Labor History Links

Set against the backdrop of the 1960s, Made in Dagenham is based on a true story about a group of spirited women who joined forces, took a stand for what was right, and in doing so, found their own inner strength. Although far from the Swinging Sixties of Carnaby Street, life for the women of Dagenham, England is tinged with the sounds and sights of the optimistic era, heard on their radios and seen on their TV sets. Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) reflects that upbeat era, along with her friends and co-workers at the city's Ford Motor Factory -- Sandra (Jamie Winstone), Eileen (Nicola Duffett), Brenda (Andrea Riseborough), Monica (Lorraine Stanley) and Connie (Geraldine James) -- who laugh in the face of their poor conditions. Lisa (Rosamund Pike) is a fiercely intelligent Cambridge-educated woman who feels a bit trapped, tending to the home with a husband that suggests she keep her opinions to herself. She may not live in the same world as the other women, but she shares their views. No one thought the revolution would come to Dagenham, until one day, it did. Rita, who primarily sees herself as a wife and mother, is coerced into attending a meeting with shop steward Connie, sympathetic union representative Albert (Bob Hoskins) and Peter Hopkins (Rupert Graves), Ford's Head of Industrial Relations. What she expects to be simply a day out of work, complete with a free lunch, turns into much more when she and her colleagues become outraged by the lack of respect shown in the meeting to the women employees. With humor, common sense and courage Rita and the other women take on their bosses, an increasingly belligerent local community, and finally the government, as their intelligence and unpredictability proves to be a match for any of their male opponents. Daring to stand up and push boundaries, the women changed a system that no one wanted to admit was broken.

“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles.” How did we get from Scrooge’s office to “Office Space”? From bookkeepers in dark countinghouses to freelancers in bright cafes? What would the world be like without the vertical file cabinet? What would the world be like without the office at all? In Cubed, Nikil Saval chronicles the evolution of the office in a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is. Drawing on the history of architecture and business, as well as a host of pop culture artifacts—from Mad Men to Dilbert (and, yes, The Office)—and ranging in time from the earliest clerical houses to the surprisingly utopian origins of the cubicle to the funhouse campuses of Silicon Valley, Cubed is an all-encompassing investigation into the way we work, why we do it the way we do (and often don’t like it), and how we might do better.

When Josey Aimes returns to her hometown in Northern Minnesota after a failed marriage, she needs a good job. A single mother with two children to support, she turns to the predominant source of employment in the region -- the iron mines. The mines provide a livelihood that has sustained a community for generations. The work is hard but the pay is good and friendships that form on the job extend into everyday life, bonding families and neighborhoods with a common thread. It's an industry long dominated by men, in a place unaccustomed to change. Encouraged by her old friend Glory, one of the few female miners in town, Josey joins the ranks of those laboring to blast ore from rock in the gaping quarries. She is prepared for the back-breaking and often dangerous work, but coping with the harassment she and the other female miners encounter from their male coworkers proves far more challenging. Times are tough. The last thing the miners want is women competing for scarce jobs -- women who, in their estimation, have no business driving trucks and hauling rock anyway. If these newcomers want to work the mines they'll have to do it on the terms set by the veteran workforce and it won't be easy. Take it or leave it. When Josey speaks out against the treatment she and her fellow workers face she is met with resistance -- not only from those in power but from a community that doesn't want to hear the truth, her disapproving parents and many of her own colleagues who fear she is only making things worse. In time, even her friendship with Glory will be tested, her already difficult connection with her father, a lifelong miner, will be pushed to its limit and elements of her personal life exposed to scrutiny. The fallout from Josey's battle to make a better future for herself and her children will affect every aspect of her life, including her relationship with her young daughter and her sensitive teenage son, who must first cope with the embarrassment of his mother's sudden notoriety and then face harsh details of her past she was hoping he would never have to know. Through these struggles Josey will find the courage to stand up for what she believes in -- even if that means standing alone. Inspired by a true story, North Country follows Josey's journey on a road that will take her farther than she ever imagined, ultimately inspiring countless others, and leading to the nation's first-ever class action lawsuit for sexual harassment.

