About Us
LAWCHA is an organization of scholars, teachers, students, labor educators, and activists who seek to promote public and scholarly awareness of labor and working-class history through research, writing, and organizing.
News & Alerts
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New Teaching Labor’s Story Unit: The Soup Song from the 1930s
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Working 9 to 5
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For a Just and Better World: A Profile of Two Radical Women Anarchists in the making of Revolutionary Mexico
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LAWCHA 2023 CFP: Class in Everyday Life
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Noel Ignatiev’s Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World: A Conversation
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Donna Haverty-Stacke on her book: The Fierce LIfe of Grace Holmes Carlson
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The Road Not Taken: Pearl McGill and the Promise of Inclusive Unionism, 1894-1914
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The Laundry Workers’ Uprising: The Fight to Build a Democratic Union in the Twentieth Century
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“We Just Want A Democratic Workplace”: Can the NLRB Protect Starbucks’ Pro-Union Workers?
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A Victory for Hope: A Note about the ALU Victory with References
Upcoming Events
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Class in Everyday Life :Theory and Praxis
May 18-21, 2023•New Brunswick, New JerseyThe 2023 LAWCHA conference calls attention to spaces of class consciousness and organization in and beyond the workplace. CFP deadline is October 15, 2022.
Read More
In Memoriam
David H. Bensman, 1950-2020
Professor, Activist, Mentor, Friend

New Teaching Labor’s Story Unit: The Soup Song from the 1930s
Do you know one of the most popular labor songs of the 1930s?
Check out this new Teaching Labor’s Story* entry to discover why “The Soup Song” became an anthem of the employed and unemployed alike. Belt it out alone or with others to feel the outrage and solidarity that the song inspired. Use it in class to help students understand working class perspectives during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Soup Song, c. 1930
“The Soup Song” uses humor and sarcasm to convey workers’ experiences and attitudes during the Great Depression. As a widely popular participatory song, it was an effective tool for labor organizing. This latest TLS entry is authored by Ryan Pettengill. Also check out Pettengill’s recent monograph: Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit’s Labor Movement, 1941-1956 (Temple University Press, 2020).
Image source: National Archives
*Teaching Labor’s Story [TLS] is a repository of primary sources with supporting teaching guides. TLS entries can be incorporated into existing curriculum, allowing experts and non-experts alike to re-infuse labor’s story into the historical narrative. TLS sources are selected to reveal significant perspectives on essential historical questions, and each source is accompanied by a guide that includes an informative contextualizing essay, glossary, discussion questions, curricular connections, and additional sources. Each TLS entry is linked to one of ten commonly taught eras in American/United States history. TLS is a project of the Labor and Working Class History Association [LAWCHA]. We invite historians to write a TLS entry; see Call for Contributions, here. Read more →