Labor History Commons^™

The Historical Persistence Of Working-Class Culture: How Laborers Created The Ethical Foundation Of Western Civilization, Kenneth Atkinson

Faculty Publications

This article highlights four historical events that shape our present: the world’s first industrial strike in ancient Egypt to protest workers’ health and safety; working-class efforts to improve labor conditions during the Roman Republic and Middle Ages through strikes and the creation of guilds; the social justice activism of the prophets of Western religions (all working-class folks!); and the creation of the selfie and the transition from a culture of character to our present obsession with celebrities and individualism that began during the Renaissance. Each case highlights unique features of working-class culture, working class reactions to societal changes, and the …

So Many Roads, So Much At Stake: The Composition Of Faculty Bargaining Units, William A. Herbert, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

This book chapter from Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History traces the history of faculty bargaining unit composition in higher education. It examines the evolution in higher education from wall-to-wall bargaining units to professional craft units of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty to separate contingent faculty units. The chapter presents historical examples of bargaining units, starting with early CIO wall-to-wall units in the 1940s, and the facts, preferences, and legal doctrines that has resulted in faculty being placed in combined or separate bargaining under collective bargaining laws. It will also explore the conflicting and congruous …

The Language Of Legal Violence: The State’S Role In Silencing Capitalist Dissent, 1877-1915, Jaclene Paolucci

Theses and Dissertations

From the 1870s to the eve of World War I, the United States government enacted a violent and repressive campaign against labor activists and political radicals to protect capitalist interests. The growing alliance between employers and the government threatened American democratic traditions and turned those who challenged the capitalist system into potential enemies of the state.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, And The Politics Of Knowledge In Puerto Rico [Book Review], Mariel Acosta Matos

Publications and Research

En su más reciente libro The Lettered Barriada: Workers and the Politics of Knowledge (La barriada letrada: los obreros y las políticas del conocimiento), Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (University of Wisconsin-Madison) nos presenta una historia de la producción subalterna de conocimiento obrero en Puerto Rico, desde los primeros años de colonialismo estadounidense en el archipiélago, a finales de siglo XIX, hasta la primera mitad del siglo XX. Los protagonistas de la misma fueron un grupo de obreros que creó redes de aprendizaje, conocimiento y transmisión de información de manera autogestionada y a los márgenes de las elites ilustradas. Tomando como referente conceptual …

"The Bottom Would Drop Out Of Everything": A Brief History Of The Battle For Blair Mountain, Brandon Neely

Student Publications

In the summer of 1921, thousands of Appalachian miners took up arms and marched in southwest West Virginia. Fighting back against attacks on miners' unions like the United Mine Workers of America, the conflict quickly turned violent. The Battle for Blair Mountain, as it came to be known, was one of the largest labor strikes in American history and impacted the history of the Coal Wars and the United States for decades to come. This analysis uses interviews with people who experienced the battle as well as the speeches of labor leaders Samuel Gompers and John Lewis to discuss the …

"Some Kind Of Socialist:" Lee Hays, The Social Gospel, And The Path To The Cultural Front, Elizabeth Withey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1939, with sixty-five dollars and twenty pages of Commonwealth Labor songs, Lee Hays, youngest son of a Methodist minister, hitchhiked thirteen hundred miles from Mena, Arkansas, to New York City where he found stardom in the Folk Revival movement, first, as a founder of the Almanac Singers then the Weavers. Hays’ biographer Doris Willens and others, viewing Hays’ unabashed socialism, ribald humor, penchant for beer, brandy, and cigarettes as induced by the childhood trauma of his father’s death, argue Hays rejected his father’s beliefs: replacing religion with radical politics. This thesis, in contrast, argues Hays’ upbringing immersed in contradictions …

"In-Betweening" Disney: An Animated History Of Hollywood Labor And Ideological Imagineering, 1935-1947, Bradley Edward Moore

History Theses & Dissertations

The Walt Disney Company’s meticulously-crafted corporate mythos, as it developed in the mid-twentieth century, hid a conflicted history of anti-New Deal, nationalist ideology that was popularized during the clashes of the Hollywood labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) entered full-scale production, and each were central to the labor-management conflict that lurked behind the scenes of the motion picture industry. By the mid-1940s, following the conclusion of the Second World War, Congress passed the Labor Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act and imposed a …

"How About The Tariff And Homestead?" Homestead, Tariff Rhetoric, And Wage Insecurity In 1892, Paul T. Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Members of Congress appropriated the 1892 labor conflict at Homestead, Pennsylvania as a point of partisan rhetorical debate over the ills or benefits of the 1890 McKinley Tariff. This appropriation demonstrated how congress found the tariff in general useful not only for engaging public concerns over industrial era woes like wage insecurity, but also for deflecting public discussion away from an underlying federal helplessness to mitigate those same detrimental effects of industrial capitalism.

