Labor History Links

"A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture."--Publisher's website
I. Shaping Myself, Shaping History 13
1. Writing and Rewriting Labor’s Narrative 15
2. Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has
Transformed the Labor Question 29
3. Historians as Public Intellectuals 38
II. Capital, Labor, and the State 45
4. Tribunes of the Shareholder Class 47
5. “The Man in the Middle”: A Social History of Automobile Industry Foremen 56
6. From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era 79
7. Communism On the Shop Floor and Off 100
III. The Rights Revolution 107
8. Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement 109
9. The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement 129
10. A New Era of Global Human Rights: Good for the Trade Unions? 144

Industrial Democracy in America begins its close examination of what came to be known among collars of any colours as "the labour problem" with the railroad strikes of the 1870s. It contemplates America's industrial decline & provokes questions
Introduction : a century of industrial democracy in America / Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris
Industrial democracy or democracy in industry? : the theory and practice of the labor movement, 1870-1925 / David Montgomery
Industrial democracy and liberal capitalism, 1890-1925 / Howell John Harris
"An American feeling" : workers, managers, and the struggle over industrial democracy in the World War I era / Joseph A. McCartin
From Commons to Dunlop : rethinking the field and theory of industrial relations / Ronald W. Schatz
Great expectations : the promise of industrial jurisprudence and its demise, 1930-1960 / Nelson Lichtenstein
Wartime labor regulation, the industrial pluralists, and the law of collective bargaining / James B. Atleson
Workplace contractualism in comparative perspective / David Brody. Pacific ties : industrial relations and employment systems in Japan and the United States since 1900 / Sanford M. Jacoby
Industrial relations myth and shop-floor reality : the "team concept" in the auto industry / Mike Parker
Epilogue : toward a new century / Nelson Lichtenstein

Anthology of Essays collected from Dissent magazine. a socialist magazine founded in 1954. Ordered chronologically, the selections track organized labor from its peak in the ’50s—when one third of workers were unionized—through the setbacks wrought by NAFTA in the ’90s and today’s more promising upswings among, for example, grad students and Starbucks employees. Novelist and autoworker Harvey Swados’s 1963 article “The UAW: Over the top of Over the Hill” seems to presage labor’s late-20th-century decline by questioning whether the “typically American” United Auto Workers are still the “vanguards” they once were. Dissent cofounder Irving Howe’s “Images for Labor,” from 1981, has an almost elegiac feel as it considers how organized labor fits into America’s cultural myths. In later sections, there is a broadening of scope beyond the book’s earlier focus on the white male factory worker, reflecting changing values as well as the decline of American manufacturing. For example, journalist E. Tammy Kim’s entry from 2015, “Organizing the Unorganizable,” is a powerful account of how vulnerable, nonunionized laborers such as nannies and taxi drivers form grassroots support groups, and 2012’s “Frontline Caregivers: Still Struggling” by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein considers how the Great Recession has impacted low-wage home care workers.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement—especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations—and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration. He argues that tensions within the labor movement and within the ranks of American business profoundly affected government policy during the war and the nature of organized labor's political relations with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. Moreover, the political arrangements worked out during the war established the foundations of social stability and labor politics that came to characterize the postwar world--Publisher's description

Nine essays detailing issues in labor management of auto work.
Introduction : the American automobile industry and its workers / Nelson Lichtenstein
Fordism and the moving assembly line : the British and American experience, 1895-1930 / Wayne Lewchuk
Employers' strategies in the Detroit labor market, 1900-1929 / Thomas Klug
The persistence of Fordism : workers and technology in the American automobile industry, 1900-1960 / Stephen Meyer
"Matters of mutual interest" : the unionization process at Dodge main, 1933-1939 / Steve Jefferys
Rosie the riveter revisited : management's postwar purge of women automobile workers / Ruth Milkman
"The man in the middle" : a social history of automobile industry foremen / Nelson Lichtenstein
The triumph of industrial orthodoxy : the collapse of Studebaker-Packard / Stephen Amberg. Shop floor bargaining, contract unionism, and job control : an Anglo-American comparison / Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin

