Labor History

Labor unions are groups of organized individuals that aim to protect and further their rights and interests. Before there were labor unions, there were issues of slavery, unsanitary working conditions, and a high number of work-related illnesses, and even deaths. So, where did the idea of labor unions start? Who started the first labor union? Know the answers in this history book for kids.

Sensational tales of true-life crime, the devastation of the Irish potato famine, the upheaval of the Civil War, and the turbulent emergence of the American labor movement are connected in a captivating exploration of the roots of the Molly Maguires. A secret society of peasant assassins in Ireland that re-emerged in Pennsylvania’s hard-coal region, the Mollies organized strikes, murdered mine bosses, and fought the Civil War draft. Their shadowy 12-year duel with all powerful coal companies marked the beginning of class warfare in America.

In the summer of 1942, 22-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labor camps in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. After liberation by the British in April 1945, she finally returned to Prague. Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele at an Auschwitz selection, saying she was an electrician.

As World War II wound down in 1945 and the cold war heated up, the skilled trades that made up the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) began a tumultuous strike at the major Hollywood studios. This turmoil escalated further when the studios retaliated by locking out CSU in 1946. This labor unrest unleashed a fury of Red-baiting that allowed studio moguls to crush the union and seize control of the production process, with far-reaching consequences.

In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between Black parents and Jewish teachers. Later, however, he built alliances with Blacks, and at the time of his death in 1997, such figures as Bill Clinton celebrated Shanker for being an educational reformer.

The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences.

The USSR collapsed in December 1991, and it can be argued that the labor camps were not only integral to the very existence of the Soviet Union, but also a damning indictment of the Soviets’ failed experiment in communist totalitarianism. The Gulags: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Soviet Labor Camps examines the rise of the labor camps, how they were institutionalized by Soviet leaders, and what life was like for the prisoners.

Irina Nikifortchuk was nineteen years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.

It has often been said that the greatest invention of all time was the sail, which facilitated the internationalization of the globe and thus ushered in the modern era. Columbus' contact with the New World, alongside European maritime contact with the Far East, transformed human history, and in particular, the history of Africa. It was the sail that linked the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and thus it was also the sail that facilitated the greatest involuntary human migrations in history.

Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers’ strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix).

The IWW’s members have been known for more than a century as the Wobblies, and no one knows how they got the name, although there are stories that an immigrant had trouble pronouncing the letters. The Wobblies quickly became a considerable force in American labor, and by far the most colorful union of its era, if not always particularly effective. This work tells the story of how they came about, the peak of their influence, and the lasting legacy they forged.

As two-income families find themselves ever more time-poor, many look to outsource to cleaners, nannies, and care workers. More and more, it would seem, people are finding themselves without either the emotional or the financial resources to take care of themselves and each other. The home, rather than an escape from the work and its pressures, is in fact an extension of it. After Work is a crucial corrective to this trend, extending its attention beyond paid jobs to the impact of domestic work upon familial relationships, social bonds, and our conceptions of domestic space.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late 20s. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written. Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat. It is an essential listen for anyone seeking to understand our modern political landscape.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel", Mother Jones.

When the local iron mine began hiring women in 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, didn't think twice about accepting the grueling but well-paid job. What she hadn't considered was that she was entering a male-dominated society that fiercely resisted the inclusion of women, a prejudice born out in the brutal harassment of every female miner.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

You need to work to live. That’s the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries. Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees. But workers have always found a way to fight back.

Blood Runs Coal comes at a time of resurgent labor movements in the United States and the current administration's attempts to bolster the fossil-fuel industry. Brilliantly researched and compellingly written, it sheds light on the far-reaching effects of industrial and socioeconomic change that unfold across America to this day.