Since the 1980s, Bob Rossi has been working on a social history of Colorado coal mining communities and an account of the 1927–28 Colorado mine workers’ strike. A part of this work has entailed documenting the lives of Syrian and Lebanese families in the Colorado coalfields.
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David Witwer and Catherine Rios recently published Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States. It tells of racketeering and union corruption in 20th century New York, when unions and the mob shaped working class lives.
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Betrayal: When the Government Took Over the Teamsters Union, a recent (2019) documentary by George Bogdanich, asks critical questions about the decades long oversight of the Teamsters by the federal government. The documentary argues that the 1989 consent decree which put in place the Independent Review Board (IRB) until 2020 was a dramatic case of federal overreach, gutted strong locals, violated free speech and was a self-interested and self-perpetuating power and money machine for the law firms hired to run the board.
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Monumental Labor is a three-part public event series and podcast that explores the memory of work and working peoples in National Parks and affiliated sites through their representation in monuments and memorials.
Why have certain events, labor leaders, or workers received attention, while others remain unrecognized?
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“The obrera recognizes her rights, proudly raises her head and joins the struggle, the time of her degradation is over, she is no longer a slave sold for some coins, she is no longer a servant, but the equal of a man,” wrote Texas border native Jovita Idar in 1911.
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Donald Rogers recent book Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in Hague v. CIO (2020) reminds us of the terrific struggles that workers endured against policing, and the way that these struggles led to the fight for civil liberties.
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Below Toni Gilpin tells a pictured story of John Deere workers radical past, a story that connects to the recently launched John Deere strike. The Midwest holds a hidden memory of militancy and radicalism. And not just Chicago and the major cities.
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We are now in the 50th year since the appearance of Strike!, one of the most influential books written in the New Left era, and one so sweeping in its depiction of direct action that it has become a textbook of sorts for every radical generation since.
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Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland details the long conflict between International Harvester and Farm Equipment Workers union, one of the unions deemed Communist by the CIO, and expelled in 1949.
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On August 5, 2021 labor advocates across the country lost a champion with the death of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Eleven days later, another working-class advocate, activist-sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, succumbed to a long illness.
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