The corporate welfare system and modern industrial relations, with a lens of gender at the center
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable growth of corporate welfare programs in American industry. By the mid-1920s, 80 percent of the nation’s largest companies — firms including DuPont, International Harvester, and Metropolitan Life Insurance — engaged in some form of welfare work. Programs were implemented to achieve goals that ranged from improving basic workplace conditions, to providing educational, recreational, and social opportunities for workers and their families, to establishing savings and insurance plans.

Employing the critical lens of gender analysis, Nikki Mandell offers an innovative perspective on the development of corporate welfare. She argues that its advocates sought to build a new relationship between labor and management by recasting the modern corporation as a Victorian family. Employers assumed the authoritative position of fathers, assigned their employees the subordinate role of children, and hired male and female welfare managers to act as “corporate mothers” charged with creating a harmonious household. But internal conflict and external pressures weakened the corporate welfare system, and it eventually gave way to a system of personnel management and employee representation. With the abandonment of the familial model, the form of corporate welfare changed; but, as Mandell demonstrates, its content left an enduring legacy for modern industrial relations.

Account of the Grand Federal Profession Performed at Philadelphia on Friday, July 4th1788 By Frances Hopkinson -- Teaching guide will help students seeing how pride in work and skill transferred to claims of rights and workplace dignity
The Grand Federal Procession was a parade organized to celebrate the ratification of theU. S. Constitution. The author, Frances Hopkinson,had signed the Declaration of Independence, served as a delegate tothe 1787 Constitutional Convention, and was the main organizer of this Grand Procession. He wrote a long pamphlet describing the paradefour days after the parade.Pamphlets werea major form of journalismandmethod ofpolitical debatein the Revolutionary Era. They were widely read and discussed. Thomas Paine’s Common Senseis, perhaps, the most famous pamphlet of that era.This is an excerpt from Hopkinson’s pamphlet.

This song was written five years after the newly formed United Auto Workers [UAW] won a major strike against General Motors,and shortly after the US entered World War II.At its founding in 1937,the UAW was one of the largest unions in thenewly formed Congress of Industrial Unions [CIO]. The Union Boysfolk musicgroup, which included Pete Seeger and Josh White, performed the song atunioneventsand various progressive gatherings. They recordedthe song in 1944 as part of Asch Records’ “Songs for Victory”album. Includes song and teaching guide

Much of the research on immigrant women and labor forces has focused on the participation of immigrant women on formal labor markets. In this study, contributors focus on informal economies such as health care, domestic work, street vending, and the garment industry, where displaced and undocumented women are more likely to work. Because such informal labor markets are unregulated, many of these workers face abusive working conditions that are not reported for fear of job loss or deportation.

In examining the complex dynamics of how immigrant women navigate political and economic uncertainties, this collection highlights the important role of citizenship status in defining immigrant women's opportunities, wages, and labor conditions

The Nome Industrial Worker was a weekly newspaper owned and produced by the local 240 chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in cooperation. It began on July 5, 1907 and was printed on the press of the Nome Daily Nugget.

This collection of twenty essays provides an integrated view of migration in North America—within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States—during the past two centuries.
Mirando atrás : Mexican immigration from 1876 to 2000 / Jaime R. Aguila and Brian Gratton
Through the northern Borderlands : Canada-U.S. migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Bruno Ramirez
The making and unmaking of the circum-Caribbean migratory sphere : mobility, sex across boundaries, and collective destinies, 1840-1940 / Lara Putnam
Population movements and the making of Canada-U.S. not-so-foreign relations / Nora Faires
Greater southwest North America : a region of historical integration, disjunction, and imposition / Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez with Dirk Hoerder
Independence and interdependence : Caribbean-North American migration in the modern era / Melanie Shell-Weiss
Migration to Mexico, migration in Mexico : a special case on the North American continent / Delia González de Reufels and Dirk Hoerder
The construction of borders : building North American nations, building a continental perimeter, 1890s-1920s / Angelika E. Sauer
The United States-Mexican border as material and cultural barrier / Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez
Migration and the seasonal round : an Odawa family's story / Susan E. Gray
Market interactions in a borderland setting : a case study of the Gila River Pima of Arizona, 1846-1862 / Dan Killoren
Paying attention to moving Americans : migration knowledge in the age of internal migration, 1930s-1970s / James N. Gregory
The Black experience in Canada revisited / Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu
Circumnavigating controls : transborder migration of Asian-origin migrants during the period of exclusion / Yukari Takai
Migration and capitalism : the rise of the U.S.-Mexican border / John Mason Hart
Central American migration and the shaping of refugee policy / María Cristina Garcia
Central American transmigrants : migratory movement of special interest to different sectors within and outside Mexico / Rodolfo Casillas-R
Interrogating managed migration's model : a counternarrative of Canada's seasonal agricultural workers program / Kerry Preibisch
1867 and all that
: teaching the American survey as continental North American history / Angelika Sauer and Catherine O'Donnell

