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. Read more →
2 New Teaching Labor’s Story Units: Women’s Rights are Labor Rights
What do labor history and movements for women’s rights have in common?
Check out the new additions to the Teaching Labor’s Story resource bank:
a 1910 article advocating women’s suffrage by Kate Debs (yes, that Debs)
Document Selection and Teaching Guide by Michelle Killion Morahn, Affiliated Faculty, Indiana State University
and the 1966 National Organization of Women’s Statement of Purpose
Document Selection and Teaching Guide by: Katherine Turk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Debs makes the case for women’s suffrage with a combination of natural rights and class interest arguments, draws support from the new science of sociology, and makes a not-very-subtle critique of patriarchy within the socialist movement itself. Debs connects suffrage with the coming of a “nobler life” for all.
As the largest feminist membership group of the “second wave” era, NOW attacked many of the gendered inequalities that continued to define American life a half century after Debs’ wrote —especially those related to work. Today, another half-century later, debates over the value and remuneration for paid and unpaid work, and the ways class complicates women’s relationships to one another are as relevant as they were when Debs advocated women’s suffrage and NOW demanded equality in all spheres of public and private life.
Teaching Labor’s Story entries include a primary source supported by a peer-reviewed teaching guides that provides context and connections to help instructors integrate ideas and experiences of work into their existing curriculum.
Do you have a favorite primary source that brings labor history and working class voices into the American story(ies)? Contact: LAWCHA’s Teaching Resources Committee @ [email protected]
Four New Teaching Labor’s Stories! Check them out —
Four New Teaching Labor’s Stories! Check them out —
The TLS repository now offers more ways to examine how work changed in the early- to mid-twentieth century, and how repressive state systems worked to constrain different groups of workers, including Black labor.
· Explore working conditions and labor organizing in Vaudeville with Andrea Ringer’s “Lady Vaudeville & Her White Rats, 1909.” This is an amusing and insightful account of industrial-era working conditions and labor organizing in the oft-ignored mass entertainment industry.
· Delve into the conflicts between workers’ struggling for dignity and a livelihood against state-supported repression and labor control. Randi Storch’s “The Memorial Day Massacre, 1937” features an oral interview narration of the famous Paramount newsreel of this event. Greta deJong’s “Frank Hanes Murder, 1939” and Gordon Andrew’s “Charles Houston, Scottsboro Case, Revisited, 1939” reveal two different ways in which the police powers of the state enabled white control of black labor.
Join these labor colleagues by becoming a TLS author. Check out the “Call for Contributions” to this peer reviewed repository. Read more →
Margaret Chanler Aldrich, “The Week Before Christmas,” December 20, 1911: Teaching Labor’s Story
Margaret Chanler Aldrich and the Teaching Committee have completed another section of Teaching Labor’s Story, featuring a poem first published in the New York Times. The poem was then used by the National Consumers’ League for its campaign to improve conditions for retail workers around Christmas. Read more →
What do Teaching, Publishing, & Collective Action have in common?
LAWCHA’s Teaching Labor’s Story project has an answer – NEW to the TLS project: Thematic Threads. Read more →
The Inside Story of a Shirtwaist Factory: Teaching Labor’s Story Update
Clare Lemlich has provided a new teaching resource for Teaching Labor’s Story. It is a primary source material lesson plan involving a magazine article written by immigrant garment worker and labor leader. The article describes working conditions in New York City’s garment factories and advocates votes for women. Read more →
Teaching Labor’s Story: Margaret Haley, “Why Teachers Should Organize” 1904
Margaret Haley, Vice President of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation gave this speech at the National Education Association convention, St. Louis, Missouri, July 1, 1904. Read more →
New Teaching Labor’s Story Guide: Triumph of the Paraprofessionals, August 22, 1970
Nick Juravich’s new TLS guide is an op-ed written by civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin on the signing of the first union contract for paraprofessional educators (classroom and school support staff) in New York City. It was published in the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s largest black-owned newspaper. Read more →
Lecturers on Strike
University lecturers in the UK will walk off tomorrow in the largest-ever strike called in British higher education. Read more →
Calling all Labor Historians: A New Resource to Tell Labor’s Story
A new LAWCHA initiative to develop classroom and public knowledge of labor history Read more →
How Community-College Faculty Organized a Strike and Scored a Contract
By Michael McCown. For the first time in its 40-year history, the union of full- and part-time faculty at City College of San Francisco recently went on strike—and it worked. Read more →
Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction
For most college and university instructors in the United States today, teaching provides neither the job security nor income typically associated with middle class careers. That is because about 70 percent of all instructors are not eligible for tenure. Read more →
Socialism in current K-12 textbooks: invisible & dismissed
For years now I’ve been showing students and friends the polls that show an increasingly favorable view of socialism especially among low income, young African-American and Hispanic youth. Read more →
Oaxaca Teachers Still Fighting Corporate Education Reforms
Ten years ago, one of the most radical unions in the hemisphere, the Sección XXII of Mexico’s National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE), led a vibrant movement against the state governor’s heavy-handed rule in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The demonstrations, known to many as the “Oaxaca Commune,” featured six months of mass marches, public encampments, and neighborhood barricades. Read more →
(Updated) Patrick S. O’Donnell, The World of Work and Labor Law: A Bibliography
Patrick S. O’Donnell has updated his monumental bibliography on the labor movement to account for the year 2015. “This bibliography,” writes the author, “contains a number of titles dealing with “workers,” the “world of work” generally, and “labor law” in particular, so as to account for some of the more compelling reasons we should assiduously attend to the complex economic and moral questions (the former often including some of the latter) regarding the labor, working conditions, and leisure time of working people.” Read more →