Labor History Links

1978 book on the coal miners of Harlan County in the 1930s. John W. Hevener separates the fact from the legend in his Weatherford Award-winning investigation of Harlan's civil strife, now available for the first time in paperback. In Which Side Are You On? Hevener attributes the violence–-including the deaths of thirteen union miners–-to more than just labor conflict, viewing Harlan's troubles as sectional economic conflict stemming from the county's rapid industrialization and social disorganization in the preceding decade.

In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend

This testimonial by Johnnie Tillmon, published in 1972, forcefully points out that welfare is a women's issue. Tillmon was bom in 1928 in Arkansas and started to organize welfare mothers in Los Angeles in 1963 when her health forced her to quit working and go on welfare. She later served as the first chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), an advocacy group founded by George Wiley that lobbied for a guaranteed annual income by arguing that welfare was a basic right of citizenship. Her testimony accentuates the demeaning aspects of going on welfare (the requirement that in order to receive aid, there must not be a man in the house was later modified) and how marginal an existence it provides. She reminds us that the majority of poor families are white, not black, and mocks the idea of 'the dignity of work" when the only work available keeps families stuck in poverty. And she punctures the commonly held view that black women have more babies in order to get more welfare money: 'Having babies for profit is a lie that only men could make up, and only men could believe." More than anything else, she argues for treating women’s work, both paid and unpaid, as worthy of support and respect. "If I were president, I would solve this so-called welfare crisis in a minute and go a long way toward
liberating every woman. I'd just issue a proclamation that "women's" work is real work."

A wave of teacher strikes in the 1960s and 1970s roiled urban communities. Jon Shelton illuminates how this tumultuous era helped shatter the liberal-labor coalition and opened the door to the neoliberal challenge at the heart of urban education today.

Drawing on a wealth of research ranging from school board meetings to TV news reports, Shelton puts readers in the middle of fraught, intense strikes in Newark, St. Louis, and three other cities where these debates and shifting attitudes played out. He also demonstrates how the labor actions contributed to the growing public perception of unions as irrelevant or even detrimental to American prosperity. Foes of the labor movement, meanwhile, tapped into cultural and economic fears to undermine not just teacher unionism but the whole of liberalism"-- Provided by publisher

Margaret Haley, sixth grade teacher and Vice Presidentof thefirst teacher union in the US (theChicago Teachers’ Federation),gave this speech at the National Education Association conventionin St. Louis, Missouri, July 1, 1904.At the time, the NEA was not a union. The NEA was dedicated to advancing the cause of public education. Its members included teachers and administrators from around the country. Haley’s speech was also published in the Journal of Education. Includes Teaching Guide (pdf link)

The movement for a shorter workweek that once defined the labor movement in the United States was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the changes that occurred within organized labor and traces their influence on the decline of the shorter hours movement. Focusing on the internal union politics of the influential United Automobile Workers and Local 600, its chapter at Henry Ford's massive River Rouge factory, Jonathan Cutler demonstrates how an all-but-forgotten interracial movement for a shorter workweek during the 1950s and 1960s became a casualty of an increasingly top-heavy union bureaucracy that lost touch with the desires, fears, and aspirations of rank and file workers and dug its own grave in the process. Jonathan Cutler examines the political context in which the shorter hours movement emerged within Local 600 in the 1940s, then chronicles the attempts by Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW, to suppress it. Cutler also reviews the role the Communist Party played in the controversy. Finally, he documents the UAW response to rank and file pressure for a shorter workweek, and how the local's own organizational flaws allowed Reuther and the national union to wrest control from the dissidents

The first all-primary source reader in labor history published in nearly one hundred years, "The Voice of the People" presents excerpts from fifty-four primary sources to blend labor history’s traditional focus on the growth of a union movement with windows into all aspects of workers lives -- their workplaces, their unions, their home lives and their culture -- the engaging selections mirroring the great diversity of the American workforce from the colonial era to the present. Arranged into four parts, each of which begins with an original overview of the corresponding period in American history, this unique compilation of edited documents -- each of which is preceded by a contextual introduction -- offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves how specific events as well as general trends in American labor history affected real people, whether farm laborers, slaves, servants, mill hands, prostitutes, assembly-line workers, office temps, fast-food employees, or union leaders. -- From product description

In order to challenge the emphasis on extreme economic individualism espoused by Gilded Age industrialists and laissez-faire theorists, labor writers drew on diverse historical and religious traditions. Jose Gros, writing in The Carpenter in 1895, turned to religious traditions, specifically the biblical parable of Cain and Abel. Gros used the parable’s central question—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—to criticize economic individualism and make the case for cooperation and brotherhood.