"As companies increasingly look to the global market for capital, cheaper commodities and labor, and lower production costs, the impact on Mexican and American workers and labor unions is significant. National boundaries and the laws of governments that regulate social relations between laborers and management are less relevant in the era of globalization, rendering ineffective the traditional union strategies of pressuring the state for reform." "Focusing especially on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (the first international labor agreement linked to an international trade agreement), Norman Caulfield notes the waning political influence of trade unions and their disunity and divergence on crucial issues such as labor migration and workers' rights. Comparing the labor movement's fortunes in the 1970s with its current weakened condition, Caulfield notes the parallel decline in the United States' hegemonic influence in an increasingly globalized economy. As a result, organized labor has been transformed from organizations that once pressured management and the state for concessions to organizations that now request that workers concede wages, pensions, and health benefits to remain competitive in the global marketplace."--BOOK JACKET
Labor and global capitalism in North America, 1850-1970
The politics of Mexican labor and economic development in crisis
Mexican labor and workers' rights under NAFTA and NAALC
Labor mobility and workers' rights in North America
The crisis of union-management relations in the United States and Canada
The North American auto industry : the apex of concessionary bargaining
VEBA Las Vegas! Unions play casino capitalism : autoworkers lose

Segments on multiple topics: Limited Series Podcasts all listed below
Early Unions in NC
Loray Mill Strike
Marion Massacre
Textile Strike of 1934
Local 22
Operation Dixie
Norma Rae
Cannon Mills
Mt. Olive Boycott
Victory at Smithfield
UAW of NC
Duke Faculty
Labor & Civil Rights
Public Employees

4 podcasts on:
Episode 1 - Roots
Episode 2 - Race
Episode 3 - Resistance
Episode 4 - Revival

A 2-4 day lesson plan Summary: On July 1, 1922 the first nationwide work stoppage in U.S. railroad history began. At least 400,000 members of six unions walked off of their jobs and the Burlington Railroad strike had begun. In Aurora, Illinois, 1700 shopmen, or skilled workers, struck the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Management at the railroad fought the strike by bringing in new workers or “new men”, and setting up dormitories for them in the shops so that they would not have to cross picket lines. The Regional History Center has extensive records of this strike action. These records include special agent reports, legal documents, correspondence and oral history transcriptions. In this lesson, students will view primary source materials and organize them in order to reconstruct some of the conditions under which the strike occurred, and to report some of the events that took place during the strike. The students will then reenact some of the arguments of the different parties involved in the strike based upon their reports. Finally, the students will evaluate the ultimate outcome of the strike action.

Standards: CCSS. ELA Literacy RH 9-10. 9 Compare and contrast treatment of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources.

Objective: The students will be able to look at an historical event from multiple points of view based on primary source documents.
The students will be able to organize and summarize the evidence to create a multi-perspective simulation of the Burlington Railroad Strike of Aurora, Illinois. The students will be able to evaluate some of the historical outcomes of the Burlington Shopmen’s strike.

Evidence: RC 217, Burlington Railroad Strike of Aurora Illinois Collection, Regional History Center at Northern Illinois University
Many thanks for the work of James Flynn.

NIU’s Digital Library includes one of the largest collections of digitized materials pertaining to the 1886 Haymarket Affair. The 300 individual primary sources and secondary materials are a significant body of information related, including images, cartoons, documents.

Illinois in the Gilded Age's interpretive materials can serve to introduce anyone with a basic knowledge of American history to the major events of this period. These resources can also introduce project users to scholars' major interpretive themes and debates, and help them to formulate their own historical questions and begin research in the online databases.
Isolate labor items by subject, or with the topic "labor" on the left side bar.

