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Industrial espionage has been raised to a sophisticated level today, but pirating labor is still the quickest and surest way to get at a competitor's trade secrets. The loss of trade secrets through changes in employment was a principal topic of discussion at the eighth annual conference of the Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Institute of George Washington University held in Washington in July 1964. Conferees agreed that losses occur because employers put a price on their ethics and employees on their loyalty. As professor Richard B. Morris has made clear, pirating of workers and interference with contract relations in American history goes back to the colonial period, when both bound servants and hired workers were enticed away from their employers for their labor and their skills. Stolen manufacturing processes were the basis for the establishment of the textile industry in this country. The seduction of workers by pirates of manufacturing processes was a real and present danger to a community of manufacturers along Brandywine Creek in northern Delaware in the early nineteenth century.

The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, Massachusetts was founded in 1943 when Radcliffe College, Cambridge, accepted the Woman's Rights Collection (WRC) . The WRC documents several woman's suffrage organizations and includes the papers of Maud Wood Park and other women active in the women rights movement. But it does not end with 1920, the year the federal suffrage amendment was ratified, and it includes the library's first labor collection, papers of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor, 1933-45, and the first woman in the Cabinet. Thus despite the emphasis on suffrage and women's political and legal rights, labor issues, from the beginning have been an integral part of the Schlesinger Library. At about the time the WRC arrived at Radcliffe, president Wilbur K. Jordan and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, of the Harvard University's history department decided to make it the centerpiece of a growing research library on women, rather than a static memorial to the suffrage movement. Soon after, in December 1945, another major labor collection arrived, the papers of Leonora O'Reilly. O'Reilly's papers make up one major series in the micropublication, "The Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders," a project sponsored by the Schlesinger Library, edited by Edward T. James, and published by Research Publications Inc. in 1981.

The article lists the labor history holdings contained in the Archives and Manuscripts Department of the Chicago Historical Society. Established in 1856, the city's oldest cultural institution, the Chicago Historical Society, collects, preserves, and interprets the history of Chicago and selected aspects of American history through exhibitions, research collections, educational programs, and publications. Some 200,000 people view the Society's exhibitions and attend its programs annually, 10000 more use its library and various archival research collections. The Archives and Manuscripts Department holds about 14,000 linear feet of records on the city's history from its earliest days to the present, along with selected materials on the American Civil War, the American Revolution, Illinois prior to the Civil War, and other aspects of American history. Materials of and about labor unions and working people are an important segment of the Society's holdings and an active area of collecting efforts. Labor history holdings include large archival collections from major American trade unions along with scattered individual items and small collections, the great majority of them emanating from the Chicago area.

Reports on developments about labor in the United States as of spring of 1995. Includes the 35th Western History Association Conference from October 11-14, 1995 in Denver, Colorado; Awarding of the Barbara Mayer Wertheimer Prize by the New York Labor History Association; Series of prizes to be awarded by the Western History Association.

The article reports on literature and several activities related to labor history which took place in the U.S. in 1992 and 1993. The Kansas City Labor History Tour was researched, and presented in October 1992, by the Kansas City Labor History Workshop, a group of union members and scholars working to retrieve the area's labor history. The 15th annual North American Labor History Conference will be held at Detroit's Wayne State University on October 14-16, 1993. Its theme will be "Labor, Citizenship, and the State." The 8th biennial Southern Labor Studies Conference will be held from October 14-17, 1993 in Birmingham, Alabama. The conference theme will be Race and Culture. One of the initial activities of the newly created Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington is a series of working papers in Comparative Labor History. The Minnesota Historical Society's Publication and Research Division each year makes available grants of up to $5000 to support original research and interpretive writing on the history of Minnesota by academicians, independent scholars and professional and nonprofessional writers.

In November 1966, at the Southern Historical Association (SHA) convention in Memphis, Tennessee, some 20 participants organized the Association of the Southern Labor Historians whose purpose was to promote the Southern labor history by encouraging the collection of labor records in various states and tile presentation of scholarly labor papers at annual meetings concurrent with SHA. The author and his friends inquired that no university in the Southwest was soliciting labor records. Professor Dick Shuttee, a labor economist at the University of Texas, Arlington, (UTA) was quite enthusiastic about the idea of an archives. With the permission of the History Department of UTA, the author and his colleagues started the Archives Project with a half-summer salary. About three dozen Texas labor newspapers and newsletters have been collected or have been purchased from other archives' microfilmed holdings. The Texas Labor Archives of UTA is currently the only depository in the Southwest that actively seeks union records.

