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The 1987-88 strike at International Paper's Androscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine severed a longstanding 'social contract' where workers and community residents tolerated the mill's air and water pollution in return for good-paying jobs and a robust local economy. This article traces the development of environmental consciousness among union workers and community residents during the strike and their efforts to protect the environment from the pollution of the mill. The union publicized environmental problems at the mill and the state's failures to regulate pollution when the strike began. After a series of environmental accidents during the strike, including a massive chlorine dioxide gas leak that threatened the safety of the town, Jay residents formed a community environmental organization and pressured the company and the state to close the mill. The environment remained an important issue after the strike, as labor and environmental activists joined forces to uphold a municipal ordinance that allowed the town to enforce state and federal environmental laws. This article studies how labor and environmental politics converged on a local level and also explores the broader themes of the conflict between job prosperity and environmental protection in industrial communities, labor and environmental movement alliances, and the current issues surrounding the 'green economy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1987, managers at International Paper Company (IP) permanently replaced more than 2,200 union members who had gone on strike after resisting the firm's demands for extensive concessions. Previous accounts of this dispute, which lasted until October 1988, have focused on Jay, Maine, where around half the strikers were located. This study gives a fuller history, detailing the involvement of strikers in De Pere, Wisconsin and Lock Haven, Pennsylvania as well. In addition, it highlights the important part played by 1,200 IP workers in Mobile, Alabama. In March 1987, IP executives locked out the Mobile workers, precipitating the entire conflict between the two sides. Blending oral history interviews with unprocessed archival material and local newspaper accounts, Minchin shows that the company's use of permanent replacements tipped the balance in its favor, despite the union's efforts to launch a corporate campaign against IP. Although the strikers held firm, they had little bargaining power once they had been replaced. The dispute graphically highlights how difficult it is for unions to win strikes in the contemporary US, confirming union leaders’ complaints that the hiring of permanent strike replacements has left them with an ‘empty gun.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opening of new archival sources often turns up surprising and interesting information. For example, one of political activist Lillian Hellman's biographers discovered in intellectual Joseph L. Rauh Papers statements by Hellman confirming her Communist Party membership in the late 1930's, an affiliation previously vigorously denied in some circles although suspected in others. Rauh, a leading civil liberties lawyer, had been Hellman's counsel when she prepared for a confrontation with the United States Congress House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. Hellman was prepared to testify regarding her own Communist activity but not to name others. Rauh's files contain drafts of a statement regarding her Communist affiliation that Hellman would give should HUAC agree to her condition. Joseph Rauh handled many important internal security cases in the late 1940's and 1950's, and historians will find much of interest in his legal files on his successful defense of playwright Arthur Miller, his removal of the Independent Socialist League from the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, and his files on the hotly debated lawyer William Remington prejury case. The Ludwig Donath file in the Rauh Papers is an example of chance discovery of an unknown episode in the history of Hollywood Communism and the show business blacklist.

Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes simultaneous strikes during the first half of the 20th century in North America. The transformation of production in copper, lead, zinc, and silver mining districts determined the formation of a working class that operated between Mexico and the United States. Therefore, the labor conflicts combined market circumstances and management-imposed homologation of work structures across firm divisions with the international coordination of miners. The paper describes the emergence, growth, and demise of a regional industrial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of southern teacher association mergers during the Civil Rights Movement. Desegregated teacher associations promised opportunity for black educators during the transformation of public schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Southern black educators at the moment of desegregation controlled the mergers of their own associations and carried forth a civil rights agenda that protected the gains of the movement and the integrity of their professional labor. Threatened with widespread unemployment and the perils of working under white school officials committed to segregation, black educators defended their right to teach in a newly desegregated and volatile work environment. White teacher associations responded by pursuing a 'right to work' in desegregated schools that built upon the rhetoric of conservative and antiunion ideology. The perennial yet evolving tensions that underpinned the merger highlights the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement, which promised opportunity yet ironically put forth new forms of resistance that deprived black teachers of the equity they sought through desegregation. The conflict inherent to the merger of education associations provides a nuanced perspective by which to understand desegregation as it precipitated fractures and tensions still evident in the teaching profession today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we put forward a theoretical framework for understanding a positive relationship between labor laws and innovation and rigorously test it against both historical and empirical data. We show how several periods in the economic history of the United States - like the increase in slave-field hand productivity in cotton picking in the Antebellum South, the transition in the North from artisanal shops to nonmechanized factories, the increase in productivity in mechanized textile factories in the Northeast in the late Antebellum period, and the increase in productivity in sharecropping after the Civil War - can be understood, at least partially, through our theoretical framework. To build further support for the framework, we empirically analyze how change in labor laws during the early twentieth century affected patent issuance by state. And we also look at how changes in worker power, as proxied by strike activity, affected patent issuance by industry between the early twentieth century and 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reframes the discussion on vulnerable and exploited agricultural labour in twentieth-century United States using the overarching category of unfree labour. In order to do so, it bridges two usually distinct historiographies by linking the phenomenon of 'peonage' during the New Deal, with the one of immigrant contract labour in southern Florida, under the H2 visa. Archival research on the practices at the U.S. Sugar Corporation in southern Florida illustrates this link. The article draws on Federal archives, U.S. Government proceedings, papers of political activists and legal and labour scholarship to argue: firstly, that unfree labour has been an enduring feature of agricultural labour relations at regional level during the twentieth century, through both a transmission and a transformation of practices that had their origin in the control of black emancipated labour; secondly, that the introduction of 'guest workers' under the H2 and Bracero programme meant a modernisation in the practices of unfree labour, pivoting on the lack of citizenship rights, racial discrimination, debt at home and threat of deportation; and, finally, that the failure to recognise forms of legal and economic deprivation and coercion as unfree labour has hurt the ability of the United States to enforce protection of human rights at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, governments around the world have been engaged in a conflict over the appropriate role of public services in society. In the U.S. and elsewhere, public services have faced pressures to restructure, reduce the size of government, and make government more ‘business-like.’ This paper examines how the evolution of public services and public sector unions shaped the distinctive character of public sector industrial relations in the U.S. Next it demonstrates how this distinctive character made public services and public sector unions vulnerable to neoliberal attacks and New Public Management reforms. It concludes by theorizing about how the frameworks of citizenship at work and union renewal may be used to strengthen the essential identity and restore the positive role that public sector unions have traditionally played in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

This article explores the role that organized labor played in the landmark presidential election of 2008. In particular, it explores the work of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), which ran its biggest ever election campaign in 2008, spending upwards of $250 million. While there is a vibrant emerging literature on the election, particularly from political scientists and former reporters, labor’s role in the story has been largely overlooked. Drawing on new parts of the AFL–CIO’s papers, as well as interviews with key staffers and federation leaders, this article highlights the important – and overlooked – role that labor played in putting Barack Obama into the White House. Especially important were its extensive efforts to educate – and pressure – white members, many of whom had backed other candidates during the Democratic primaries, to support Obama. Indeed, theWashington Postasserted that union members played a ‘pivotal role’ in Obama’s victory, especially in terms of delivering the white vote. It was a conclusion largely supported by exit polls, which showed that white union members were much more likely to support Obama than whites who were not in unions. The article highlights that despite the decline in union density – by this time only about 12% of American workers belonged to unions, compared to 35% in the 1950s – the labor movement retained considerable political influence, chiefly because of reforms carried out by AFL–CIO President John J. Sweeney. While Obama was unable to fulfill many of the expectations generated by his campaign, the story of labor and the 2008 election is an important one in its own right, showing that contemporary labor could still be a powerful and constructive force. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a collection of papers that respond to an essay that compares the role of political repression in the early American labor movement and European labor movements. One paper questions the severity of political repression in the U.S. during the period in question, 1870 to 1914, and offers additional historical moments that influenced the labor movement in the U.S. Another paper discusses how the essay addresses the issue of American exceptionalism in the early American labor movement. An additional paper argues that the essay utilizes a crude conceptualization of political repression of labor movements and does not allow room for alternative explanations.

