Labor History Links

A digital exhibit on the life, community and union organizing, political career, and untimely death of Mexican-American activist Rudy Lozano. Active in International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute.

A 2 volume anthology of the Cold War's effects on the American Labor Movement.

Provides an account of the theatrical strategies used by consumers, farmers, agricultural laborers, and the federal government to negotiate competing rights to food and the moral contradictions of capitalist society in times of economic crisis.
The New Deal vision for agriculture : USDA exhibits at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair
Milk dumping across America's dairyland : the May 1933 Wisconsin dairymen's strike
Playing "housewife" in Polonia : the 1935 Hamtramck (Michigan) women's meat boycott
Hunger on the highway in the cotton South : the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers' demonstration
Staging the Agricultural Adjustment Act : the Federal Theatre Project's Triple-a plowed under (1936)

Published by the Montana Historical Society Press, Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 offers a child’s eye view of “the Richest Hill on Earth.” PDFs of several sections of Mining Childhood are available for teachers to download at no charge to share with their students. In addition, several lesson plans are available to help teach this material.

As part of the Montana Historical Society's Landmark Program, funded by National Endowment for the Humanities, Montana 2014 Teacher of the Year Anna Baldwin created lessons targeted to grades 4, 7-8, and 11 that use text excerpts, as well as historic photographs and other primary sources, to help students master new skills and explore questions such as how neighborhoods shape our identity as we grow up; how childhood play has changed; and how unions can both unify and divide people. Another lesson, created by Mississippi teacher Melinda Moore, uses excerpts from Mining Childhood to explore contrasting experiences of childhood.

Each lesson is tied closely to the Common Core standards for English/Language Arts and suggests strategies for improving student literacy. Video clips provide a detailed view of how to implement one of the fourth grade lessons and a model for strategies to engage students in interpreting challenging texts. At the link you will be able to:

Download Excerpts
“Coming of Age in Wartime,” in “Chapter 1, Children of the Hill,” Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012): 50-55.
“Chapter 2, Mining Childhood,” in Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012): 64-110.
“Chapter 4, Child’s Play: Risk and Resilience,” in Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012): 135-77.
"Historical Perspective" and "Newsboys" in “Chapter 6, Learning to Labor," Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012): 218-27.
“Chapter 7, Memories of a McQueen Childhood,” in Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012): 249-77.

Download Lesson Plans
Grade 4: Play Places in Butte Lesson Plan and Columbia Gardens Knowledge Rating Sheet
Grades 7-8: Unions and Strikes and Conflict Resolution and Frayer Chart
Grades 7-8: Descriptive Childhood
Grades 10-12: Butte Newsboys and the Industrial Workers of the World
Grades 10-12: Cadet Nurses Corps

Teaching Techniques
The following video clips demonstrate techniques used in the lesson "Play Places in Butte." Modeling the lesson are lesson creator Anna Baldwin, fourth-grade teacher Dan Ries, and Mr. Ries's students at Arlee Elementary School, Arlee, Montana.
Play Places in Butte, Part 1—Columbia Gardens: Photograph as Primary Source
Play Places in Butte, Part 2—Mineyards and Railway Tracks: Memoir as Primary Source
Play Places in Butte, Part 3—Remembering Columbia Gardens, Knowledge Rating
Play Places in Butte, Part 4—Remembering Columbia Gardens, Knowledge Rating continued
Play Places in Butte, Part 5—Remembering Columbia Gardens, Learning from Oral History
Play Places in Butte, Part 6—Putting the Evidence Together: What Did Columbia Gardens Mean to Butte’s Children?

Linking the personal and the political Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a "struggle for the breeches." The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity the sexual division of labor and sexual mores changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history. Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire Glasgow and London she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies. Workers faced a "sexual crisis," Clark claims as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability others might be homophobes wife-beaters and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class.

If we are to fully understand how slavery survived legal abolition, we must grapple with the work that abolition has left undone, and dismantle the structures that abolition has left in place.

Child Slavery before and after Emancipation seeks to enable a vital conversation between historical and modern slavery studies - two fields that have traditionally run along parallel tracks rather than in relation to one another. In this collection, Anna Mae Duane and her interdisciplinary group of contributors seek to build historical and contemporary bridges between race-based chattel slavery and other forms of forced child labor, offering a series of case studies that illuminate the varied roles of enslaved children.

