files to novels - Brokering Servitude connects Asian immigration, European immigration, and internal, black migration

This exhibit focuses on the period of Chinese Exclusion that lasted from 1882-1943. Under the guidance of Rutgers Professor, Andy Urban, student curators conducted original research examining the history of Chinese immigration to New Jersey under the Exclusion laws. This exhibit represents the culmination of a semester-long exploration into the role that immigration laws and policies have played - and continue to play - in shaping the United States as a nation. At the heart of this exhibit is the question: what represents a fair and just approach to immigration?
This exhibit represents the culmination of a semester-long exploration into the role that immigration laws and policies have played - and continue to play - in shaping the United States as a nation. Focusing on the period of Chinese exclusion that lasted from 1882 to 1943, students conducted original research using files from the National Archives in New York, in order to examine how exclusion affected the Chinese community in New Jersey.

The history of Seabrook Farms is largely forgotten in New Jersey. Our state's residents rarely think about where their food comes from, who grows it, and what costs are associated with its production. In this story, production comes at the cost of civil liberties, self-determination, and racial equality. Given the relevance of these issues today, we want to remind people that the forced choice between security and rights can create unanticipated, complicated consequences.

Invisible Restraints: Life and Labor at Seabrook Farms is an online exhibition curated by undergraduate and graduate students in the fall 2015 Rutgers University course, "Public Histories of Detention and Mass Incarceration," which was cross listed between American Studies, Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, and History, and taught by Professor Andy Urban.

Famous for its frozen vegetables, by 1950 Seabrook Farms was the largest agribusiness in the United States, employing more than 6,000 seasonal and permanent laborers during peak production periods. Located in rural Upper Deerfield Township, approximately 30 miles south of Philadelphia, recruiting a sufficient supply of laborers had always been a challenge to the company. Military conscription and increased production demands caused by wartime contracts only exacerbated the situation. The war, however, also created opportunities for Seabrook to procure new sources of labor. This included approximately 2,500 American citizens (Nisei) and immigrants of Japanese descent (Issei) incarcerated in internment camps. While federal officials defended internment as a matter of national security, no evidence backed this claim, and no formal charges were ever brought against any of the detained. Internment reflected white Americans’ longstanding belief that Japanese immigrants and their children were racially unassimilable.
Home
Introduction
Origins, Innovations, and Early Labor Struggles
Housing Migrant Labor
Internment and Paroled Work Release
Recruiting and Housing Paroled Internees
Divisions of Labor at Seabrook
A Destination for the Stateless
Displaced Persons
"Americanization" and Reparations for Internment
Pluralism and Postwar Life at Seabrook
Childhood and the Defense of Innocence
Conclusion
Timeline
I Remember
Visual Essays
About
Bibliography

Andrew Wender Cohen examines the contested & contingent origins of the modern American economy. He looks at how in the early 20th century tradesmen combined to thwart the ambitions of national corporations, at the origins of unionism, & at the influence of racketeering

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in this book, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians -- as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see

Angela Davis' chapter on the unpaid labor of domestic housework as an aspect of women's oppression, with a focus on how this impacts black women in the U.S.

What does globalization look like in the rural South? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi's chicken processing communities and workplaces, where large numbers of Latin American migrants began arriving in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest paid jobs in the country. Based on six years of collaboration with a local workers' center, activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse explores how Black, white, and new Latino residents have experienced and understood these transformations. Illuminating connections between the area's long history of racial inequality, the poultry industry's growth, immigrants' contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers' prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future"--Provided by publisher

1. Southern Fried: Globalization and Immigrant Transformations
2. Dixie Chicken: Racial Segregation, Poultry Integration, and the Making of the “New” South in Central Mississippi
3. The Caged Bird Sings for Freedom: Black Struggles for Civil and Labor Rights, 1950–1980
4. To Get to the Other Side: The Hispanic Project and the Rise of the Nuevo South
5. Pecking Order: Latino Newcomers, Receptions, and Racial Hierarchies
6. A Bone to Pick: Labor Control and the Painful Work of Chicken Processing
7. Sticking Our Necks Out: Challenges to Union and Workers’ Center Organizing
8. Walking on Eggshells: Illegality, Employer Sanctions, and Disposable Workers
9. Plucked: Labor Contractors and Immigrant Exclusion
10. Flying Upwind: Toward a New Southern Solidarity

Postscript
Home to Roost: Reflections on Activist Research