Dime novels were a format of inexpensive popular fiction produced in the United States between 1860 and 1930. Available for as little as a nickel or as much as a dime, they opened up leisure reading for the masses in a way previously not possible. Originally featuring stories about the American frontier and the West, cowboys eventually gave way to detectives, like Nick Carter, and boy adventurers and entrepreneurs, like Frank Reade Jr. This site contains materials from two major dime novel collections in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, the Albert Johannsen and Edward T. LeBlanc Collections. This work has been generously supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Visitors may browse the entire full-text collection, explore a particular series or author, or start at our about pages to learn more about dime novels.

In addition to thousands of digitized dime novels, this site features essays and spotlights on particular novels, which serve as entry-points into the collection. This work is part of a decades-long effort at NIU and partner institutions to preserve and document an important part of American culture with support provided by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Horatio Alger Society, and individual donor

This publication has chronicled the labor movement since 1900. Though each edition was written for present-day readers, over time the archives have become a rich resource for historical research. What most of our readers call “the Labor Press” has gone through several name changes since its founding. It was known as:
Portland Labor Press from 1900 to 1915;
Oregon Labor Press from 1915 to 1986;
Oregon/Washingt​on Labor Press 1986 to 1987; and
Northwest Labor Press from 1987 to today.
There are several ways to access our archives.
1910-2023 — online via Newspapers.com
1900-1915 — online via University of Oregon library
1915-1986 — online via University of Oregon library
1900-today — in person via bound volumes or microfilm at 11 libraries
1997-2011 — via the html archive on this site

Historians have frequently portrayed Italian anarchism as a marginal social movement that was doomed to succumb to its own ideological contradictions once Italian society modernized. Challenging such conventional interpretations, Nunzio Pernicone provides a sympathetic but critical treatment of Italian anarchism that traces the movement’s rise, transformation, and decline from 1864 to 1892. Based on original archival research, his book depicts the anarchists as unique and fascinating revolutionaries who were an important component of the Italian socialist left throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Anarchism in Italy arose under the influence of the Russian revolutionary Bakunin, triumphed over Marxism as the dominant form of early Italian socialism, and supplanted Mazzinianism as Italy’s revolutionary vanguard. After forming a national federation of the Anti-Authoritarian International in 1872, the Italian anarchists attempted several insurrections, but their organization was suppressed. By the 1880s the movement had become atomized, ideologically extreme, and increasingly isolated from the masses. Its foremost leader, Errico Malatesta, attempted repeatedly to revitalize the anarchists as a revolutionary force, but internal dissension and government repression stifled every resurgence and plunged the movement into decline. Even after their exclusion from the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, the anarchists remained an intermittently active and influential element on the Italian socialist left. As such, they continued to be feared and persecuted by every Italian government.

The Daily Bulletin and Ohio Daily-Express were African American newspapers published in the 1940s and 1950s in Dayton, Ohio. By 1944, the Daily Bulletin‘s full title as it appeared in its masthead was The Daily Bulletin Combined with the Ohio Express, further described as “One of the Two Only Negro Dailies in the World.” Here, Ohio Express refers to the Ohio Daily-Express, which officially began publication in 1946 when its publisher, Paige H. Strickland, apparently purchased the Daily Bulletin. It is unclear whether a separate Daily Bulletin existed in Dayton between its origin in 1942 and the first known issue in 1944, or if such a publication continued alongside the combined version. In November 1950, the Ohio Daily-Express dropped “Ohio” and became the Daily Express. The similarities in format, frequency, and content, in addition to the combination of titles from 1944-1946, suggest that the two represent a singular and continuous lineage.

The Daily Bulletin published a four-column, four-page daily newspaper featuring syndicated material from the Negro Newspaper Publishers’ Association (now the National Newspaper Publishers Association) and the Associated Negro Press (ANP). The Express leaned more heavily on the ANP for its article content. The Express also added a fifth column and occasionally printed up to six pages, but it kept the same publication frequency.

Searchable database. Results have many items related to the steel industry, especially ARMCO, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Republic Steel and Pollock company, US Steel, but this is just a starting point for searching this huge database.

Ohio Memory began in 2000 as a digital repository containing contributions from hundreds of cultural heritage institutions around the state. A lot of content has been added to the site since then, but most of the original contributions can be seen here, representing a variety of topics, time periods and institutions.

