Staughton Lynd, one of labor history’s icons, died on November 17. He was an academic and activist when those combinations were reviled as unbecoming of a professional, and he was blacklisted from the profession for his bold anti-war stance. He became a labor attorney, moved to Niles, Ohio and was a strategic player in the fight against steel-mill shutdowns and the destruction of steel communities in Youngstown, Ohio.
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In the past twenty years, I have been told time and again about how it is nearly impossible to organize Amazon, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and so many other leading workplaces until we get the Pro-Act, card-check (various government laws to make unionization easier to attain.)
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Kaisha Esty’s marvelous essay “‘I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me’: Black Women and Girls and the Battle Over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory” is available for free download from Duke University Press until May 31.
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Jason Resnikoff’s essay The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and the Neuter Keyboard is now available with free access until March 31, 2022 of Labor: Working Class Studies of the Americas. The essay gives new perspectives on how typing, considered one of the “office wife” service duties, became “neutered,” in the late twentieth century.
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Please share these freely available articles with your colleagues and students.
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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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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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Welcome to Labor Online’s first on-screen interview with an author of a recently published book. We’ll be continuing to do author interviews in written form, but we’ll be experimenting with short introductions through these interviews. Today we welcome Jacob Zumoff, history professor at New Jersey City University, and author of the new book, The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike.
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This recent issue of the Labor: Studies in Working Class History features a terrific essay “Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s by Matthew Nichter that brings new light to the Emmett Till story.
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News that hopeful immigrants continue to be transported across the border under the Biden administration at levels last reached in 2018 makes it clear that the early weeks of the new administration will not bring a policy sea-change. And it makes the essays in the new issue of Labor 18:1, which discuss elements of U.S.
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