Labor History Today

On Labor History Today: Grit and Working-Class Solidarity: B.C. Workers Respond to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. The On the Line: Stories of BC Workers podcast reports on “A time of unsurpassed working-class consciousness and resistance, the likes of which Canada had not seen before, nor since.” On this week’s Labor History in Two : Moral Mondays. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcom...

On Labor History Today: The 1917 “Bath Riots”. The story of Carmelita Torres, the "Latina Rosa Parks," and the so-called “Bath Riots” on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1917. On Labor History in Two : auto workers sit down and Black students sit in.    Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at  LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com L...

On this week's Labor Heritage Power Hour: MLK in Memphis; “We Will Not Be Turned Around”, Part 3 of AFSCME’s I AM STORY podcast about the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at  LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalm...

On this week’s Labor History Today:  While historians have written prolifically about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, there has been a lack of attention to the Columbine Massacre in which police shot and killed six striking coal miners and wounded sixty more protestors during the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike, even though its aftermath exerted far more influence on subsequent national labor policies. I...

On this week’s Labor History Today: Battle of the Eureka Stockade. Australia’s history closely tracks American history; the subjugation of indigenous people is the most obvious parallel, and the battles for basic worker rights is another. On today’s show -- which comes to us from Stick Together , Australia's only national radio show focusing on industrial, social and workplace issues -- the Battle...

American labor unions have seen an incredible resurgence in recent years, which, suggests public historian Tom Goldscheider , “begs the question: why were they in decline in the first place?” In "At Sword’s Point", Tom revisits a pivotal moment in American history, when the furious power of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare found its first true target, and when the dismantling of American organized labo...

Joe Jencks is a 25-year veteran of the international folk circuit, an award-winning songwriter, and a celebrated vocalist based in Chicago. Merging conservatory training with his Irish roots and working-class upbringing, Joe delivers engaged musical narratives filled with heart, soul, groove and grit. Pete Seeger said “The spirit of Folk music is people working together. Joe is a fantastic singer...

“This fight isn't just for the teamsters. This is for all American workers.” This weekend, Teamsters struck Amazon in New York City, Atlanta, Skokie, Southern California, San Bernardino and San Francisco. The union represents 10,000 Amazon workers at 10 warehouses and delivery stations. But that quote at the top is not from the Amazon strike; it’s about the Teamsters’ strike against the United Par...

On this week's Labor History Today: Touring the American Labor Museum The American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey, is also known as The Botto House, and that’s because for generations that’s what it was: the home of the Botto family. This unassuming house, sitting on an ordinary-looking street in a quiet residential neighborhood, played a key role in American labor history when it became the...

On this week's Labor History Today: Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar worker...

Dr. Jay Cephas considers two Depression-era murals in Detroit and their contrasting messaging about workers, labor, and power. Diego Rivera’s famed Detroit Industry murals (top), commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932, champions industrial and technological progress and the factory workers who fueled it. In contrast, Walter Speck and Barbara Wilson’s 1937 untitled mur...

Five stunning paintings depicting labor organizing, pickets and the violence directed at workers in the turbulent 1930s were almost lost to history. The story of Philip Tipperman and how a small group of people saved those paintings . On this week’s Labor History in Two : Massacre At Bogalusa. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History T...

Labor historian Mitch Troutman’s 2022 book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942 is a detailed account of coal bootlegging in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the Prohibition/Depression decades when unemployed miners took over unused mines, asserting and defending a right to mine and market the coal to support their families. Excerpted from...

Bev Grant is a cultural worker from Brooklyn, NY; she’s a social justice feminist, a choral director, an occasional bandleader, a dance artist and a photographer.   She’s also a much beloved singer/songwriter, and on today’s show, she tells us the story behind one of her best-known songs – and one that seems especially meaningful this post-election week, Together We Can Move Mountains. On this wee...

“ The life and music of Barbara Dane ,” from The Harry Bridges Project. The story of America told through its social upheaval, its achievements and, above all, its music. Originally broadcast on WPFW's Labor Heritage Power Hour (10/31/24). On this week’s Labor History in Two : The year was 1975; that was the day that the National Organization for Women, or NOW, called for a strike by women across...

LHT tours the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum with Executive Director Mackenzie New-Walker. On this week’s Labor History in Two : The year was 1948. That was the day that a thick yellow fog rolled over the town of Donora, Pennsylvania just south of Pittsburgh. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at  LaborHistoryToda...

The Pittsburgh Labor Choir’s Tom Hoffman and Kira Yeversky lead a master class in the history of labor songs in their inspirational session at this year’s Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium , recorded with a live – and enthusiastically singing – audience. On this week’s Labor History in Two :  The year was 1945; that was the day that Paul Robeson received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.  Q...

I could not put this away. Once I saw what happened here: the orange Tug River from the strip mines…the strip mining, the desecration, the poverty. I owed it to the world to tell what happened. William Trent Pancoast has worked as a construction laborer, gas station attendant, railroad section hand and brakeman, factory laborer, commercial laundry foreman, and machinist. He’s been an English teach...

Chris talks with labor historian Dana Frank; her new book is What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times. The book takes a new look at working-class activism during the 1930s from the perspective of our own time, examining mutual aid, eviction protests, the expulsion of a million Mexicans, a sit-down strike by African American women w...

William Lucy – an icon of the labor movement -- died this past Wednesday at the age of 90. “Bill Lucy served as a brilliant strategist whose words instantly cut to the heart of an issue,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, who called Lucy “a bridge across generations of our movement; and a leader in connecting the fights of working people all across the world.” As Shuler noted, when Lucy was just...

The Animation Guild (TAG), Local 839 of the Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), resumed negotiations with Hollywood studios this week and are fighting for pay equity  for color designers, a job historically staffed by women. Today’s show originally ran on July 6, 2023, when the strike by Hollywood writers was in its’ 10th week. Among those turning out to support that strike were members of the Ani...

Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan on the labor movement past, present and future and his new book “The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.” Recorded live at the eighth annual Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium on August 31 in Wheeling, West Virginia. Music by the Pittsburgh Labor Choir .  On this week’s Labor History in Two : The year was 1970; that was the day 35...

J. Albert Mann, author of “Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States,” a children’s book that’s unusual not just in its subject matter but in the way it treats kids seriously as the future citizens they are. Recorded live at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium in Wheeling, West Virginia on August 31, 2024. Recording by Patrick Dixon, produced by Chris Garlock. On this week’s...

Walter Reuther’s name is forever linked to Detroit, Michigan, where he and his brother Victor built the United Automobile Workers -- the UAW -- into one of the largest and most progressive labor unions in American history. In Wheeling, West Virginia, where he was born on September 1, 1907, Reuther is a hometown boy who made good. Each year for the last eight years, the Wheeling Academy of Law and...

Labor action is effectively one of two things: political action, or direct action. This week, from the Solidarity Forever podcast, we learn about political action, in the courts through the landmark Pullis decision, and charting the rise and fall of the Working Man's Parties in the days of Andy Jackson. On this week’s Labor History in Two : the year was 1925. Five hundred African American sleeping...