Well known is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) in the United States places a largely per se ban on nonunion employee representation (ER) groups which deal with employers over a term or condition of employment. Much less well known is that America’s other labor law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA, 1926), takes a different approach and permits employers to operate such councils and committees as long as they do not perform a collective bargaining function or interfere with workers’ free choice of a bargaining agent. Thus, under the RLA Delta Air Lines is able to operate what is today the closest living approximation to a 1920s-style ER plan while hundreds of other companies (e.g. Polaroid) under the jurisdiction of the NLRA have been forced over the years to disband similar groups on grounds they are a proscribed company union. No study to date has explored the history behind the RLA and NLRA’s divergent treatment of nonunion ER groups so this article takes a first look. The main part of the story covers the 1920–1935 period and examines the events, people, and experiences associated with company unions and ER in, respectively, the rail and manufacturing industries and why the legislative outcome in the former was a permissive stance on nonunion committees but prohibitive in the latter. The last part of the paper fast-forwards the RLA-NLRA story from the 1930s to contemporary law and practice in order to demonstrate how “history matters” when it comes to what employers can and cannot do with nonunion representation groups, such as works councils, participation and involvement committees, and dispute resolution forums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Labor History Resources in the University of Iowa Libraries (UIL), the State Historical Society of Iowa/Iowa City (SHSI), and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (HHPL), all located within 12 miles of one another in east central Iowa, have long been known as a major repository of source materials concerning the politics of American agriculture, Iowa history, and the Hoover Presidency and Commerce Secretariat. UIL sources mentioned here. Pertinent oral history collections at UIL are the Communications Workers of America-University of Iowa Oral History Project, and the Quad Cities Oral History Project, along with a 1936 typescript history of the area's labor and radical movements by R.F. McNabney. The SHSI holds a magnificent and in some ways unparalleled collection which, due to staff shortages in recent years, remains largely unprocessed and therefore somewhat difficult to access. The HHPL, opened to scholars in 1966, holds the Hoover papers, totaling some 2450 linear feet, and the papers of more than 100 of Hoover's associates and contemporaries, totaling over 2200 linear feet.

The Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library at the Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, was established in 1960 to collect and preserve the records of the American labor movement, with special emphasis upon industrial unionism and related social, economic and political reform movements in the U.S., especially those relating to workers. Later, in 1970, the scope of the Archives was expanded to include urbanization, especially relating to Detroit and southeastern Michigan. The majority of the archival collections relate to the period after 1920, though some collections like those of the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of Teachers, and the personal papers of labor leaders date back to the turn of the century. Archives. From its beginning in 1960, the Archives has adopted a vertical collecting policy for union records. This vertical collecting policy differs sharply from the acquisitions policy of many archives that concentrate almost solely upon key offices of an international union and the personal papers of top union leadership.

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress seeks to preserve personal papers and organizational records that document the course of America's national experience. Its more than 10,000 collections with more than 40,000,000 manuscript items touch upon every aspect of American history and culture. Collections containing labor-related material are considerable and constitute a major archive for labor history research. Some of the organizational records in the library includes the American Federation of Labor Letterbooks, American Friends Service Committee Work Camp Diary, Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Railway Postal Clerks, National Child Labor Committee, National Consumers League, National Women's Trade Union League of America, and People's Legislative Service. Some of the personal papers included in the library are of Henry J. Allen, former governor of Kansas, Otto S. Beyer, a consulting engineer and labor-management relations specialist, Warren K. Billings, a labor militant, William E. Borah, a former U.S. Senator from Idaho, and Andrew Carnegie, a labor activist in the late 19th century.

The article presents information about the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), which has, in the past two years, significantly added to already existing archival collections with the addition of several important groups of labor-related materials. In 1986 due to the expansion of its present office structure and the creation of an in-house computer center, the Rochester and Pittsburgh (R&P) Coal Co. donated many of its corporate archives to IUP. This collection, consisting of 420 linear feet, constitutes one of the most complete groups of coal company records in the East. Probably the most significant group of papers consists of the presidential files of R&P and of its several predecessor companies. Lucius Waterman Robinson left papers rich in labor history and the industrial heritage of Western Pennsylvania. B.M. Clark and his son, Heath S. Clark, both served as president during periods of industrial expansion and labor-management strife, and these are reflected in their surviving correspondence. The R&P collection also contains a unique group of early financial ledgers which document the founding of the company's 17 mining towns, beginning with the parent company's incorporation in 1881.

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 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.

