Keywords: Labor
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Displaying 1-20 of 318 results.
"1500 Doomed": People's Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster
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Abstract: The deadly lung disease silicosis is caused when miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers inhale fine particles of silica dust--a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite. In 1935, approximately 1,500 workers--largely African Americans who had come north to find work--were killed by exposure ... More »
A Call to Arms: McNeill's Unshakable Faith in Labor's Future
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Abstract: As the 19th century drew to a close, labor activists were forced to confront the implications of a long string of defeats suffered by their movement in recent years. One of the most venerable of labor editors, George McNeill, writing in the official journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in ... More »
A Case of Black and White: White Women Protest the Hiring of Black "Wage-Slaves"
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Abstract: Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile ... More »
A Clear and Present Danger: The Chinese Exclusion Act
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Abstract: The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence ... More »
"A condition we can ill afford": Debating the Equal Pay Act of 1963
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Abstract: Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary ... More »
A Cowboy's Work is Never Done: George Martin
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Abstract: The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for ... More »
A Craft Unionist Rewrites the Ten Commandments
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Abstract: The moral code of craft unionism was part of a larger system of late nineteenth-century working-class values that went well beyond behavior on the job. Moreover, those values drew upon other deeply held moral beliefs, particularly those growing out of religion. In "Labor's Decalogue," G. Edmonston, the ... More »
A. F. of L. Delegates.
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Abstract: Faced with stiff business opposition, a conservative political climate, hostile courts, and declining membership, leaders of the American Federeration of Labor (AFL) grew increasingly cautious during the 1920s. Labor radicals viewed AFL leaders as overpaid, self-interested functionaries uninterested ... More »
"A Foretaste of the Orient": John Murray Criticizes the AFL
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Abstract: Most historians who have written about the 1903 strike of Mexican and Japanese farm workers against the Oxnard, California, sugar beet growers have relied on John Murray's first-hand account of the strike and its aftermath. Murray, a socialist union organizer, went to Oxnard after learning of the strike ... More »
"A Healthy Public Opinion": Terence V. Powderly Distances the Knights of Labor from the Haymarket Martyrs
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Abstract: The Haymarket Affair, as it is known today, began on May 1, 1886 when a labor protester threw a bomb at police, killing one officer, and ended with the arrest of eight anarchist leaders, three of whom were executed and none of whom was ever linked to the bombing. Some labor organizations saw the executed ... More »
A Labor Newspaper Derides the Myth of the Self-Made Man
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Abstract: One of the prime frustrations of labor organizers in the late 1800s was the powerful myth that every American could attain untold riches if sufficiently hardworking and ambitious. The faith that some workers had in this mythology of the "self-made man" inhibited unionization and the spread of radical ... More »
A Mule Spinner Tells the U.S. Senate about Late 19th century Unemployment
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Abstract: Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O'Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel's questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule ... More »
"A Nave and Self-Taught Artist": John Frazee Sculpts Daniel Webster, 1833
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Abstract: Many artists working in the decades after the American Revolution came from the ranks of artisans and mechanics. In a republic that dispensed with aristocratic patrons and royal academies, art came to be supported by a middling populace more interested in portraits than grand history painting. Sculpture ... More »
A Pledge of Allegiance: Joining the Grange
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Abstract: When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it ... More »
A Separate Peace: Alice Henry on Women and Unions
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Abstract: The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), established in 1903 by reformers seeking to combine the forces of trade unionism and feminism, faced particular obstacles when organizing women into unions. In this 1915 essay, published in The Trade Union Woman , WTUL leader Alice Henry discussed some of those ... More »
"A Shocking Instance of Brutal Employer Aggression": Antiunion Violence in a "Union-Free" Town
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Abstract: In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that guided labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain ... More »
A Shoemaker and the Tea Party
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Abstract: George Robert Twelve Hewes, a Boston shoemaker, participated in many of the key events of the Revolutionary crisis. Over half a century later, Hewes described his experiences to James Hawkes. When Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, colonists refused to allow cargoes of tea to be unloaded. In the ... More »
A Show of Support: Farmers Feed Homestead Strikers
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Abstract: In 1892 the possibility of a Labor-Populist alliance circulated. Populist orators like Mary Lease sought to build ties between the Farmer's Alliance and the labor movement by mobilizing farmers to send wheat and corn to striking workers at Carnegie's Homestead steel mill outside Pittsburgh. Despite the ... More »
"A Square Deal?": The Michigan CIO Debates the No-Strike Pledge
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Abstract: In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the labor movement made an "unconditional no-strike pledge" to help win the war. In turn, labor won some important concessions from the federal government. Some ... More »
A Thorn in the Side: A Socialist Takes Aim at Gompers
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Abstract: During the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was faced with both the rising popularity of the People's Party in rural areas and attempts by the Populist movement to create a farmer-labor alliance. At the same time, socialist trade unionists lobbied for greater political involvement and adoption ... More »