In the summer of 1994, 150 workers at a cement plant in Calera, Alabama, abandoned a month-long strike after Blue Circle Cement Co. permanently replaced more than three-quarters of them. The company's tactics deeply alienated its experienced workforce. Tyrone Perkins, who had more than 18 years of seniority at the Calera plant, summed up how the experience of being replaced had transformed the attitude of workers to the company. In the 1980's and 1990's, employers faced with strikes increasingly resorted to hiring replacement workers.

Presents an update on issues concerning labor history in the U.S. as of January 1993. Overview of the 1993 Lowell Conference on Industrial History; Information on several conferences on labor studies and industrial relations; Establishment of a working group to focus on labor movements and free trade.

Presents information on several conferences and meetings on labor to be held at universities in the U.S. from 1996 to 1997. Labor and Democracy at the University of Washington; Obscure Objects of Desire: Reviewing the Crafts This Century at the University of East Anglia; Workers and the City at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

From the onset of the Great Depression, and continuing throughout the lifetime of the New Deal, re-casting the nation's political economy became the overriding preoccupation of American politics. The economic crisis inevitably called into question the prevailing relationship between the government, the economy, and society. In particular, the power of dominant industrial, commercial, and financial institutions was severely tested. Political alternatives proliferated, but tended to gather around one of two possible general approaches. On the one hand, numerous proposals, some more conservative than others, suggested deploying the moral authority of the Federal government to sanction a system of industrial self-regulation. On the other hand, this corporatist politics was opposed by those who envisioned a more autonomous and active role for the state in regulating and encouraging the growth of the national economy, and prescribed policies, some more liberal than others, subsequently characterized as Keynesian.

The article presents information related to the research papers analyzing the American and European labor history. The paper entitled "Artisans in Transition: Early Capitalist Development and the Carpenters of Boston, 1987-1837," by Lisa B. Lubow, focuses on eroding artisan relations, rather than on emerging wage labor. It integrates ideology, organization, and politics with production, economics, and social structure. The paper "Culture and Conspiracy: A Socialist History of Chicago Anarchism, 1870-1900," by Bruce C. Nelson focuses on Chicago's socialist and anarchist movements in the Gilded Age. This study's principle conclusion is that the anarchist movement can be best understood as the explosive confrontation between two republicanisms in a harshly industrializing environment. Another research paper entitled "Gender, Class, and Culture: Women Secretarial and Clerical Workers in the United States, 1925-1955," examines scientific management programs, employer practices, and government policies.

Presents an update on issues and events related to labor history in the U.S. as of September 1993. Conferences; Grants and fellowships; Library materials made available to the U.S. public.

The article examines the use of song-poetry as a vital element in the labor movement in the period 1865-1895. Karl Reuber is not a name scholars are likely to recall. Reuber earned his livelihood polishing furniture and pianos in Pittsburgh in the decades surrounding the Civil War. Like most working-class Americans, he did not leave behind personal papers or memoirs. He was simply one of the millions of workers who owed their survival to the nation's burgeoning industrial base. However, Reuber also joined those who repeatedly rose in protest against the abuses of the rising capitalist elite from 1865 to 1895 and who sought to check capitalist domination by joining fellow workers in a movement for collective redress. Worker gatherings featured song-poetry as a regular part of their agenda, while labor "bards" engendered considerable followings with skills of composition and declamation. The majority of these bards emerged from the ranks of the nation's burgeoning workforce, iron molders, coal miners, coopers, machinists, printers, shoemakers, bakers, railroad brakemen and engineers. This lore and song certainly deserves study in its own right. However, the greatest value of song-poetry may derive from its examination as cultural artifacts and historical documents.

Massachusetts workers have engaged in some of the most important struggles in American labor history. Yet, until recently, there has been no systematic attempt to document the Bay State's labor organizations. The Archives and Manuscripts department of the University of Massachusetts (UM) at Amherst hopes to ensure that the state's more recent labor history does not suffer due to negligence. UM previously had eight volumes of minutes and dues books of the Loom Fixers Association of Fall River, a small, elite craft union in the industry, and a minute book for the Fall River Yarn Finishers Union. But the paucity of labor records reflected both the lack of interest by repositories and the sporadic strength of textile unions until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1986, the University acquired the records of the New Bedford Joint Board of the Textile Workers Union of America, documenting the resurgence of New England textile unionism from 1940 through its decline in the 1970s. The holdings of UM have begun to provide the raw material for the story of the Bay State's labor history.

The article presents information on various developments related to labor. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin will record the oral history of the United Packinghouse Workers of America with the help of an NEH grant. Under the direction of Society Archivist Jim Cavangah, some 200 hours of interviews will be taped with union members throughout the Midwest. The Society is also the official repository of the records of the UCPWA, which is now part of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University has opened several collections relating to the history of American radicalism since the publication of its catalog in 1974. The University of Louisville, Kentucky Archives has published a microfilm edition of the City of Louisville Municipal Reports. This complete set covering the years 1866-1916 includes information of interest to labor and urban historians and costs $640. The Sixth Conference on Workers and their Communities will be held May 9-11, 1986 at the University of Ottawa, Ontario and will focus on the theme Confronting the Crisis: Struggles in Work, Communities, and the Public Sector.