Source: Jose Gros, “Cain,” The Carpenter, 15 (May 1895): 12.

In August 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) called an illegal strike. The new president, Ronald Reagan, fired the strikers, establishing a reputation for both decisiveness and hostility to organized labor.

As Joseph A. McCartin writes, the strike was the culmination of two decades of escalating conflict between controllers and the government that stemmed from the high-pressure nature of the job and the controllers' inability to negotiate with their employer over vital issues.

PATCO's fall not only ushered in a long period of labor decline; it also served as a harbinger of the campaign against public sector unions that now roils American politics."--Jacket

In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis.

Although publicists for the Gilded Age corporations celebrated efficiency and the science of management, their employees did not always join the celebration. What looked like careful and disciplined management from one perspective was often viewed as petty tyranny from below. While some workers assailed upper management for this abuse others experienced the tyranny more directly in their day-to-day work lives. In this transcript taken from testimony before the U. S. House of Representatives in the late 1880s, Joseph P. Cahill, a worker in the freight department of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, described the petty tyrannies inflicted on workingmen by the company dispatcher.

From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early 1960s, public-sector unions generally had no legal right to strike, bargain, or arbitrate, and government workers could be fired simply for joining a union. Public Workers is the first book to analyze why public-sector labor law evolved as it did, separate from and much more restrictive than private-sector labor law, and what effect this law had on public-sector unions, organized labor as a whole, and by extension all of American politics. Joseph E. Slater shows how public-sector unions survived, represented their members, and set the stage for the most remarkable growth of worker organization in American history. Slater examines the battles of public-sector unions in the workplace, courts, and political arena, from the infamous Boston police strike of 1919, to teachers in Seattle fighting a yellow-dog rule, to the BSEIU in the 1930s representing public-sector janitors, to the fate of the powerful Transit Workers Union after New York City purchased the subways, to the long struggle by AFSCME that produced the nation's first public-sector labor law in Wisconsin in 1959. Slater introduces readers to a determined and often-ignored segment of the union movement and expands our knowledge of working men and women, the institutions they formed, and the organizational obstacles they faced

Steelworker Joseph Fish Speaks on the 1919 Steel Strike (History Matters): In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworker Joseph Fish described conditions in the steel mills as good and maintained that only “one or two” Americans have joined the strike. This document is useful for showing how the workforce was divided along ethnic lines

Labor leaders like Denis Kearney and H. L. Knight of California’s Workingmen’s Party often resorted to popular racist arguments to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In an 1878 address, Kearney and Knight described the Chinese as a race of “cheap working slaves” who undercut American living standards and thus should be banished from America’s shores. A few American labor leaders, mostly in the radical and socialist wing of the movement, were more sympathetic. In this 1878 editorial in the Labor Standard attacking demands for Chinese workers to be deported, Irish-born socialist Joseph McDonnell reminded readers that the arrival of virtually every ethnic group in America had been met with the same “intolerant, silly and shameful cry” of “Go home!” Though voices like McDonnell’s were exceptional, they serve as reminders that some late nineteenth-century white Americans were able to pierce the veil of prejudice that men like Kearney and Knight erected against Asian immigrants.

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the 'browning' of the nation's middle class-once considered a de facto 'white' category-over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations. Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order"-- Provided by publisher

Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands (northeastern North America) followed a seasonal schedule of hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and the cultivation of crops. They relied upon cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and squash for much of their food. Men primarily provided the meat and fish, while women were responsible for supplying cultivated vegetables along with wild berries, nuts, and fruit. While men helped clear the fields, women did the planting, weeding, and harvesting in the warm months.

