
thank you for visiting the labor history resource project as we build this resource!

This site explores the controversial history of the Communist Party in the Pacific Northwest from 1919 to the present. The project is sponsored by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington and is one of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects directed by Professor James Gregory.
Created in partnership with Education Development Center, Zoom In features 18 skill-focused, document-rich lessons on social history topics that address every era of U.S. history. These interactive inquiries engage students in reading documents closely, gathering evidence, and writing an argumentative or explanatory essay. Each lesson…
Designed for both high school and college classrooms, History Matters helps students actively interpret evidence about the lives of ordinary Americans. It contains descriptions of and links to more than 1000 websites and first-person primary source documents, guides for analyzing historical evidence, classroom activities, and…
This bibliography contains a number of titles dealing with “workers,” the “world of work” generally, and “labor law” in particular, so as to account for some of the more compelling reasons we should assiduously attend to the complex economic and moral questions (the former often…
This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later…
The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Postal Service began on March 18, 1970, with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demanding better wages.
In 2018, there were 20 major work stoppages involving 485,000 workers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of major work stoppages beginning in 2018 was the highest since 2007 (21 major work stoppages). The number of workers involved was the highest since 1986 (533,000 workers).
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University form a unique, internationally-known center for scholarly research on Labor and the Left. The primary focus of our collections is the complex relationship between trade unionism and progressive politics, and how this…
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…
The repeated argument I hear from people who are opposed to Oklahoma teachers walking out tomorrow is “we knew what we were doing when we signed up for this.” You’re right. We did. We signed up for the hardest job in the world and putting our kids first. Here’s a poem about it.