The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations

The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations

Walter Reuther, the most imaginative and powerful trade union leader of the past half-century, confronted the same problems facing millions of working Americans today: how to use the spectacular productivity of our economy to sustain and improve the standard of living and security of ordinary Americans. As Nelson Lichtenstein observes, Reuther, the president of the United Automobile Workers from 1946 to 1970, may not have had all the answers, but at least he was asking the right questions. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit vividly recounts Reuther's remarkable ascent: his days as a skilled worker at Henry Ford's great River Rouge complex, his two-year odyssey in the Soviet Union's infant auto industry in the early 1930s, and his immersion in the violent labor upheavals of the late 1930s that gave rise to the CIO. Under Reuther, the autoworkers' standard of living doubled

Insightful, original, and steeped in the culture of retail life, "The Retail Revolution" draws on first-hand reporting from coastal China to rural Arkansas to give a fresh and necessary understanding of how Wal-Mart has transformed international commerce

This title explores the multifaceted history and range of conservative hostility toward unionism, opening the door to a fascinating set of individuals, movements, and institutions that help explain why, in much of the popular imagination, union leaders are always 'bosses' and trade union organizers are nothing short of 'thugs'
ntroduction. Entangled histories: American conservatism and the U.S. labor movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries / Nelson Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Unions, modernity, and the decline of American economic nationalism / Andrew Wender Cohen
The American legion and striking workers during the interwar period / Christopher Nehls
Democracy or seduction? The demonization of scientific management and the deification of human relations / Chris Nyland, Kyle Bruce
Capital flight, "states' rights," and the anti-labor offensive after World War II / Tami J. Friedman
Orval Fau bus and the rise of anti-labor populism in northwestern Arkansas / Michael Pierce
"Is freedom of the individual Un-American?" Right-to-work campaigns and anti-union conservatism, 1943-1958 / Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Singing "The right-to-work blues": the politics of race in the campaign for "voluntary unionism" in postwar California / Reuel Schiller
Whose rights? Litigating the right to work, 1940-1980 / Sophia Z. Lee
"Such power spells tyranny": business opposition to administrative governance and the transformation of fair employment policy in Illinois, 1945-1964 / Alexander Gourse
Pattern for partnership: putting labor racketeering on the nation's agenda in the late 1950's / David Witwer
"Compulsory unionism": Sylvester Petro and the Career of an anti-union idea, 1957-1987 / Joseph A. McCartin, Jean-Christian Vinel
Wal-Mart, John Tate, and their anti-union America / Nelson Lichtenstein
"All deals are off": The Dunlop Commission and employer opposition to labor law reform / John Logan
Is democracy in the cards? A democratic defense of the Employee free choice act / Susan Orr

"In this ambitious, challenging and innovative study, Neville Kirk focuses on organised labour's attitudes and practices towards class, race and politics in Britain, Australia and the USA during an earlier period of globalization and imperialism, from the 1880s to 1914." "This book advances our knowledge of labour and popular attitudes in new and significant ways and will appeal to all those interested in the past, present and future of the labour movement and other progressive causes in an increasingly globalized context."--Jacket

A study of workers, organized labour and society in Britain and America from the 18th century to the 20th. The second of a set of two, this study deals with the uneven development of corporate capitalism and responses of employers and the state to workers' organizations, particularly trade unions.

Over 20,000 factory workers went on a strike for six months and ultimately ended in a 5% pay cut, being the largest labor strike in New England during the 1920s. This event and continuing pressure from the unions which were growing in strength injured the textile industry and contributed to its eventual downfall. Many owners simply relocated their factories further south.

The masthead of the Connecticut Labor Press of 1920 declared the 3-cent weekly “Organized labor’s only newspaper in New Haven” and “A newspaper for the people.” While certainly a manifestation of the political and social power of the New Haven Trades Council, the paper covered not only local, but also state, national, and international labor news.

The Labor Press editors identified strongly with the relatively moderate craft union and “non-partisan” political perspectives of the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, as well as the related positions of the Connecticut Federation of Labor (CFL). Numerous editorials identified anti-union employers and Bolsheviks as the twin enemies of trade unionism. Other opinion pieces expressed consternation at the attempts of state legislators and manufacturers to associate the Labor Press with “the radical element” and reminded labor’s detractors that the CFL had eradicated the influence of the factory militants who had gone on strike during the war in Bridgeport. Still other editorials chastised the activists of the Hartford Central Labor Union, a group that insisted on running candidates under the umbrella of the American Labor Party.