The article focuses on the American labor and immigration history. Prior to the 1960s interest in American working class history or labor history was very limited and centered chiefly on the New Deal with its support of industrial unionism and its attempt to legitimize social security programs and unionization as a support to existing institutions. Perhaps the most important scholars in the mid-1950s engaged in translating and presenting American works were Gino Giugni and Federico Mancini, both now professors of Labor Law, and chief authors of the Statuto dei Lavoratori, which delineates workers' rights and conflict procedures. Both are members of the Partito socialista italiano. Since late 1960s, the experience of extra parliamentary groups, whose activities include factory nuclei, has made younger scholars particularly attentive to conflict and to groups not integrated into traditional trade union or party organizations. The interest has also changed the direction of study of Italian immigration. In 1969 the Istituto di studi americani of the Facoltà di Magistero, Universita di Firenze, held a symposium on Italian immigration to the United States; it included papers on specific working class situations and political activity.

In the 1960s, two Federal steps against sex-based discrimination, the Civil Rights Act and the "Equal Pay" amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, signaled victory for the heirs of the women who had fought for both equal pay and equal employment opportunities during World War I. The wartime government had embraced cautiously the demand for equal pay, had equivocated on the rights of working women, and in the end, had left a checkered legacy. Among the government's most important agencies, which dealt with women workers, was the National War Labor Board (NWLB). The NWLB administered America's first comprehensive experiment in labor-government-management relations. The American Federation of Labor named five labor leaders to represent employees, and the National Industrial Conference Board selected five industrialists to speak for the nation's employers. From the outset, the NWLB employee members urged sweeping reforms and the employer representatives stood firm against change. The board's principles, which had been drafted in an effort to reconcile the two groups' conflicting demands, were themselves ambiguous.

The article presents bibliography of some papers on the labor history of the U.S. for 1969 published in various periodicals. Some of these papers include "Labor History: Sources and Perspectives," by Richard C. Berner published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, "Annual Bibliography of Periodical Articles on American Labor History: 1967" by Michael Brook published in Labor History, "Three Problems for the Labor Historian," by Nuala McGann Drescher published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, "Manuscript Sources in the Library of Congress for a Study of Labor History," by Paul T. Heifron published in the Labor History, "Listening to the Inarticulate: William Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons," by Jesse Lemisch published in the Journal of Social History, "The Educational Philosophy and Practices of Robert Owen: Educational Iconoclast of the 19th Century," by Alfred Lightfoot and "Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Welfare Work, 1865-1920," by Norris Alden Magnuson.

Presents news briefs related to labor history in the U.S. as of March 1976. Grants and research assistantships offered by the Immigration History Research Center; Information on archival collections acquired by the University of Akron American History Research Center; Purpose of the grant received by the Minnesota Historical Society from the U.S. General Services Administration.

The Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, was the second labor archive established as a result of the activities of the Association of Southern Labor Historians. This group of historians concerned about the lack of attention paid to the southern working class on the part of labor historians, developed during the 1966 meeting of the Southern Historical Association with the purpose of stimulating study of the southern trade union movement by collecting union records and presenting papers on labor history at meetings concurrent with those of the Southern Historical Association. Dr. George Green of the University of Texas (UT) at Arlington, Texas, returned home from this meeting and began a series of conversations with UT faculty and administrators, as well as Texas labor leaders. These discussions led to the creation in 1967 of the Texas Labor Archives at UT. The Southern Labor Archives is a very young repository. The Archives seeks, however, to become a major regional and national research resource by concentrating its efforts on documenting the development of the labor movement in the South.

The State Historical Society of Wisconsin's resources on labor and working class history fall into two broad areas: (1) library collections of books, newspapers, pamphlets, and printed proceedings; and (2) archival holdings of unpublished manuscripts, public records, audio, and visual collections. The second of these two areas is the focus of this brief article. No attempt will be made to provide a comprehensive listing of the Society Archives' labor related collections. Such a descriptive listing is already available in the book "A Guide to Labor Papers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin." Rather this is an introduction to the collection highlighting its strengths in terms of types of collections time periods, and topical areas within the field of labor and working class history. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin is located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. The Archives Division holdings are open to all researchers upon presentation of identification. Some of the labor collections have been microfilmed and may be purchased or borrowed on interlibrary loan.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has had a long and varied industrial history out of which rose, among other things, the first labor party, U.S. President Zachary Taylor's scientific management, and labor activist William H. Sylvis' brand of modern trade unionism. Indeed, at least one labor historian has suggested that Philadelphia was the headquarters of the trade union movement in the 19th century. During the past year, the Urban Archives of Temple University at Pennsylvania, has been involved in a project to survey and acquire business and labor records relating to the city. As a result, the Archives have added several significant collections to its previous holdings. Perhaps the largest labor collection in the Urban Archives is that of the Upholsterers' International Union (UIU), covering the period from 1937 to 1976. The papers comprise approximately 175 linear feet and, while unprocessed, some sections are available for easy access. In particular, the extensive minutes of the Executive Board are a valuable source, containing the actions and correspondence of the board on every UIU resolution, dating from Sal Hoffman's election as president in 1937.