Archiving The Stories Of The 2018 West Virginia Teachers' Strike, Ian Harmon

Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference

In February of 2018, teachers and school personnel across West Virginia went on strike, shutting down schools in all 55 of the state’s counties. As the school year ended, teachers began to reflect on their experiences, and many expressed the desire to have their stories recorded. To answer this need, an interdisciplinary group at West Virginia University began developing a digital exhibit that provides the strike’s participants with a platform where they can share their stories by contributing photos, videos, oral recordings, social media exchanges, and written accounts of the events. This exhibit provides both researchers and the public with …

Analyzing Union Voting By Workforce Sector In The 2016 Presidential Election, Galen Hlavsa

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In the 2016 presidential election, there was evident change in the voting behavior of both blue and white collar workers in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania that assisted in Donald Trump’s win. While there was some realignment in party backing in a handful of unions, there were a number of union members that went against their union recommendation and voted for Trump. I research how union members in private and public sectors voted in the 2012 and 2016 election to compare the rate of union members defecting to Trump across the various sectors of the workforce. In order to …

The History Books Tell It? Collective Bargaining In Higher Education In The 1940s, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article presents a history of collective bargaining in higher education during and just after World War II, decades before the establishment of applicable statutory frameworks for labor representation. It examines the collective bargaining program adopted by the University of Illinois in 1945, along with contracts negotiated at other institutions. The article also examines the role of United Public Workers of America (UPWA) and its predecessor unions in organizing and negotiating on behalf of faculty, teachers, and instructors. The first known collective agreements applicable to faculty, teachers and instructors, were negotiated by those unions before UPWA was destroyed during the …

The History Books Tell It: Collective Bargaining In Higher Education In The 1940s, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article presents a history of collective bargaining in higher education during and just after World War II, decades before the establishment of applicable statutory frameworks for labor representation. It examines the collective bargaining program adopted by the University of Illinois in 1945, along with contracts negotiated at other institutions. The article also examines the role of United Public Workers of America (UPWA) and its predecessor unions in organizing and negotiating on behalf of faculty, teachers, and instructors. The first known collective agreements applicable to faculty, teachers and instructors, were negotiated by those unions before UPWA was destroyed during the …

Following The Ball : The Migration Of African Soccer Players Across The Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975, Todd Cleveland

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal’s African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal’s increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies.

Cleveland zeroes in on the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning …

In Essentials, Unity : An Economic History Of The Grange Movement, Jenny Bourne

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.

In Essentials, Unity takes as its focus Grange founder Oliver Kelley and his home organization in Minnesota. Jenny Bourne draws upon numerous historical records to present a lively …

Diamonds In The Rough : Corporate Paternalism And African Professionalism On The Mines Of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975, Todd Cleveland

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Diamonds in the Rough explores the lives of African laborers on Angola’s diamond mines from the commencement of operations in 1917 to the colony’s independence from Portugal in 1975. The mines were owned and operated by the Diamond Company of Angola, or Diamang, which enjoyed exclusive mining and labor concessions granted by the colonial government. Through these monopolies, the company became the most profitable enterprise in Portugal’s African empire. After a tumultuous initial period, the company’s mines and mining encampments experienced a remarkable degree of stability, in striking contrast to the labor unrest and ethnic conflicts that flared in other …

Italian Militants And Migrants And The Language Of Solidarity In The Early- Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields, Stephen Brier, Ferdinando Fasce

Publications and Research

This article uses the life and experiences of an Italian immigrant and labor militant, Carlo Demolli, to examine a range of issues, including: the intersection of ethnic and national identity and labor militancy and solidarity in the organizing efforts of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) among the ethnically diverse workforce of coal miners in the American West at the turn of the 20th century; the role of a "language of solidarity" as expressed in an Italian language version of the UMW Journal, Il Lavoratore Italiano, in sustaining a militant Italian immigrant workforce in the coal mines; and the …

Public Sector Labor Law And History: The Politics Of Ancient History?, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article discuss three books that address various aspects of public sector labor history. It seeks to contextualize the current debate over public sector labor law and relations through the lessons of relevant history. The first book discussed is entitled The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975, by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner. It recounts the leadership of Governor Carey and public sector labor leaders in reaching negotiated solutions through collective bargaining that helped solve New York City's fiscal crisis in 1975. The second book is a long-forgotten 1948 treatise Government …

Pamela J. Stewart And Andrew Strathern's Review Of D. C. Lewis's The Plantation Dream: Developing British New Guinea And Papua, 1884–1942, Pamela J. Stewart, Andrew Strathern

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Colin Newbury's Review Of Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro, And Edward D. Beechert's Plantation Workers: Resistance And Accommodation, Colin Newbury

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Noel J. Kent's Review Of Edward D. Beechert's Working In Hawaii: A Labor History, Noel Jay Kent

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

The Fiji Labor Trade In Comparative Perspective, 1864-1914, Ralph Shlomowitz

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Time-Expired Melanesian Labor In Queensland: An Investigation Of Job Turnover, 1884-1906, Ralph Shlomowitz

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Noel J. Kent's Review Of Ronald Takaki's Pau Hana: Plantation Life And Labor In Hawaii, 1835-1920, Noel J. Kent

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Indian Indenture Historiography: A Note On Problems, Sources And Methods, Brij V. Lal

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.