Allis Rosenberg Wolfe's publication of five "Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845-1846," represents an important contribution to the study of the New England factory women. These letters, sent to the 22 year-old Harriet Hanson by her friends Maria and Lura Currier and H.E. Back and now in the Harriet Hanson Robinson papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are among the only surviving manuscript materials that document the perceptions of the Yankee mill women of the 1840's. The following remarks are designed to clarify and extend our understanding of the letters' contents, now that they have at last been made more accessible. Wolfe publishes perhaps two-thirds of the letters, an unfortunate if possibly necessary, for reasons of space editing of such rare documents. The portions retained are well chosen, but the general character of the letters is inevitably blurred. In short, all five letters in the Robinson papers must be seen as representing the complex experience of those mill women who went back and forth between factory town and rural community.

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.

The article presents a bibliography of periodicals and papers on the history of the American labor. According to the author the scope of this bibliography is, in fact, somewhat narrower than the title suggests, as it has been confined, with one or two exceptions, to learned periodicals. The list of papers on the period of labor development in the U. S. includes "Labor and the Federal Government: 1850-1933," by Albert A. Blum, , "Labor and the Radical Republicans: a Study of the Revival of the American Labor Movement, 1864-1868," by David Montgomery, "Cooperative Community in the North: Brigham City, Utah," by Leonard J. Arrington, "The Experimental Utopia in America," by Maren Lockwood, "The Failure of the Movement by the Unemployed for Public `Works in 1873," by Herbert G. Gutman, "Economic Growth and the Opportunities of Minorities: an Analysis of Changes in the Employment of Negroes and Women," by Dale Leroy Hiestand, and "The Poles and Anthracite Unions in Pennsylvania," by Victor R. Greene.

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a hostile political climate, although internal resistance and division also played a role. As a result, a major campaign to secure labor law reform fell short, and union density continued to decline, yet the rate of decline was slower than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, although the results of Sweeney’s efforts were mixed, the important role that the AFL-CIO played in electing Barack Obama partly justified Sweeney’s emphasis on political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through formal workforce participation; through home work of various sorts; and through selling subsistence, providing in-home services to nonfamily members in exchange for cash. Unlike earlier works which focused on single locations or ethnic or racial groups or female occupations, I tell a national story of ever-married women's cash-producing work. Working-class wives and mothers filled in the economic gaps existing in the interactions of their families with the capitalist marketplace through a range of different methods. While early 20th-century unions called for the establishment of a "living wage" for male workers, the world in which those workers lived required both family wages and family strategies to bring in other forms of cash for their survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the last notable period of working-class unrest in Britain and America, the 1968-74 'upsurge.' It questions the widespread dismissal of such workplace-based, 'economistic' forms of resistance as disconnected from more explicitly political forms of rebellion. The explosive, dynamic character of the rebellion is argued to have contained both the potential and actuality of a transformed consciousness and thus fundamental questioning of existing political and economic relations. The loss of 'what might have been' is attributed less to absence of a grand political narrative, despite the ruling-class panic of 1974, than to a simple failure to build cross-class networks which could have achieved the coordination and unity of often separate struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show that employment rates among less-educated young black men in the US continued their long secular decline in the 1980s and 1990s. We review a range of potential causes of this problem, including weak schooling, persistent discrimination, declining real wages and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. For the 1990s, we also focus on two fairly new developments: the dramatic rise in the numbers of young black men with criminal records and the rise in child support enforcement upon low-income non-custodial fathers. We also discuss the implications of these findings for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of Social Security's passage focus on the views of the various "progressive" reform movements and currents of thought that eventually came together to frame the Social Security Act in 1935. The respectable reformers, government officials, and business leaders who played a part in the Act's creation left behind a paper trail of documents, articles, and archives. For academics reviewing this history, there is a natural tendency to concentrate on this mainstream documentation. There is a troubling element, however, in the bias toward respectability. It is often the case that those proposing radical economic and social remedies have an influence on the political process, even if their schemes are not adopted. And the proponents of respectable proposals sometimes undertake less than honorable tactics to discredit their radical critics. Such tactics are not necessarily given prominent attention when the winners write the history of their success. At the time Social Security was before the U.S. Congress, the alternative Townsend Plan--a radical pension scheme that attracted millions of devoted followers--was also under consideration. Under the Townsend Plan, each person over 60 would have been granted a monthly pension of $200 per month--a huge sum at the time--on condition he/she not work and spend all the money within the month. The Townsend stipend was unrelated to past work history or wages.

