Unions and Labor Archives

Unions and Labor Archives identifies the overlapping roles and the development of good and trusting relationships with unions that is vital to building strong labor collections. While the needs of both the unions and the repository are many, one of the most significant is demonstrating that the proper care of union records will provide a historical memory of union actions that can not only preserve the evidence of past decisions, but inform present and future efforts as well. This article provides practical suggestions, as well as how several important repositories and unions have worked together to document working class culture and experiences

African Americans and Unions in Los Angeles

This paper highlights the racism that permeated Labor Unions across Los Angeles while determining the methods that African American men and women employed in order to successfully lobby not only the unions themselves but the United States government in cases where the locals were unwilling to integrate. I came upon this topic after a story I had heard at family gatherings about an ancestor of mine, William Schneiderman, who was a union leader, outspoken communist, and whose similarities to Harry Bridges called my attention to Los Angeles unions in my new hometown of San Pedro. My focus on race relations within L.A. unions which eventually led me to focus on African Americans and Los Angeles organized labor given their more vocal activism in the city, more so than any other ethnic group. Black workers fought the unions they came to be a part of for their rights as union members and faced belligerent racism constantly. In the course of my research, I located archival records from numerous repositories across L.A., including the Los Angeles Times Historical Archive, the Long Beach Library Historical Archives, the Random Lengths News Archives, the National Archives and Records Administration’s ????les, and the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union’s Special Collections and Archives

Garment Workers in Kentucky Oral History Project (FA 865)

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project FA 865. Interviews conducted by Lisa Karen Miller containing details about the lives of garment workers in Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of the topics included were technological changes, job layoffs, and labor unions

Memorial Notice for Professor Emeritus, Dr. Charles Scontras

Dr. Scontras was a tireless advocate for workers and for the preservation Maine’s history of working class struggle. For more than half a century Dr. Scontras addressed the history and present condition of labor in Maine. His work appeared in the op-ed pages of Maine’s newspapers, in six volumes of Maine labor history covering the period from 1636 to the present, in presentations at labor halls and in his determination to make the historical records of Maine labor unions available at the University of Maine Fogler Library Labor Archives

Special Issue Introduction: Labor in Academic Libraries

Labor in academic libraries has reemerged as an area of critical interest in both academic library and archives communities. Librarians and archivists have long worked to counter the diminishment of their labor within an academy that centers the concerns of disciplinary faculty who may, in turn, see knowledge workers as a footnote to the scholarly enterprise. Recent years have seen a renewed attention to the social and economic conditions of our work, as researchers turned to topics such as affective labor in libraries and archives, attitudes toward labor unions, and information work under capitalism (Sloniowski 2016; Mills and McCullough 2018; Burns 2018). As the landscape of higher education changes dramatically after decades of reduced public investment, rising tuition, and an explosion of student loan debt, colleges and universities have sought to streamline, downgrade, and outsource labor. Workers have in turn fought back by organizing, withholding their labor, and articulating new visions of the academy and the academic workplace

A reevaluation of the trade union unity league, 1929-1934

The Third Period trade union activities of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), especially the creation of independent red industrial unions as opposed to continuing to work within the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, has been widely criticized in the literature. The recent opening of the CPUSA archives has made it possible to reevaluate the Party\u27s activities during this era. While the TUUL unions suffered major defeats and had difficulties in organizing in the heavy and mass production industries such as mining, textile, maritime and steel, these unions experienced considerable organizing success in light industries in New York City, particularly after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933. Besides promoting industrial organization, the TUUL\u27s vision of union organization was structurally different from that of the AFL. Specifically, the red industrial unions, unlike the AFL unions, attempted to promote democratic, rank-and-file participation in union affairs as opposed to leaving such activities solely in the hands of the union officialdom

Labor Union Organizing in the Archives

Unions are organized to advocate for workers' rights in the workplace, whether that be in a factory, an academic library, or a federal archives. Panelists spoke about their perspectives on unions in libraries and archives and the union history of their organizations. What is it like to be a union member during a time when there are actions to undermine national and international unions? How does this impact the ability of the union to effectively negotiate with management? Organizing efforts in the Bakers Union, a key labor collection at the University of Maryland, will be highlighted as an interesting example from the 1970s, before the Reagan administration, to show the differences in the labor situation when compared to now

Killing Communists in Havana: The Start of the Cold War in Latin America

The Cold War started early in Cuba, with anti-communist purges of the trade unions already under way by 1947. Corruption and government intervention succeeded in removing the left-wing leaders of many unions but, in those sectors where this approach failed, gunmen linked to the ruling party shot and killed a dozen leading trade union militants, including the General Secretary of the Cuban Sugar Workers’ Federation.// Based on material from the Cuban archives and confidential US State Department files, this SHS Occasional Publication examines the activities of the US government, the Mafia and the American Federation of Labor, as well as corrupt Cuban politicians and local gangsters, in this early episode of the Cold War

Latin American "free-trade unionism" and the cold War: an analysis based on educational policies

The political education of workers and their leaders was viewed as a strategic concern in the cold war period’s bipolar world. This article discusses how this issue was dealt with by Latin American reformist trade unions grouped together in the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT, for its Spanish acronym), analyzing the educational policies promoted by its Inter-American Institute for Labor Studies (IIES), focusing specifically on its educational program for trade union instructors. We argue that the nature of the education provided changed, shifting from a rationale based on explicit ideological confrontation to a more focalized technical type of training. We claim that this shift started in the early 1960s, when the Alliance for Progress was launched.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin