The International Trade Union and Labour Memory Network is a collaborative international project by a group of historians and labour activists. We aim to examine the commemoriation of labour history by highlighting what kind of labour and trade union memory work is undertaken across the globe, how trade unions use history and memory as a resource, and discuss the problems and challenges involved in commemoration.
The Samuel Gompers Papers collects, annotates, and makes available primary sources of American labor history. Founded by Stuart Kaufman in 1974, the project has published two microfilm series of union records and eleven volumes of Gompers’ papers. The nation’s leading trade unionist in the late…
On November 23, 1909, more than 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants, mostly young women in their teens and early twenties, launched an eleven-week general strike in New York’s shirtwaist industry. Dubbed the Uprising of the 20,000, it was the largest strike by women to date in American history.
The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) works for the respect, recognition, and rights for more than 2.2 million nannies, housecleaners, and home care workers who do the essential work of caring for our loved ones and our homes.
The Takeaway traces it all back to August 1981, when nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike creating a standoff with Ronald Reagan that ended when he fired the majority of them and de-certified their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.
We are activist scholars — Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, Diana Sierra Becerra — collaborating with the domestic workers movement (nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers) to give workers greater access to their own histories and cultures of resistance. These are educational tools for everyone to learn about these foundational histories.
In 1820 Lowell, known as East Chelmsford, MA at the time, had a population of 200 and was a farming community. Thirty years later, the population had grown to 33,000 and one could find 32 textile mills in existence there. Lowell was an ideal location for these mills because it was located near the Merrimac River. The river supplied the water necessary to run these factories.
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 Chicago Teachers Union argues for proven educational reforms to dramatically improve education of more than 400,000 students in a district of 675 schools. These reforms are desperately needed and can head Chicago towards the world-class educational system its students deserve.