Duane provides a provocative, historically grounded set of inquiries that suggest how attending to child slaves can help to better define both slavery and freedom."--Publisher's description

During the 1983-86 copper miners’ strike against Phelps-Dodge, Anna Ochoa O’Leary served as one of the presidents of the Morenci Miner’s Women’s Auxiliary, an organization of women historically dedicated to support efforts of striking copper miners. She resigned that position when the strike ended and resumed her studies at the University of Arizona, where she is now an Associate Professor, the Head of Mexican American Studies, and Co-Director of the Binational Migration Institute. Today we share an excerpt from her contributions to the forthcoming volume Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona. Written in 2018

The Communist-led Unemployed Councils mobilized jobless men and women in hundreds of local communities to demand jobs and better treatment from relief authorities. In these excerpts from a recorded interview,

Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed. She also talked about the focus of local councils on issues like fighting for more relief and stopping evictions.

Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers' lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves - even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one's safety, dignity, and selfhood

Even as substantial legal and social victories are being celebrated within the gay rights movement, much of working-class America still exists outside the current narratives of gay liberation. In Steel Closets, Anne Balay draws on oral history interviews with forty gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworkers, mostly living in northwestern Indiana, to give voice to this previously silent and invisible population. She presents powerful stories of the intersections of work, class, gender, and sexual identity in the dangerous industrial setting of the steel mill. The voices and stories captured by Balay — by turns alarming, heroic, funny, and devastating — challenge contemporary understandings of what it means to be queer and shed light on the incredible homophobia and violence faced by many: nearly all of Balay’s narrators remain closeted at work, and many have experienced harassment, violence, or rape.

Through the powerful voices of queer steelworkers themselves, Steel Closets provides rich insight into an understudied part of the LGBT population, contributing to a growing body of scholarship that aims to reveal and analyze a broader range of gay life in America.
Contents
Setting the scene
Bridging the divide between work and home
Secrecy : its logic and consequences
Female masculinity in the steel mill
Male masculinity in the steel mill
Danger and death in and out of the mills
Unions in twenty-first-century America

Shadows in the land of sunshine
The strikes, the partisans, and the press
Arbitration and analysis
"A wildly stirring story": Steinbeck's interpretation
The conversion of Carey McWilliams
Raids and reaction
The trial
Literary repercussions
Following the forgotten Americans
Paul Taylor finds a photographer
The road to The Grapes of Wrath
Voices from the battlements
"Something must be done, and done soon!"
Aftermath

The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages traces the evolution of a new global labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from Manila to Manhattan, from Baja California to Bangladesh, from Capetown to Cambodia. This is an up close and personal look at globalization and its costs, as seen through the eyes and told whenever possible through the words of low-wage workers themselves: the berry pickers and small farmers, fast food servers, retail cashiers, garment workers, hotel housekeepers, home health care aides, airport workers and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety and a living wage. The result of 140 interviews by award-winning historian Annelise Orleck, and with original photographs by Liz Cooke, this is a powerful look at neo-liberalism and its damages, a story of resistance and rebellion, a reflection on hope and change as it rises from the bottom up"-- Provided by publisher

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to “redeem” the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization’s attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. Black Knight Frank J. Ferrell faced an uproar when he was invited to socialize with fellow white Knights at the convention. The attitude of an anonymous Knight of Labor, interviewed here, typified the not-in-my-neighborhood reaction of many white Knights to Ferrell’s crossing of the color line.
Source: Peter Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). © 1984 by Temple University.

This ongoing project explores both publicly remembered and untold history of the American labor movement. The site showcases a selection of photographs from documented sites across 45 states accompanied by a brief project summary. "The story of the American labor movement is vast, fractured and astoundingly complicated. The story is one of exceptional violence. There is also much that is reprehensible and shameful. Yet there is much more that instills hope and inspiration. This is every working American's history, a history that has been denied, but whose lessons have never been more imperative. How to effectively re-instill these crucial stories into the larger collective memory is a monumental, but essential, challenge."

Exhbiitions and Digital Archives (searchable) from a significant workers museum in Europe
Digital Exhibits and Archives includes: Labour history themes:
Workers’ assembly building
Denmark’s Stauning
International solidarity
The Easter crisis
Security policy – War and Peace
Democracy and the Constitution
The Storming of the Stock Exchange, 1918
Space for everyone

1. May – The battle for time
The Early Labour Movement
The Trade Union Movement – Then and Now
Gender struggle is class struggle
Social Democratic Prime Ministers
Marx and the Manifesto
Parties

Exhibits:
1950s
Take a trip to the decade where Denmark said goodbye to war and scarcity, and when working families became consumers. After World War II, there were still shortages and rationing of many goods, which affected the lives of working families. But during this decade, the private economy flourished, and consumer culture grew strongly influenced by the US. This exhibition invites you into the home of a working-class family, where you can sense the emerging prosperity. On a trip through the shopping street, you can experience the shortage of goods from the war and post-war period gradually being replaced by a greater supply.