The article presents several news related to various universities in the U.S. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has acquired the United Mine Workers of America District 2 Collection. The collection consists of almost 400 boxes and includes papers associated with the presidencies of John Brophy and James Mark and executive files including presidential correspondence, injunctions and other documents. The Knight Library at the University of Oregon has opened the Records of the International Woodworkers of America to researchers. The records, which span from 1936 to 1987 and till nearly 600 linear feet, consist primarily of correspondence, minutes, proceedings, negotiation files, expired contracts, legal and financial documents and officer and departmental records. In addition to the union's basic activities, such as organizing, negotiations, litigation, and strikes, the collection documents the conflict between the red bloc and white bloc forces in the union during the 1940s and 1950s. Papers from the presidency of Keith Johnson deal with Canadian softwood lumber imports, national health insurance, labor law reform, affirmative action, occupational safety and health and other issues.

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.

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.

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.

The labor history resources at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are, in part, the result of the first systematic attempt to document the rise of working-class movements and trade unionism in the U.S. In the early 1890s, when Richard T. Ely joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in Madison, Wisconsin, the Society began assisting him in gathering source material for the study of the labor movement. When, in 1904, Ely formed the American Bureau of Industrial Research and brought John R. Commons to Madison, the Society began collecting labor material on a systematic basis. From the 1890s to the present, those collecting for the Society have had a very broad definition of the labor movement, including not only trade unions but also anarchism, communism, cooperation, socialism, utopianism, and other working-class movements. Society research collections are divided functionally into three major areas, Library, including newspapers, pamphlets, books; Archives, including organizational records, personal papers, and Wisconsin governmental records; and Visual and Sound Archives, including photographs, posters and other graphics.

Renowned labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he resided throughout his life except for two periods when he was incarcerated for his labor and antiwar activities. After his death, Marguerite Debs Cooper, the sole surviving family member left in Terre Haute came into possession of Eugene's and her father's private papers, including family and other correspondence. In 1962 the Eugene V. Debs Foundation had been founded with the primary goals of historic preservation of the Debs Home and its utilization as a museum open to the public. Many charter members of the Foundation were professors at Indiana State University at Terre Haute, whose campus now surrounds the Debs Home. Having faculty as members of the Foundation helped ensure from the start close and productive ties with Cunningham Memorial Library, where the Debs Collection is now located in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The initial gift establishing the Debs Collection contained 3800 letters, 6000 speeches, 220 telegrams, 170 typescripts, 60 manuscripts, and 300 other items, including campaign memorabilia and photographs. A gift of particular significance came to the Collection through the efforts of J. Robert Constantine, a member of the university's Department of History, who for many years was Secretary of the Debs Foundation and was instrumental in the inception of the Debs Collection.

The Ohio Historical Society (OHS) began the Ohio Labor History Project in 1975 to locate, inventory, acquire, preserve, and provide access to labor union records and personal papers of Ohio labor leaders and to conduct oral history interviews. Initial funding came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Labor Education Research Services of the Ohio State University at Columbus and OHS. Since 1979 the Society's manuscripts department, through continuing support from the Ohio General Assembly, has expanded the collections and conducted extensive research into the history of Ohio labor. The majority of collections at OHS are of local unions in the central Ohio area, but district and regional headquarters for many internationals are located in Columbus and larger central labor bodies also are included. The Ohio AFL-CIO Records for the years 1922-1984 cover nearly all aspects of organized labor in the state, including material on the important defeat of the right-to-work campaign in 1958. The Columbus-Franklin County AFL-CIO, Newark Area AFL-CIO Council, and the Columbus-Franklin County Building and Construction Trades Council records also are at OHS.