An online exhibition from Ohio State University libraries featuring articles, descriptions, and primary documents on the U.S. coal industry in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Contents

A view of coal mining in 1877
How important was coal mining to the American economy?
The work of a coal miner in the 1870s
The special hazards of coal mining
How did machines change the work of a coal miner?
How did Stephen Crane describe the life of a coal miner in 1894?
A description of the life of a miner in 1902
How did reformers use the coal industry to persuade Americans to support measures to abolish child labor?
An Anthracite Miner's Story (1902)
Among the Coal Miners (an account from Illinois in 1902)
Anthracite Coal Mines and Mining (a description from 1902)
The Boys in the Breakers (1904)
Troubles in the coke regions
The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902
The The Anthracite Coal Strike
A 1904 description of anthracite coal communities
The Molly Maguires
Avondale Disaster from The Coal Mines, by Andrew Roy, State Inspector of mines of Ohio, 1876. pp. 134-137.

Work of a Coal Miner from Andrew Roy, The Practical Miner's Companion; or, Papers on Geology and Mining in the Ohio Coal Field (Columbus: Westbote Printing Company, 1885): 108-110.

The Life of a Coal Miner
scanned from The World's Work 4 (October 1902): 2659-60

Turn-of-the-Century Coal Mining Machinery from Cassier's Magazine

The Coke Region Troubles scanned from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 1891 Vol. 72, p. 240.

Images from A view of coal mining in 1877 scanned from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, vol. III, no. 1, Jan. 1877, pp. 116-126.

A view of coal mining in 1877 webpage by C. Gordon Moffat and
modified by K. Austin Kerr

Among the Coal-Miners scanned from Missionary Review 1902,
Vol. 25, pp. 835-39

Anthracite Coal Mines and Mining from The American Monthly Review
of Reviews, November, 1902.

The Boys in the Breakers from Anthracite Coal Communities,
by Peter Roberts, 1904, pp.174-181

The Anthracite-Carrying Railways was scanned from The American Monthly Review of Reviews, July,
1902. pp. 66-69.

A General View of the Coal Strike By Talcott Williams scanned from The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 1902.

John Mitchell: The Labor Leader and the Man scanned from The American Monthly Review of
Reviews, 1902.

The Progress of the World scanned from The American Monthly Review of
Reviews, November, 1902, pp. 515-527

Pages originally designed by Patrick J. Hall

Site revised by Mitchell R.K. Shelton

Story of a dress made with child labor. Scanned from The Child Labor Bulletin, August, 1914.

This is a story told by the National Child Labor Committee to persuade Americans to support the regulation and elimination of child labor. The Ohio State University Libraries have scanned this story from the original Child Labor Bulletin, part of The Ohio State University Library collections. The article appears in vol 2 no.2 and reprinted in vol 3 no.2, also available online on Google Books.

An Ohio State University-hosted webpage on the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike which contains thirteen resources including short background essays, information on anthracite carrying railways, descriptions of relevant historical figures, and visuals.

In the breakers of the anthracite coal industry there are nearly 18,000 persons employed as slate pickers. The majority of these are boys from the ages of 10 to 14 years. In an investigation conducted in an area where 4,131 persons wholly dependent on the mines lived, we found 64 children employed in and around the mines not 14 years of age. There were 24 boys employed in breakers before they were 12 years of age. In other sections of the coal fields the evil of employing children under age in breakers and mines is worse than in our limited area. But if the proportion above mentioned prevails in these coal fields, there are employed in the breakers about 2,400 boys under 12 years of age, and nearly 6,400 boys under 14 years of age working in and around the mines. The tabulated report of superintendents of public schools in Lackawanna county given above, shows how prevalent the evil of child labor is. Improved machinery for cleaning coal has displaced many boys, and it is hoped that a still further improvement and utilization of such machinery will render unnecessary the labor of boys hardly in their teens in these breakers. No industry demands the service of boys whose bone and muscle are not hardened and whose brain has not been developed for continuous and effective thinking. Muscle without intelligence is annually depreciating, being displaced by machinery which does nearly all the rough work. To stunt the body and dull the brains of boys in breakers is to rob them of the mental equipment which is essential to enhance their social worth and enable them to adjust themselves to the requirements of modern life.

Ohio Valley Worker : Official Paper of the Federated Trades Council of Louisville, Trades and Labor Council of New Albany, Central Labor Union of Jeffersonville ([Louisville, Ky.]) only one issue digitally available