The Movement 1871-2021
Experience the early beginnings of the movement in the 1870s, and delve into the cultural rise of the labour movement in the 1920s and the great mergers of the trade union movement in the 21st century. And explore the movement’s own representations of vast networks of organisations.

The Children’s Workers Museum
At the Children’s Workers Museum, our youngest visitors can experience and play their way into the lives of working-class children from when great-grandma was a child.
Take a stroll through the small working-class apartment, down the narrow back stairs and look up into the scarce daylight and see the laundry hanging on strings as you explore the backyard. But watch out for the rats and mean, old Aksel in the bog-house!

The Banquet Hall
The Banquet Hall is the heart of the Workers’ Assembly Hall from 1879. It is embellished with decorations and picturesque details that testify to the pride of the many different trades and craftsmen who have used the building. The Banquet Hall has been the facility for countless meetings, political discussions, congresses, and parties, and here, thousands of workers have participated in democracy and community life. The Banquet Hall underwent a major restoration in 2021. Enjoy the beautiful hall with its many stories from floor to balcony. Explore the life that has unfolded in the hall over time and experience the exhibitions and the unique sound and light installation throughout the day.

Industrial Work
What is a worker? From the mid-1800s until today, the answer to that question has changed drastically. New machines and processes, mass production and unemployment have forced the workers to constantly adapt. The question is, are workers even a unified group with common goals?

Battle of the Commons
In the attic, you find a beautiful room above the Banquet Hall, where a dramatic light-and-sound exhibition unfolds. Here, you can experience the origin story of the labour movement.

We Are the Workers
Experience the exhibition We are the workers, where you step right into Danish history. You meet servants and rural workers, machinists and white-collar workers. Skilled and unskilled workers. Individually vulnerable people, finding strength by standing together. This is the story of equal rights, the right to vote, of strikebreakers and Dandy proletarians, conciliation and hunger. But also about reform, revolution, progress, and leisure.

Café & Øl-Halle “1892” The workers’ own restaurant
The restaurant, Café & Øl-Halle, has been part of the Workers Assembly Hall since1879. In the beginning, billiards and beer were the big attractions. But over time, the great open-faced sandwiches and eminent service took over.

The Workers Songbook (temporary exhbitition)
For 100 years, the Workers’ Songbook has given voice to hope, struggle, and community. This summer at the Workers Museum, you can experience an exhibition celebrating the red songbook and the song culture that has helped shape the Danish labour movement.

By way of introduction : on Wobblies & their songs. Preface / Archie Green ; Lost and found : other IWW songs and poems / Franklin Rosemont ; "Their horrid gold" : John Handcox and the uncopyrighted red songbook / David Roediger ; Sizzlooks, scissorbills, sab cats and songs : language and image in Wobbly expressive art forms / Salvatore Salerno
All the songs from the IWW song book, 1909-1973
Other IWW songs & poems, somehow not included in the Little red songbook
Variants & parodies : how Wobblies & others adapted and/or updated their songs
Songwriters tell their stories. How I wrote the "Red flag" / Jim Connell ;
On "Halleluiah on the bum" / Harry McClintock ;
The story of the IWW's Little red song book / Richard Brazier ;
Joe Hill and the Wobbly song tradition / Carlos Cortez
History & commentary : diverse reflections on the Wobbly song tradition. John Neuhaus,
Wobbly folklorist / Archie Green ;
Glossary of labor language ; The older songs of labor / Fred W. Thompson ;
"How long are you in town?" : two stolen songs find their way home /
Judy Branfman ; Labor arts and the first recorded IWW album /
Bill Friedland ; Feeling a thought through song / Virginia Martin
; Charles H. Kerr and America's first socialist songbook / Fred W. Thompson ;
Afterword / Utah Phillips

Ardis Cameron focuses on the textile workers' strikes of 1882 and 1912 in this examination of class and gender formation as drawn from the experience and language of the working-class neighborhoods of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Using the neighborhood perspective to explore the role of women in worker militancy, Cameron reveals the importance of female networks and organizational life in working-class culture and politics. Unionized women were labeled "radicals of the worst sort" because, in fighting for equality, they also rebelled against traditional economic and sexual hierarchies. Oral histories and detailed maps illuminate the setting and the dramatic story behind the famous Bread and Roses strike of 1912.