The Fred Lewis Pattee Library of the Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, is a major resource for the study of labor history, the world of work, and industrial relations. In addition to the excellent general library collection of monographs, serials, and Pennsylvania and federal documents, primary sources are concentrated in two special collections: (1) the Pennsylvania Historical Collections and Labor Archives, which also houses the labor oral history collection, and (2) the University Library's Microforms Division. The major record group in the Historical Collections and Labor Archives relates to unionization in the steel industry. Records of the United Steelworkers of America contain a vast array of documents from the union's international headquarters. A large labor oral history collection complements the union records and personal papers in the archives. Not surprisingly, the majority of the interviews are with individuals who have been associated with the history and development of trade unionism in the steel and metals industries.

The autobiography by Henry Johnson, a black CIO organizer in the Chicago meatpacking industry, offers a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between race and class-consciousness in the history of American workers. What follows is the transcript of a 1937 interview, conducted by a Works Progress Administration (WPA) worker, with Henry Johnson. The transcript is included in the papers and records of the WPA's "Negro in Illinois" survey, held at the George Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library. The materials contained in the survey include a large number of interviews on the Afro-American migration from the South during the World War I period and the subsequent growth of social, political, and cultural institutions in Chicago's black community. Johnson was born in Siblo, Texas at the turn of the century. His father worked as a logger and plasterer and had been a member of several unions well as the IWW. The standard picture we have of southern white racism is re-focused by Johnson's descriptions of important instances of inter-racial cooperation in his and his father's lives.

The paper presents annual bibliography of articles on American Labor History. Some of the articles on general history are — "Collective Action, Marx's Class Theory, and the Union Movement," by D.E. Booth; "Southern Workers and Social Change: Concepts and prospects," by Michael J. Cassity; "Occupational Classification in the United States Census: 1870-1970," by Margo A. Conk; "Work in a New America," by R.M. Kanter; "Work: A Short and Critical History," by D. Whitsett and K. Lash and "Occupational Folklore and the Folklore of Working," edited by Catherine Swanson and Philip Nusbaum. Some of the articles on American labor movement are — "Racial Discrimination Against Free Blacks in Antebellum Virginia: The Case of Harry Jackson," by Raymond C. Bailey; "House Servants and Field Hands: Fragmentation in the Antebellum Slave Community," by C.W. Harper; "Indentured Servitude: The Philadelphia Market, 1771-1773," by Robert O. Heavner and "A Variety of Panaceas: The 'Social Problem' and Proposed Solutions to It in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York State," by Edward Pessen.

The article is an announcement about several meetings to be held concurrently in the year 1979 in various cities of the U.S. The Economic and Business Historical Society issued a call for papers for the April 1979 meeting at Lake Tahoe-Reno. A dissertation session is also planned. The Society meets concurrently with the Western Social Science Association. The Fourth Midwest Marxist Scholars Conference will be held on March 9-11, 1979 at the University of Cincinnati on the theme "The U.S. Educational System: Marxist Approaches;' The focus will be on education as an institution and on Marxist approaches to research and teaching in various academic disciplines. The Department of History and the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University announce a national labor history conference that will be held in October 1979. The American Council of Learned Societies had published a brochure on "Aids to Individual Scholars," which deals with competitions to be held in 1978-79. The ninth annual Institute for Historical Editing will take place in July 15-27, 1979, in Madison, Wisconsin.

The article details the preservation or accessioning of labor history records at the University Libraries' department of Special Collections and Archives. The University Libraries' department of Special Collections and Archives has been seeking labor records for its Archives of Public Affairs and Policy since 1986. These growing archives include papers of individuals and records of organizations concerned with New York State public policy issues, especially since 1950. While there are approximately 450 public- and private-sector labor unions and related organizations in this area, the survey has been expanded geographically in recognition of the New York State Department of Labor's broader definition of the "Albany District," which includes the industrial cities of Glens Fails, Gloversville, Hudson, Johnstown, Plattsburgh, and Poughkeepsie. Despite the long history of organized labor in the Capital District, there has been little serious historical scholarship on unionism in the area. The monographs and dissertations that have been produced give insight into reasons for the successes and failures of organized labor and examine unions in a few trades, but much of the labor history of the region remains unknown.

