Labor History

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

The movement for a shorter workweek that once defined the labor movement in the United States was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the changes that occurred within organized labor and traces their influence on the decline of the shorter hour's movement.

“The go-to guy on minimum wage” (Nobel Laureate and New York Times bestselling author Paul Krugman) tackles one of the thorniest social issues of our times—income inequality—from a new vantage point with field-leading economics. How did the labor market stop working for so many in the...

As of the date of publication (March 2022), this is by far the largest collection of Eugene V. Debs' writings available in audio. Published in 1916, it is a compilation of his writings - magazine articles and campaign material - and his speeches to conventions and other large gatherings, from the years of his greatest popularity and influence. This collection is presented to you for your consideration, for you to learn who this man was and what his movement advocated. His core principles and ideals are included herein.

The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America?

A recent history of the Democratic Party that identifies its chronic errors—the “pathologies” of the New Democratic mindset—and argues urgently against a return to the status quo Why did the Democrats initially abandon their principles, and why haven’t they been able to grasp that they...

In this account, Gottlieb Mittelberger reveals the plight of poor German families who migrated to America in the 18th century. It was normal at the time for poor Europeans to fund their journey to the New World by agreeing to a period of indentured servitude. Yet what Mittleberger observed was more akin to slavery: workers were auctioned off upon arrival with no formal contract. This enlightening record reveals a darker side to early American history.

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought.

Best known as a monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act also revolutionized the lives of America's working women. Title VII of the law made it illegal to discriminate "because of sex". But that simple phrase didn't mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job - and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court.

Blood Runs Coal comes at a time of resurgent labor movements in the United States and the current administration's attempts to bolster the fossil-fuel industry. Brilliantly researched and compellingly written, it sheds light on the far-reaching effects of industrial and socioeconomic change that unfold across America to this day.

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

Field has spent his adult life fighting against poverty in Britain, through parliament and through his strong personal influence. Poverty for him has injustice at its root and as he explains in this book, he has found allies on all sides of the political spectrum. He was appointed by Tony Blair to be the Secretary of State for Pensions, but the reforms he advocated were so radical and essentially just, that Tony Blair could not contemplate them and Field stood down. Previously he had been Chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee under John Major.

As labor unions and movements began to form and coalesce in the 19th century, the tensions between workers and companies led to demonstrations, encounters, and even conflicts that descended into violence. Among those, none were larger than the colloquially known Battle of Blair Mountain, which pitted West Virginian miners against authorities in 1921. It represented the largest labor uprising in American history and the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War, and it would have lasting ramifications on unions and labor moving forward.

In the summer of 1942, 22-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labor camps in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. After liberation by the British in April 1945, she finally returned to Prague. Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele at an Auschwitz selection, saying she was an electrician.

It's the year 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend, Arthur, must leave school and go to work on the looms in the mill. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in their town, and a few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board.

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor-relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought and ranged across all of the major industries of the region. Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today.

In The Silver Women, Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the Panama Canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans.

Between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.