Focusing on the textile workers' strikes of 1882 and 1912, Ardis Cameron examines class and gender formation as drawn from the experiences of working-class women in the textile manufacturing town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. She explores the role of women in worker militancy from the perspective of the neighborhood and argues for the importance of female networks and associational life in working-class culture and politics. Radicals of the Worst Sort is a study of domination and power, constructed not only at the level of economics and politics but also at the level of social perception and conceptualization. It thus provides the basis for a new set of generalizations about the lives of nineteenth-century factory women in their jobs and communities. This exciting history illuminates ongoing debates about the dynamic role of gender and challenges shifting perceptions and definitions of what a "woman" should be. Cameron shows that unionized women who fought for equality were "radicals of the worst sort" (as one mill officer tagged them) because they rebelled against traditional economic and sexual hierarchies, providing alternative models for turn-of-the-century women. Radicals of the Worst Sort includes oral histories of former strikers in the famous Bread and Roses strike of 1912. Four full-color maps show Cameron's meticulous documentation of the nationalities of every Lawrence family living in the multicultural neighborhoods featured in her book

In this lesson plan (2 class days) students will gain a better understanding of the relationship between geography and history by examining the Bisbee Deportation in terms of push and pull factors and the impact of forced migrations. It uses maps to acquire process and report information, stresses forces of cooperation and conflict among people for control of Earth's surfaces.

See photographs of strike events, and to see the offices and headquarters of the Central Labor Council, Union Record, Metal Trades Council, IWW, Socialist Party, Cooperative Union Market, Japanese Labor Association, and other unions and cooperatives.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum is in the historic Mitchell-East Building in Tyronza, Arkansas.

During the 1930s, this building housed the dry cleaning business of H. L. Mitchell and the service station of Clay East, two of the organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934, serving as the unofficial headquarters for the union until offices were moved to Memphis for safety.

Museum exhibits, located in the Mitchell-East Building, focus on the farm labor movement in the South and the tenant farming and sharecropping system of agriculture.

The museum also includes the adjacent historic Tyronza Bank building. Facades of the bank and the Mitchell-East Building have been restored to their 1930s appearance, while the bank interior has been modified to include a reception area, gift shop, office and classroom.

Though widely recognized as one of the Industrial Workers of the World's leading members and one of its most prominent militants, this is the first book-length biography of Frank Little. Little's life offers innumerable lessons for working class people facing many of the same economic injustices in today's world. Arnold Stead, PhD, is a poet, fiction writer, historian, playwright, and jazz and film critic. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and familyIntroduction; Chapter one: The Western Wobblies; Chapter two: Free-Speech Fights; Chapter three: Iron Miners, Harvest Hands, and Oil Workers; Chapter four: Urgency and Conspiracy; Chapter five: Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little; Chapter six: Three Western Wobbly Martyrs; Conclusion: Frank Little, Where Are You Now that We Need You?; Acknowledgments; Sources; Notes; Index;

A guided walking tour of historic buildings and industrial sites throughout Hamilton, Ontario led by artist and educator Simon Orpana

In the 1910s hundreds of thousands of African Americans headed North in the Great Migration. Arthur Dingle was one of them. Dingle was born in the small town of Manning, North Carolina, in 1891.

After holding hotel jobs in several cities, he took a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia. Promised his job back if he enlisted in World War I, the company made good on its promise when Dingle remained in Philadelphia after the war.

This interview with Arthur Dingle was conducted by Charles Hardy in 1983 for the Goin’ North Project.

In the nation's so-called heartland, racism is sometimes subtler than in other parts of the country but just as insidious. When Black communities across America went up in flames in the 1960s, Midwest cities, where racial inequity was endemic, were among those most likely to burn. Midwest Unrest explores those rebellions, paying particular attention to the ways that region, race, class, and gender all played critical and often overlapping roles in shaping Black people's resistance to racialized oppression. Focusing on the uprisings in three midsize Midwestern cities--Cincinnati, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin--Ashley Howard argues that urban rebellions were a working-class response to the failure of traditional civil rights activism and growing fissures between the Black working and middle classes. Utilizing arrest records, Kerner Commission documents, and author-conducted oral history interviews, Howard registers the significant impact the rebellions had in transforming the consciousness of African Americans and in altering the relationship between Black urban communities and the state. Specifically, multiple parties, including municipal governments, city residents, and most importantly rebels, wielded urban revolt as a political tool to achieve their own objectives. Revealing a new dimension of the Black Freedom Movement, Howard moves the understanding of these disturbances from aberrant acts of violence to historically contingent acts of resistance, highlighting the coeval nature between organized protests and violent outbursts"-- Provided by publisher