Labor History Commons^™

Labor And Residence Within The Mexican Community In Aurora, Illinois, 1920-1940., Eddie Guerrero

Honors Capstones

This research examines how labor opportunities in Aurora, Illinois, between 1920 and 1940 shaped the growth and development of the Mexican community. Using U.S. census data from 1920, 1930, and 1940, historical city maps, oral histories, and special agent reports, the project traces employment patterns across three distinct waves of migration. It explores the role of industries such as the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Cotton Mill, and New Deal initiatives like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA) in the formation and growth of the Mexican community. The findings reveal that labor not only shaped …

2025-03-28 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

A message sent by the Office of the President to the campus community on March 28, 2025, regarding upcoming events on campus, staff and faculty recognition, personnel updates, and the most resent Board of Regents meeting.

Graduate Student Labor Unions: Two Experienced Academic Administrators Share Their Views, Karen R. Stubaus

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

This interview of two experienced academic administrators traces the evolution of graduate worker concerns as expressed in their collective bargaining agreements over the course of 50 years, at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. Initial emphases on standard terms and conditions of employment are supplemented over the course of time with attention to work/life balance, discrimination and harassment, and other social justice issues. Administrators provide insights and advice on how to establish productive and collegial working relationships with the growing phenomenon of graduate worker unions.

2025-03-04 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from March 4, 2025.

Anarcho-Syndicalism In The Negaunee Branch Of The Finnish Socialist Association, Michael P. Selwa

HS 390 Primary Research Papers

Socialism reached a prominence as a movement in the United States during the early 20th century. Fueled by the machinations of industrial capitalism and labor reform, many workers, immigrants, and other individuals would arrive to the precepts of socialism, a political movement avowing to shirk the constraints of capitalism on the proletariat. Specifically, the question of why and how labor unions should function in a socialist society was a central tenet of debate within the faction of the American Socialist Party. The central question of this article is to examine why anarcho-syndicalists argued against traditional socialist reformist arguments in the …

2025-03-00 Newsletter, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress newsletter from March of 2025.

2025-02-04 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from February 4, 2025.

Labor And Beet Sugar, A "Modern Commodity" In The United States Between 1890 And 1920, Melanie H. Zelle

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The turn of the twentieth century saw a booming American beet sugar industry. For the first time beet sugar rivaled cane sugar in feeding growing domestic demand. Examined here are numerous factors considered significant in the sudden explosion of an industry which had previously failed to establish itself on the continent, including trade policy, monopolization, and advancements in industrial technology. However, in returning to contemporaneous primary literature on the subject, including grower’s manuals, histories of the plant, and economic analysis, I locate labor as a significant and often overlooked base of growth in the industry. Thus it was through innovations …

2025-01-08 Convocation Speech, Morehead State University. Office Of The Provost.

Staff Congress Records

Remarks given by Raj Parikh, Provost of Morehead State University, during the Spring Convocation to the campus community on January 8, 2025.

2025-01-03 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

A message sent by the Office of the President to the campus community on January 3, 2025, regarding the potential of inclement weather in the upcoming days and possible closure of campus.

Iii.A.2 Displacement & Barriers To Home Ownership, Kim Rostan, Bria Harper, Jim Neighbors, Mark Byrnes

Crafting Democratic Futures

This document explains how systemic racism and discriminatory policies from the Civil War & Reconstruction period through the 20th century prevented African Americans in Spartanburg from building wealth through land ownership and home equity. It details barriers such as Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, exclusion from New Deal programs, discriminatory housing policies, and urban renewal projects that displaced Black neighborhoods without providing equitable opportunities for economic advancement.

“We Were Put Out Of Good Jobs”: Women Night Workers In New York And The Origins Of The Women’S Equal Opportunity League, R.B. Tiven

Publications and Research

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and …

Silent Chains: Family And Religious Systems As Foundations Of Child Slavery And Labor In Ghana (1775-1956), Patricia Esi Quainoo

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This study explores the often-overlooked role of children in slavery and forced labor in Ghana, emphasizing their exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and other labor sectors. While existing scholarship often subsumes children within broader narratives of slavery, this research highlights their distinct experiences and their crucial role in sustaining Indigenous slavery. It argues that child slavery in Ghana was reinforced by familial practices such as the pawnship system, religious obligations like the trokosi system, and the reliance on family farms, where children served as producers and carriers of cocoa. Additionally, missionaries employed children as laborers in mission stations, schools, and …

Engines Of Division: The Trabant, Economic Lag, And Cultural Fragmentation In A Unified Germany, Maria Carolina Auerbach

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the Trabant, East Germany’s iconic yet inefficient automobile, as a critical lens through which to explore the enduring socio-economic and cultural disparities between East and West Germany in the aftermath of reunification. By tracing the Trabant’s trajectory from its inception within the GDR’s command economy to its rapid obsolescence in the face of Western market forces, this study reveals how the vehicle served as both a product and a symbol of East Germany’s industrial ethos, resilience, and identity. The Trabant, once a ubiquitous artifact of socialist life, embodied the constraints of a resource-scarce economy but also cultivated …

Campesino World-Building: Stories Of Migration, Memory, And Care In The Tension Of The Colonial Frame, Chelsea Ríos Gómez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Campesinos, often reduced to the label of “farmworkers”, are too often seen only through the lens of their labor within profit-driven systems. This thesis disrupts that limited narrative by illuminating the rich, expansive nature of vivencias campesinas, ways of being that transcend capitalist measures of value. These vivencias are lived, embodied experiences rooted in campesino lifeways, encompassing cultural, spiritual, and relational practices that nurture and sustain life.

My research is guided by four central questions: (1) In what ways have campesinos in pixley resisted exploitative labor systems, and how can this resistance be understood as a form of care labor? …

White Paper And Black Water: Environmental Control Of Labor In Appalachian Paper Mill Communities, Matthew C. Powell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In several small Appalachian communities, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company dominated the local landscape. The company stripped the mountainsides of spruce trees for pulpwood and used rivers for industrial processes and waste disposal. The small towns along these rivers and between these mountains relied on paper mills for employment. Corporate control over the natural environment, and water more specifically, was a necessary requirement for paper production, but also acted as a source of power over employees and their communities. When paper workers sought to organize, the company responded by leveraging their control over the environment against them to …

Plantation Matters: The Black Production Of Space In Southeastern Louisiana, 1830 To 1912, Noura Jabir

Pomona Senior Theses

Taking one Louisiana sugar plantation as a starting place, I demonstrate how African-descended laborers created life-sustaining spaces within/beyond the death-driving plantation complex during and after slavery.

This Is A War: The 1977-78 Coal Strike And The Fracturing Of The Postwar Social Compact, Christian B. Rowe

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The 1977–78 coal strike was a landmark moment for the American labor movement. Despite holding out for 110 days with no pay or benefits through a historically severe winter, miners were unable to advance their demands and achieve a progressive contract. By invoking the Taft–Hartley Act to end the strike, Jimmy Carter destabilized the New Deal political coalition by enraging one of its core constituencies and placing the needs of the state over the needs of unionized industrial workers. The BCOA’s immovable position in negotiations was an early sign that the labor-management accord that had governed industrial relations since World …