Many European observers remarked upon what they saw as drudgery inflicted upon Indian women. However, Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and writer, was also a keen ethnographic observer of the details of Iroquois life. In this account, he noted the similarities between farm women’s work in Europe and among the Iroquois.
Source: Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. and trans. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth I. Moore, 2 vols (Toronto,: The Champlain Society, 1974–77), 2: 47, 54–55.

"Out of the "lemons" handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California - low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination - Mexican men and women made "lemonade" by transforming leisure spaces such as pool halls, movie theaters, baseball games, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, Jose Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET

"This volume offers a crucial and long overdue historical intervention in the study of modern surveillance and capitalism in the United States. At a basic level, it historicizes what has been taken as unprecedented, revealing a deep logic to surveillance as a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control traceable to the late eighteenth century forward.
The chapters in this book highlight a variety of surveillance practices that predate computers and miniaturized electronics-from the disciplinary control of enslaved labor, to the management of customer service staff, to the solicitous scrutiny of hotel guests before 1950. Many of the chapters illustrate the power of written records-account books, lists, and reports-as technologies of control, monitoring, and investigation.
By historicizing modern surveillance, this volume shows how post-9/11 surveillant practices and contemporary digital platforms are elaborations, rather than breaks, from the past. Though surveillance themes are often implicit in historical studies, as in the fields of labor history and the history of civil rights, the chapters in this collection make such themes explicit and central to the story of American capitalism"-- Provided by publisher

Japanese immigration to Pacific states began in the 1880s after anti-Chinese legislation led to a shortage of cheap labor. Labor recruiters for factories, rail roads, mining camps, fisheries and plantations looked to Japan to recruit cheap labor from abroad (Takaki 180). The rising Japanese population led to the Census Bureau creating a “Japanese” category for race, distinct from the “Chinese” race and subsequent anti-Japanese legislation was passed in the United States.

Anti-Japanese sentiments culminated with Executive Order 9066 in 1942–3 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The order interned Japanese Americans, including those who were citizens, in camps primarily located in Mountain and MidWest states. Executive Order 9066 did not intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii.

I will analyze how the internment of Japanese Americans affected their migration patterns across the United States. I will also analyze how the citizenship status (the Nisei) of Japanese Americans affected their migration.

From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York's labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories--how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance - it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. 00Exhibition: In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York (From May 1, 2019)

In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change.

He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today's behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam.

Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now
Introduction
"Like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter" : the invention of the factory
"The living light" : New England textiles and visions of utopia
"The progress of civilization" : industrial exhibitions, steelmaking, and the price of Prometheanism
"I worship factories" : Fordism, labor, and the romance of the giant factory
"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country" : crash industrialization in the Soviet Union
"Common requirements of industrialization" : Cold War mass production
"Foxconn City" : giant factories in China and Vietnam
Conclusion

How do news images of events such as a strike or uprising shape viewers’ understanding of what happened? Examination of the leading images of 1877 railroad strikes and Great Uprising, by a leading historian of the era, with accompanying reflection questions for students.

In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation.

Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution.

Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans. By tracing the lives and careers of the nation's most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today" -- Provided by publisher

-- The Ledger and the Chain is a gripping story of human traffickers as labor allocators in the American South at a pivotal time. It focuses on how a constellation of white businesspeople—principally John Armfield, Rice C. Ballard, and Isaac Franklin—bought, transported, jailed, and sold ten thousand of their African-descended fellow Americans and how their firm, Franklin & Armfield, exemplified American capitalism of the early nineteenth century. The title points to the marriage of the bland business technology of the ledger and the bloody violence of the chain. The juxtaposition unravels a seeming contradiction between capitalism and slavery. The book's subjects put the capitalist virtues of social trust, investment, optimism, and creative problem-solving into the service of incarcerating, raping, deracinating, and forcing the labor of thousands of Black Americans, killing many along the way.

This work chronicles the rise of Western Union Telegraph from the early years of telecommunications to its apogee as the first corporation to monopolize an industry on a national scale. The battles over Western Union's monopoly illuminate the fierce tensions over the rising power of corporations after the Civil War and the reshaping of the American political economy.

A compelling look at the movements and developments that propelled America to world dominance beginning in 1945 and moving through McCarthyism and Vietnam, from the Great Society to Morning in America