The masthead of the Connecticut Labor Press of 1920 declared the 3-cent weekly “Organized labor’s only newspaper in New Haven” and “A newspaper for the people.” While certainly a manifestation of the political and social power of the New Haven Trades Council, the paper covered not only local, but also state, national, and international labor news.

The Labor Press editors identified strongly with the relatively moderate craft union and “non-partisan” political perspectives of the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, as well as the related positions of the Connecticut Federation of Labor (CFL). Numerous editorials identified anti-union employers and Bolsheviks as the twin enemies of trade unionism. Other opinion pieces expressed consternation at the attempts of state legislators and manufacturers to associate the Labor Press with “the radical element” and reminded labor’s detractors that the CFL had eradicated the influence of the factory militants who had gone on strike during the war in Bridgeport. Still other editorials chastised the activists of the Hartford Central Labor Union, a group that insisted on running candidates under the umbrella of the American Labor Party.

On January 21, 1921, the publication of the Labor Press was taken over directly by I. M. Ornburn, long a leader of the New Haven Trades Council, now also president of Ornburn Press. The Labor Press was renamed the Labor News. The announcement of the transfer of ownership hinted at troubling developments that “forced the new publishers (All Organized Labor Men) to get away from the ‘has been,’” reaffirm the newspaper’s essentially “official” relationship with the CFL and the local Trades Council, and put out a “bigger and better” paper. The new publisher’s statement said that the Labor News would be “an exponent of justice to all, a square deal to employer and employee alike, with a desire to serve the best principles of trade unionism and at the same time create a better understanding and co-operation between capital and labor.”

Nonetheless, the content of the Connecticut Labor News reflected the deep divide between moderate trade unionists and the Connecticut legislators, manufacturers, and Chambers of Commerce who advocated the “American Plan” for ridding the state of the closed shop, the 40-hour week, and certain conditions of work. Each issue of both the Press and the News described ongoing employer efforts to increase productivity and lower costs in various branches of construction and industry, including textile and brass, as well as union efforts to organize a defense of the status quo. Political struggles over the post-war re-privatization of the railways, high prices and “profiteering,” a state “anti-strike bill,” the open shop, the use of the court injunction against collective labor action, attempts to install “city manager”-type municipal governments, and the Child Labor Amendment of 1924 were the kind of topics treated in-depth weekly. Connecticut visits by prominent American Federation of Labor leaders sent to rally the troops, and sermons by clerics opposed to the open shop, were given much attention. Syndicated fiction, feature columns, cartoons, sports, and a women’s page offered some respite from all this deeply serious news.

On March 14, 1925, the Ornburn Press announced that the Connecticut Labor News would suspend publication and reopen later in the year under new management, but no successor publication is known to exist.

Working on the Railroad, availalble as a virtual tour (and on exhibit thru 2027) tells another side of New Mexico’s locomotive history that makes no mention of passenger trains or tourism; visitors will leave the exhibition with a greater appreciation of the difficulty of this work. All workers are represented – women, people of color, immigrants, young and old – and most jobs are represented, both on and off the tracks. The exhibit will remain virtually available after that time.

From steel gangs to machinists and car cleaners to conductors, every role in the railroad industry served an important purpose.

Working on the Railroad is featured in the Mezzanine Gallery of the History Museum near the Fred Harvey installation.

The massive strike of 1877 shook the very foundations of the political and economic order. Begun with a spontaneous railroad strike in West Virginia, the “Great Uprising” spread rapidly across the country, as the entire working populations of many cities went out on strike. Workers across the country along with sympathizers in their communities were galvanized by official violence, as state and federal troops fired on protesters in several cities. As this 1878 cartoon from the New York Daily Graphic indicated, in the aftermath of the strike Indians, trade unionists, immigrants, and tramps were increasingly grouped together in the press as symbols of disorder and opposition to the nation’s progress.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. In this brief excerpt from their testimony before the Factory Investigation Commission, New York City Fire Chief Edward F. Croker and Fire Marshall William Beers commented on the safety lapses—the locking of an exit door, the inadequate fire escapes, and the overcrowded factory floor—that led to the deaths of the Triangle workers.
Source: State of New York, Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, 1912, Vol. II (Albany: The Argus Company, Printers, 1912), 14, 19–20, 21.

The New York Labor History Association (NYLHA) was founded in 1976 by trade unionists, academics, students, archivists, educators, labor editors, attorneys, and retirees, mostly from New York State. NYLHA encourages the study of workers and their organizations and serves as a bridge between past and present labor unionists and academics.