The Labor Archives and Research Center was established in 1985 as part of the library system of San Francisco State University. Previously, despite San Francisco's reputation as a labor town, no archival repository in Northern California had actively collected the records relating to working people and their organizations even though there was a substantial body of published scholarship on the labor history of the San Francisco Bay Area. The founding of the Center stems from the activities of three interested parties, each with a vital stake in its establishment and each essential to the effort. First, there was a dedicated group of labor leaders whose garages and closets held files, photographs, banners, and other historical material documenting their lives and local labor's past. Second, there was at San Francisco State University, a president, Paul F. Romberg, who with his close advisors recognized the importance of labor history. The third component involved the financial backing for the proposed center. A compromise has also been worked out in which the six counties surrounding San Francisco are specified in the collecting policy, and nothing from Northern California is explicitly excluded.

Penn State's Historical Collections & Labor Archives (HCLA), a unit of the University's Pattee Library, began in 1958 as a special col- lection of historical source material concerning Pennsylvania. In the roughly 20 years since the beginning of its labor archives project, HCLA has acquired a variety of sources that docu- ment both working class institutions as well as the lives of workers themselves. HCLA has the records of state-wide labor federations, central bodies, and local unions. The largest single group of records in HCLA is the United Steelworkers of America Archive, which covers the union's membership throughout the U.S. and documents the internal and external activities of every hierarchical level of the organization. Manuscript collections donated by labor leaders, organizers, activists, and industrial relations experts complement the records of labor organizations at HCLA. Oral histories provide another vital set of documents about organizing campaigns, formation of union policy, rank and file movements, mergers of unions, and the formative experiences of labor leaders.

This article studies the great public debate over yellow-dog contracts as an episode in the history of the legal culture of early 20th century U.S. The attempt by certain groups of employers to enlist judicial power on their side of labor disputes provoked a bitter quarrel, full of charges, justifications, and recriminations. The debate revealed the partisans' conflicting understandings of the nature of the industrial order. Its outcome was an unmistakable sign that the moral vision of proprietary capitalists no longer provided a persuasive account of the industrial relations of the corporate economy. The yellow-dog contract in the 1920s was most often used by those employers who faced the greatest challenges from organized labor, that is, the proprietors of marginal firms in the nonunion sectors of competitive industries. Their justification of the contract proceeded from assumptions which made sense of their own industrial circumstances but which were out of step with the understandings of managers of the decade's dominant, corporate firms.

On May 21, 1914, Frederick C. Mills left the San Francisco offices of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing to begin an investigation of itinerant life in California. Traveling in the guise of a "blanket stiff," Mills spent the next two months traversing the Central Valley observing a way of life about which little was known. He took short jobs on this trip, rode the rails, ate in the hobo jungles, and spent hours talking with men on the road. While he was traveling, Mills kept a journal. In this journal, and in the reports and fragments he wrote after he returned, Mills referred again and again to his observations of the impact of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) on California's itinerant laborers. The reception of the IWW message by the farmworkers, itinerants and casuals that it was attempting to organize, however, was not known. In 1913-1914, during the first year of its existence, the Commission of Immigration and Housing attempted to find out the reaction of itinerants to the IWW by sending Mills and other agents into the field.

Two great waves of organization built the industrial unions founded in the 1930s. The first, most dramatic, and most closely examined surge of growth ended in late 1937 after the U.S. Committee for Industrial Organization had won a substantial foothold in much of basic industry. Nearly four years of stagnation and retreat followed, until in early 1941 a second wave of industrial union growth began. Although attracting far less scholarly attention than the era of unionism symbolized by the sit-down strikes, the wartime surge of organization completed many of the unfinished tasks of the 1930s, doubled the size of what had become the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and put collective bargaining on a routine basis which determined much of the pattern of government-management-labor relations in the postwar era. This growth and consolidation took place under the most extraordinary circumstances, the nation was at war, unemployment had dropped to minimal levels, the federal government dominated every aspect of the economy, the trade unions had agreed to a ban on strikes and a ceiling on wages.

The article focuses on the origin and progress of the Texas labor archives. During the Southern Historical Association's meeting in Memphis in November 1966 a group of mostly young historians organized the Association of Southern Labor Historians (SHA). Its purpose was to promote Southern labor history by encouraging the collection of labor records and the delivery of labor papers at meetings concurrent with those of SHA. Inspired by this development, professor George Green of the University of Texas Arlington history department talked with the university librarian, John Hudson, about the absence of primary resource materials for graduate and undergraduate study in history at UTA and the lack of recent research in the South and Southwest on the history of labor. Professor Howard Lackman of the history department joined in the series of conversations. Researchers learned that no university in the Southwest was actively collecting labor records and that the labor community, possessing tons of non-current records, needed and wanted a labor archives.