Several international unions which have national offices in the greater Washington, D.C. area have sought assistance from the University of Maryland at College Park, the state's land grant institution, in preserving their archival records. A combination of developments also contributed significantly to the creation of a labor archives program at College Park, the formal establishment of what is now called the Historical Manuscripts and Archives Department in 1972 and the commencement of the Samuel Gompers Papers Project at the University campus in 1973. The first major archival collection to arrive at College Park was the records of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) in 1967. The archives located at College Park provide in-depth documentation on the origins of the union, its contact with civilian and military agencies during World War II, labor and race relations during the war, and the union's efforts to combat the decline of the shipbuilding industry during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The article presents information about the George Meany Memorial Archives, for which a new building was dedicated on the campus of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland, ending the formative years of the Archives and creating a national center for the study of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The Meany Archives serves as the official archives of the AFL-CIO and has defined as its collecting scope the records of the federation and its predecessor organizations, the constitutional trade and industrial departments, affiliated institutes and selected personal papers of AFL-CIO officers and staff. It is the plan of the Archives to eventually become a national clearing house for information about labor-related archival collections through participation in the Chadwick-Healey Inc. micropublication "The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States" and through cooperation with the "Labor Archives Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists."

The Joseph A. Beirne Memorial in Washington D.C. was built in the memory of Joseph A. Beirne, the founding father of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), who passed away after more than 30 years in the vanguard of the labor movement. The union started a three-part program, including an archives, museum, and written history, as a testament to CWA's many achievements under his administration. The archives was initiated in 1986, when CWA hired an archivist to organize the Joseph A. Beirne Memorial Archives. The original scope of the project encompassed primarily the processing of the Beirne papers and the renovation of an area in the CWA headquarters building into an archival facility. Since then, however, the role of the archives has expanded considerably to include the preservation of the important records of the entire union and the establishment of an oral history project, which will update an earlier project conducted by the University of Iowa's Center for Labor and Management between 1968 and 1972. The Beirne archives consists of six major collections, which include records relating to the administrations of Joseph Beirne and his successor, Glenn Watts, as well as to the National Federation of Telephone Workers and the International Typographical Union.

The American labor movement has been heavily Catholic for more than a century, both in its rank and file composition and top leadership. From its inception in 1948 the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., has therefore devoted a substantial portion of its holdings to collections in the field of American labor history. Many of these collections were acquired with the help of clerical faculty who had themselves been important figures in early 20th century social reform. The records of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, and the National Council of Catholic Women/National Council of Catholic Men contain much material on Church welfare work, Catholic social programs, and efforts to influence government social and economic policy. The National Catholic War Council undertook extensive social surveys among the Catholic urban population with particular emphasis on the conditions of women and child laborers, extent of immigrant citizenship and health conditions at home and in the armed service camps. The John Brophy papers is the most consistently useful of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holdings. The Philip Murray Collection covers the period 1943 to 1952 when Murray was simultaneously president of the CIO and United Steelworkers of America.

The Urban Archives Center at Temple University was established in 1967 by a member of the History Department to document the lives of common urban dwellers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Instead of collecting the papers of well-known figures, these new social history archives acquired manuscript collections that represented services provided to working-class people. Typical collections include the records of housing, minority, educational reform, social welfare; and labor organizations. Currently, the Urban Archives Center serves as the research base of the newly established Center for Public History which is jointly administered by the library system of the and the History Department of the Temple University. The Archives is one component of the Center for Public History, which also offers courses in applied history through the History Department, programs with the Philadelphia Board of Education, and conferences on various aspects of public history. One of the Center's most important acquisitions of the last few years is the records of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. Acquired through the Center's participation in the Penn Central Railroad Appraisal Project, the collection now comprises one of the largest collections of organizational records housed at the Temple University.

The article presents information about the Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and its labor history resources. Rutgers University was founded in 1766 and has been in the process of building library collections for over two centuries, however, the concept of building manuscript and archival holdings in an organized fashion dates back less than 50 years. Rutgers' Special Collections and Archives now includes approximately 3000 manuscript collections and the largest and most comprehensive collection of New Jersey books, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, broadsides, and pictorial materials. Although the major focus of the collection has been New Jersey and its history, significant 20th century holdings have been developed in such areas as the consumer movement, social welfare policy, and women's history, all areas that have collections relating to labor history. Also at Rutgers are the papers of over 20 New Jersey politicians who have served in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, dating from William Paterson's term in the Senate to former Congressman/now Governor James J. Florio.