The map documents the history of working men and women in New York City and their struggles to gain concessions such as the eight-hour work day, better pay, improved working conditions, decent and affordable housing, collective bargaining rights, healthcare, and pension plans. It also documents important aspects of the city's political and social history, major union leaders and contributors, and their work to better conditions for workers. The map was created with the hope that people will be able to use the map as an alternative teaching and learning tool.

Over 33,000 photographs. from 1930s-1940s NYPL's Farm Security Administration (FSA) collection is comprised of approximately 40,000 photographs taken during the 1930s and 1940s by Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee, among others. Initially the government project documented the Resettlement Administration’s distribution of cash loans to displaced and struggling farmers and its construction of planned communities, but later broadened its focus to include migratory laborers in the Midwest and West, as well as sharecroppers in the South. Eastern locations including New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are represented as well. Migratory workers, housing, farm labor, unemployed, cotton strike of 1938, Under the Office of War Information, the agenda shifted to themes of patriotism and war production. NYPL's FSA photographs were transferred to the Wallach Division’s Photography Collection from the Library's Picture Collection.

There are a great number of items in this searchable database. The Yiddish Theater and Actors Union collection is of interest, but a search for workers or labor union returns many results. It also has digitized Farm Security Administration photos from the New Deal agency. For example, the words "labor union"

Collection depicts African Americans engaged in a variety of occupations and date from the 1900s to the 1990s with the bulk of the images being from the 1930s to the 1950s. Images capture blue-collar and white-collar workers performing their jobs. Other collections depicting people at work include Education, Businesses, Military, Farm Security Administration, and the National Youth Administration. Studio and candid portraits of noted individuals from various fields are found in the Portrait Collection. Organized into five series: I. General; II. Business professionals; III. Legal and law enforcement professionals; IV. Medical professionals; V. War industry workers.

The General (1800-1990) series comprises the majority of the collection and documents diverse occupations including air pilots, astronauts, clothing workers, construction workers, disc jockeys, engineers, factory workers, filmmakers, food industry workers, jewelers, journalists, maritime workers, office workers, photographers, realtors, scientists and laboratory technicians, service industry workers, union representatives and transportation workers. Very few images are from the nineteenth century. Of note are a series of images of Pennsylvania Railroad Workers produced for an advertising campaign in the African American press (1940s-1950s).

The Business professionals series (194?-198?) include images of business professionals and employees in the advertising, airline, alcohalic beverage, insurance, entertainment, manufacturing, and publishing industries.

The Legal and law enforcement professionals series (193?-199?) consists of images of judges, lawyers, law clerks, and police officers. Images of law enforcement professionals range from uniformed police officers to commissioners and document on-the-job activities, ceremonies, and community out-reach programs.

The Medical professionals series (192?-199?) shows doctors, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, and medical assistants at work. Included are images of World War II cadet nurses and nurses/nannies from the nineteenth century, one depicting Mary E. Mahoney, the first African American registered nurse in the United States.

The War industry workers series (1942-1946?) documents the contributions of African Americans to the defense industry during World War II. Depicted are men and women laborers engaged in shipbuilding, airplane construction, arms and ammunition manufacturing and construction projects. Women are also shown sewing and preparing uniforms and parachutes. Among the work sites depicted is the Picatinny Arsenal, Dover, New Jersey (1944) where employees are depicted in both on-the-job as well as leisure activities.

Interior and exterior views concerning labor in various light and heavy industries, worker's housing and social conditions in the United States including Connecticut, Illinois, New England, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

The NY Tenement Museum tell the stories of working-class tenement residents who moved to New York City from other countries and other parts of the country. Their work helped build the city and nation, and their stories help us understand our history. While textbooks often overlook the stories of ordinary people, Tenement Museum tours immerse visitors in the tenement hallways, kitchens, and parlors where families carved out new lives. The Tenement Museum share primary sources and research that help us explore the stories of tenement families. Public programs, curricula, and the museum's Your Story Our Story website continue the conversation, using our stories as points of departure to connect the past to present.

We aim to build an inclusive and expansive American identity and believe that the exploration of our complex history—one with moments of both inclusion and exclusion—helps prepare us to recognize and discuss today’s complex issues with empathy and nuance.