The article comments on the progressive and the working class vote in California. Progressivism was a middle class movement, and while its leaders might strive to remedy the crassest abuses of industrial society, they were as fearful of concentrated labor power as of unregulated monopoly capitalism. In their zeal for moral reform and efficiency, they were often thrown into conflict with labor and immigrant-dominated political machines in cities. The interpretation that represents Progressivism as a political move by a disaffected middle class, as reformers frightened by the power of monopolistic corporations and fearful of organized labor, rests upon inferences drawn from public statements and, in a few instances, private thoughts of a leadership elite. Few attempts have been made to examine the other side of the coin and determine the response of labor leaders and the labor press. The conclusion that Progressivism was a middle-class movement has not been adequately tested against the voting records of metropolitan areas. It is the hypothesis of this paper that leaders of organized labor in California strongly endorsed Progressivism and that, though Progressivism was originally sustained by middle- and upper-class voters.

The article presents news related to labor and labor unions in the U.S. as of March 1981. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union has shifted its Archives to the eighth floor of the Union Health Center building at 275 Seventh Avenue, New York. The Southern Labor Studies Association has organized the fourth Southern Labor History Conference to be held at Georgia State University in Atlanta in February, 1982. The National Association of Office Workers has a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and disseminate a curriculum on the history and philosophy of working women. The project includes a four session course, a forum group, research projects, and a curriculum manual. The Pacific Northwest Labor History Association has published the book "Unionism or Hearst" by William E. Ames and Roger A. Simpson. The West Virginia Labor History Association, in conjunction with the State Department of Culture and History, held a "Mother Jones and the Miners" festival in Charleston on November 29-30, 1980. The Kansas Carpenters' History Project will produce a fifty-page pamphlet on the history of the Kansas Carpenters' Union and the carpentry trade, 1881 to 1981.

The article presents information on various meetings related to labor disputes to be held in various places. The Arizona Labor History Council and the Arizona State University will jointly sponsor the 1977 Southwest Labor Studies Conference scheduled to meet in Tempe, Arizona on March 4-5, 1977. The sponsors welcome conference proposals, papers, and participants from both the academic and labor-union communities there is a possibility that participants will have expenses paid by a pending grant proposal. The Forest History Society has published "Oral History Collection of the Forest History Society: An Annotated Guide." The fifth annual Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization conference has been tentatively scheduled for April 16-16, 1977, in New York City. The theme of the conference will be "The Politics of Culture: Legitimation and Resistance in Advanced Capitalism."

The article presents different proceedings to be held in the United States in relation to Labor History and also presents other library news. The Second International Conference on Self-Management will be held June 6-8, 1975, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Ninth annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Conference is tentatively scheduled for Seattle in the spring of 1976. The Southern Labor History Conference will hold a two-day convention in Atlanta in the spring of 1976 to discuss labors past, present, and future. The Oral History Association announces its tenth National Colloquiumon Oral History, October 23-26, 1975, at the Grove Park Inn in Ashville, North Carolina. The theme for the collosuium will be "Oral History Comes of Age: The 10th National Colloquium on Oral History." The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library has announced that all security-classified documents in the papers of Arthur F. Burns, 1952-56, and records of the President's Committee on Migratory Labor, 1938-66, have been declassified.

The article presents an extract from a private diary kept by an intelligent and scholarly young carpenter living in New England and New York from September 1820 to May 1827. Carpenters having frequently discussed upon the impropriety of working so many hours during the longest days in summer, for a day's work and on the necessity and expediency of limiting the number of hours for a day's work, thereby reducing it to a regular system whereby every mechanick might be enabled to work the exact specified time for his employer and yet have some leisure time to regulate and make such arrangements in his affairs as are indispensably necessary. The first step taken to effect this was notice given in the public papers that a meeting of the journeymen carpenters would be held at Concert Hall, on April 12, 1825 and solicited punctual attendance. This notice was given about ten days previous to the proposed meeting. Five or six days before the meeting about sixty or seventy of the above named met to consult what measures to adopt at the general meeting and make such arrangements for the same as might be thought proper.

The article presents various newsletters related to the labor history. The American Historical Association Meeting will be held in the month of December, 1968. The Labor Historians will sponsor two sessions of the American Historical Association in Chicago. The Pacific Northwest Labor History Conference met last April on the campus of Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington. 65 individuals from academic community and trade unionists attended the conference. The Association of Southern Labor Historians was formed during the 1966 meeting of the Southern Historical Association. The President of the Association of Southern Labor Historians is Professor George Green of the University of Texas, Arlington, Texas. The Chicago Historical Society has the papers of John Fitzpatrick, relating largely to his work as President of the Chicago Federation of Labor. It contains some information on the Chicago Journeymen Horse Shoers Union, the Labor Party of Cook County, and the Farmer Labor Parties of Cook County and the United States.

This article considers the reasons why labor historians have continued to neglect the history of workers and unions in the US public sector. It argues that the most compelling explanation for historians’ failure to examine the history of public sector unions is that conducting such an examination would challenge a number of deeply rooted preconceptions regarding the history of American labor since World War II. The article goes on to suggest what we might learn if US labor historians began to probe the experience of public sector workers more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly literature on the recent history of public policies dealing with race and labor has focused on the origins, implementation, and aftermath of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians and historically informed scholars in other disciplines have focused particular attention on affirmative action programs, which were designed initially to implement the requirements of Title VII. Scholars such as John D. Skrentny and Hugh Davis Graham have stressed the troubled relationship between affirmative action, on the one hand, and changes in immigration policy, on the other. Meanwhile, Timothy Minchin, Nancy MacLean, and Thomas Sugrue emphasize the importance of grassroots activism in the adoption of affirmative action programs and highlight the positive role of the federal government in the quest for racial justice in the workplace. Debate, as reflected in the work of Judith Stein and Herbert Hill, has also raged over the role of organized labor with respect to workplace civil rights within the broader context of public policy and political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the organized labor in the U.S. Taking care of business belongs to a long tradition of literature that has castigated the U.S. labor movement even as it has hailed the enduring virtue of the U.S. working class. Dating at least back to Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais's Labor's "Untold Story Strike," and James Green's "World of the Worker," partisans of working-class radicalism have contradistinguished the inherent decency and potential radicalism of working people, on the one hand, and the conservatism and cynicism of the real, existing labor movement on the other. Paul Buhle's contribution to this genre is a kind of scholarly polemic-scholarly because it rests on broad acquaintance with the academic literature relating to its subject, a polemic because it marshals its evidence without much regard for nuance on behalf of a rousing agenda of popular struggle. Despite this long, doleful record, those seeking historical sustenance for progressive labor activism do nonetheless have a rich tradition on which to draw. Radical laborites, notably members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local grass-roots movements in the 1930s, projected a free-wheeling, democratic brand of unionism that remains of inspirational and tactical relevance.

The article presents a bibliography on labor history, which is organized into the following twelve sections, Theories of the American Labor Movement/Working Class; Cross-Period Studies and Surveys; Periods of Development; Labor and Political Action/The State, Labor and Radicalism; Women; Immigration, Ethnicity, and Minority Groups; City, State, & Regional Labor Movements/Working Class; Industries, Occupations, and Trades; Comparative; Related/Thematic Works; Marxology and Archival, Reference & Bibliography, Professional, Non-Print Formats/Media, New Serials.

In early August of 1894, John McBride, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), announced his intention to form an Ohio labor party and to merge the party with the state's People's party. Historians who have examined the Federation's stance toward political action have mistakenly concluded that McBride shared Samuel Gompers' union philosophy. Gompers's unionism went by a number of names-business unionism, trade unionism, voluntarism, pure and simple unionism, prudential unionism-but it rested on two fundamental assumptions. First, Gompers saw an inherent and unalterable conflict between employers and those who worked for wages. This led Gompers and like-minded unionists to eschew alliances with farmers, small producers, and shop keepers. Second, Gompers saw the conflict between labor and capital as essentially economic in nature. In the past decade, scholars have attempted to explain the decline of labor republicanism and the rise of business unionism in hopes of understanding the conservative nature of American politics. For in the United States alone among Western industrialized nations, the labor movement did not organize politically after the turn of the century to challenge the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism.

In 1993 the Governor-General of Australia, son of an American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) maintained that brutal employment conditions explained the rise of the IWW in the USA: "Direct action appeared justified." Not so in Australia, he insisted, where unionism was well established, Labor governments a periodic reality, and industrial relations avoided the "excesses" of the American system; Australian IWW tactics, therefore, were "self-destructive." As a former cabinet minister in a federal Labor government, Bill Hayden's perspective on the Australian IWW is typical of the Australian Labor Party, implying as it does that Labor's achievements rendered an Australian IWW unnecessary and counterproductive. A similar response is apparent in a 1919 Labor pamphlet, which described the IWW as "a serpent in the new Eden ready to poison the clear spring of progress." However, the Wobblies of the time maintained that it was precisely the discrepancy between promise and performance of Labor governments that discredited political action and demanded direct industrial action; and it was the persuasive power of this argument that found them an audience amongst militant workers. Thus it was the apparent success of the labor movement's incursion into parliamentary politics, the formation of governments that explains the appeal of the Australian IWW, as it developed and articulated a distinctively anti-political position.

