This is the official bibliography for LAWCHA’s Teaching and Public Sector Unionism initiative. A full listing of our resources can be found on the Teaching Resources page. For an overview of teachers’ unions, see our featured article, “A Century of Teacher Organizing: What Can We Learn?”
In 2019, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—the union membership rate—was 10.3 percent, down by 0.2 percentage point from 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
LMU is a private Catholic university with 6,250 undergraduates, 2,150 graduate students and 1,100 law students from diverse backgrounds and many perspectives.
Mother Jones Museum is the website of the Mother Jones Heritage Project, a 501-c-3 non-profit. We are guided by the philosophy & model of Mother Jones, whose base was in Chicago, but who went across the US to organize and fight for justice.
In the town of Matewan, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum sits at the site of a historic battle which erupted in May of 1920, setting into motion a chain of events that led to the largest armed uprising in the United States since our civil war.
The Knights of Labor was the largest and most extensive association of workers in 19th century America. Organized in 1869, the movement grew slowly in the 1870s, then surged in the 1880s, reaching a peak membership approaching one million in 1886-1887 with Local Assemblies spread across the country in more than 5,600 cities and towns.
The Southern Historical Association was organized on November 2, 1934 with the idea of promoting an “investigative rather than a memorial approach” to southern history. Its objectives are the defense of history education and historical thinking in the South; the promotion of rigorous research in southern history; the collection and preservation of the South’s historical records; and the encouragement of state and local historical societies in the South.
John L. Lewis was born February 12th 1880, to Welsh immigrant parents in the coal mining camp of Cleveland, Iowa- one mile East of Lucas, Iowa. He began working in the Big Hill Coal Mine in Lucas, IA as a teenager, joining the UMWA Local #799 in 1900. He began his rise to power in the United Mine Workers of America and served as President of the UMWA for forty years and was founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