The establishment of archival institutions whose primary objective is to collect and preserve the records of labor unions, labor organizations and the personal papers of labor leaders and workers is a relatively recent development in the U.S. and Canada. The National Archives and Record Administration established in 1934 has extensive public records relating to government and labor, as do a number of state archival programs. However, for the most part, up to 1950, collections relating to the labor movement were not given priority by the major archival institutions which concentrated their collecting priorities on the "white male elite" in the U.S. The 1960s witnessed a change in this emphasis, resulting in the establishment of new archival programs devoted to specialized subject areas such as immigration, social welfare, women, minorities, native American Indians, and urban America. Several international unions have established archival programs to preserve their own records, rather than placing them in an archival institution. In addition to new labor archives programs, existing archives have expanded their labor holdings since 1982.

Herbert Gutman often prefaced his arguments by pointing out that "little is known" about the particular subject at hand. This certainly was true of women's history during his lifetime. Gutman's work and his presence in the historical profession contributed enormously to altering that fact. Gutman's approach to history did more than any particular study or article to inform and invigorate the field of women's history. The questions he posed, how he posed them, and the way he used sources opened new areas to historical study and freed us to consider the history of those who left no state papers, no archives, and no published documents. With a basically humanistic approach; Gutman considered history part science and part literature. He combined numbers from the census with poems written by slaves and workers. The implications of Gutman's approach proved critical for women's history. By probing sources in a new way, he opened the possibility of new questions as well. Arenas of life previously considered impossible to scrutinize from an historical perspective suddenly became important arenas of investigation. Gutman included women in his vision, not as appendages but on the stage of American life.

This article examines the responses of waitress unionists to U.S. legislative proposals and trade union policies which affected women in the 20th century. A study of waitress unionists indicates first that working-class women have been more active in legislative and trade union arenas than has been acknowledged and that their impact has been considerable. The case of waitress unionists also suggests that working-class activists, like their middle-class sisters, have been divided over the proper strategies to pursue in gaining equality, alternating between the poles of special protection and equal treatment. The paper suggests that class played a significant role in how waitresses defined their goals. Their primary object was the achievement of economic security, not upward mobility or career advancement. The article will also detail the response of waitresses to only a few of the many issues with which they were engaged. The issues that have been chosen illustrate clearly the pragmatism of working-class activists and the ways in which they balanced class, union and family loyalties, economic security and cultural beliefs.

This article surveys the holdings gathered on social and cultural movements at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in the U.S. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was founded at Stanford University by Herbert Hoover in 1919 to collect materials documenting the causes and consequences of World War I. The Hoover Institution is available without charge to all individuals regardless of citizenship, residence, academic affiliation, or lack thereof. Socialist activities during World War I are illuminated by the microfilm collection (10 reels) assembled by Frank L. Grubbs, Jr., as research material for his book "The Struggle for Labor Loyalty." Grubbs' topic was the competition between the pro-war American Alliance for Labor and Democracy and the anti-war People's Council of America, both founded in 1917. The Archives' holdings on the Communist Party, U.S., are far more extensive, and, without question, the single richest source is the Jay Lovestone Papers (330 linear feet). Lovestone a founding member of the party in 1919, played a central role in its internal factional wars of the 1920s, became its general secretary in 1927, and was expelled together with a core of followers in 1929 at the insistence of Communist International headquarters in Moscow.

This article describes the basic parameters of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s surveillance system, outline the Bureau's filing system, and discuss the procedures for obtaining files. The basic source for this article is the case file that the FBI developed during its surveillance of the Farm Equipment Workers from 1941 to 1955. The Farm Equipment Workers, which originated in the Chicago Steel Workers Organizing Committee, organized the majority of International Harvester plants, other agricultural implement plants, and miscellaneous manufacturing shops. The FBI carries on investigations at the Field Office level. The Field Offices have their own files, which differ drastically from those kept at FBI headquarters. The Field Office files contain the raw material produced by investigations and provide the basis for reports sent to Washington. The first and most obvious source of information is an FBI organizational file. Volume of paper, especially in the case of the FBI, is certainly no guide to the quality of information, but the amount produced on Congress of Industrial Organizations is staggering. One important function that FBI files serve is to confirm or expand upon data gathered from other sources. Information on the backgrounds and movements of the organizers and leaders of 236 is a case in point.

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 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.