The article comments on the article "On the Importance of Crossing Borders," by Marcel van der Linden that appeared in the 1999 issue of the journal "Labor History." When Van der Linden refers to the book "We Shall Be All as: A History of Industrial Workers of the World," by Melvyn Dubofsky a product of its time," he may be correct but not in precisely the way that he imagines. Today the author readily confess toneglecting the influence of gender in the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, to simplifying the dynamics of migration and immigration among working people, and perhaps to understating the impact of race but not ethnicity in the story of the Wobblies. After all, when the author first delved into the subject and began to research what the author took to be the story of working-class radicalism in the U.S. West in 1961, gender scarcely figured as a factor in scholarly analysis, immigration studies remained in the grip of models created by sociologists Marcus Lee Hansen and Oscar Handlin, and merely to introduce "people of color" into a western narrative was unusual. Indeed, the author drew too sharp a distinction between the U.S.-born and Americanized immigrants from northern Europe whom, the author alleged, generated western working-class radicalism and more recent immigrants from the east and south of Europe, whom the author portrayed as uprooted first-generation migrants to an industrial society.

The article discusses the book "We Shall Be All: A History of Industrial Workers of the World," by Melvyn Dubofsky and its significance as a pivotal work in western working-class history. By locating the roots of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), and the miners' radicalism in industrialization, Dubofsky reframed the conversation about western labor radicalism and linked it to the history of class relations in the industrial U.S. Previous histories, influenced by the Commons school, activist Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Cold War anti-communism, and the assumptions of consensus history, generally interpreted the WFM as a colorful exception to "mainstream" labor. Its socialist endorsements, the "un-American" violence of its strikes, and its role in founding the Western Labor Union, the American Labor Union, and the IWW as alternatives to the American Federation of Labor, all became odd deviations in histories that presumed a moderate labor movement that sought only a larger piece of the economic pie. Social scientists explored the "anomalous" demographics of mining communities that led miners to displace their frustrations onto absentee mine owners. The only national historical narrative the WFM "fit" was the paradigm of frontier violence.

On April 19-20, 1978, representatives of nearly 70 labor and political organizations met at the DuPont Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., for the founding conference of the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition (CLEC). CLEC was formed during the second energy crisis to represent working and middle-class citizens, challenge the power and priorities of the energy industry, and reform energy policy. It had another, even more ambitious purpose: to revive and strengthen liberal and progressive politics by coalition-building between labor unions, citizen organizations, and public interest groups. CLEC made limited yet significant progress toward these goals by the mid-1980s, when it was absorbed into a larger organization and declined in importance. Though neglected by scholars in both fields, CLEC's role in contemporary labor history and American politics is worthy of attention, above all because it addressed a crucial issue of American public life: the relationship between the decline of organized labor and the decay of liberal and progressive politics.

For U.S. workers and unions in the 1940s, labor law, and its administration and interpretation, had changed the world in which they operated. Without a doubt, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the National War Labor Board during World War II both strongly stimulated and protected union organizing and collective bargaining for the first time in American history. Historically, the predominant paradigm of the American judiciary towards organized labor's constitutional liberty had been to conceptualize human labor as a commodity that was part of a commercial transaction. As such, since they engaged in business related commercial activity, unions were only granted as much First Amendment protection as appropriate to this sphere. A long line of cases had held that business or commercial expressions could properly be regulated by the state to protect the varying interests affected by the commercial transaction violating the First Amendment, and commercial professions could be licensed by the state. As the complexities of representing labor during wartime increased, Pressman, as leader of the ClO general counsels, periodically convened conferences where industrial union lawyers could discuss common legal problems. In the early war years, Pressman devoted a brainstorming session to the question of how to deal with the tremendous increase in anti-union legislation at the state and local levels, particularly in the south and rural plains areas. In response to the union revival of the mid-1930s, state legislatures in conservative regions passed varied restrictions on union activity.

In "The Cultural Front," Michael Denning has written a remarkable book. Wide-ranging in its perspectives, brilliant in its analysis of the politics of cultural forms, Denning persuasively reminds that the 1930s were far more than years of despair whose lasting cultural symbols seemingly consist of only breadlines, apple-sellers, and migrant mothers. "The Cultural Front" is a complex book, owing in part to the multiple definitions that Denning accords his somewhat awkward phrase, the "laboring of American culture." In Denning's basic usage, the phrase "refers to the pervasive use of labor and its synonyms in the rhetoric of the period." Reflexibly, the phrase also describes the "proletarianization of American culture, the increased influence on and participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and the arts." In arguing that the Popular Front influenced American culture in the depression years and beyond, Denning raises issues of periodization, audience, voice, representation, agency, and causation-all of which need to be questioned.