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Presents an update on issues concerning labor history in the U.S. as of January 1993. Overview of the 1993 Lowell Conference on Industrial History; Information on several conferences on labor studies and industrial relations; Establishment of a working group to focus on labor movements and free trade.

From the onset of the Great Depression, and continuing throughout the lifetime of the New Deal, re-casting the nation's political economy became the overriding preoccupation of American politics. The economic crisis inevitably called into question the prevailing relationship between the government, the economy, and society. In particular, the power of dominant industrial, commercial, and financial institutions was severely tested. Political alternatives proliferated, but tended to gather around one of two possible general approaches. On the one hand, numerous proposals, some more conservative than others, suggested deploying the moral authority of the Federal government to sanction a system of industrial self-regulation. On the other hand, this corporatist politics was opposed by those who envisioned a more autonomous and active role for the state in regulating and encouraging the growth of the national economy, and prescribed policies, some more liberal than others, subsequently characterized as Keynesian.

The article examines the use of song-poetry as a vital element in the labor movement in the period 1865-1895. Karl Reuber is not a name scholars are likely to recall. Reuber earned his livelihood polishing furniture and pianos in Pittsburgh in the decades surrounding the Civil War. Like most working-class Americans, he did not leave behind personal papers or memoirs. He was simply one of the millions of workers who owed their survival to the nation's burgeoning industrial base. However, Reuber also joined those who repeatedly rose in protest against the abuses of the rising capitalist elite from 1865 to 1895 and who sought to check capitalist domination by joining fellow workers in a movement for collective redress. Worker gatherings featured song-poetry as a regular part of their agenda, while labor "bards" engendered considerable followings with skills of composition and declamation. The majority of these bards emerged from the ranks of the nation's burgeoning workforce, iron molders, coal miners, coopers, machinists, printers, shoemakers, bakers, railroad brakemen and engineers. This lore and song certainly deserves study in its own right. However, the greatest value of song-poetry may derive from its examination as cultural artifacts and historical documents.

The article details the preservation or accessioning of labor history records at the University Libraries' department of Special Collections and Archives. The University Libraries' department of Special Collections and Archives has been seeking labor records for its Archives of Public Affairs and Policy since 1986. These growing archives include papers of individuals and records of organizations concerned with New York State public policy issues, especially since 1950. While there are approximately 450 public- and private-sector labor unions and related organizations in this area, the survey has been expanded geographically in recognition of the New York State Department of Labor's broader definition of the "Albany District," which includes the industrial cities of Glens Fails, Gloversville, Hudson, Johnstown, Plattsburgh, and Poughkeepsie. Despite the long history of organized labor in the Capital District, there has been little serious historical scholarship on unionism in the area. The monographs and dissertations that have been produced give insight into reasons for the successes and failures of organized labor and examine unions in a few trades, but much of the labor history of the region remains unknown.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has had a long and varied industrial history out of which rose, among other things, the first labor party, U.S. President Zachary Taylor's scientific management, and labor activist William H. Sylvis' brand of modern trade unionism. Indeed, at least one labor historian has suggested that Philadelphia was the headquarters of the trade union movement in the 19th century. During the past year, the Urban Archives of Temple University at Pennsylvania, has been involved in a project to survey and acquire business and labor records relating to the city. As a result, the Archives have added several significant collections to its previous holdings. Perhaps the largest labor collection in the Urban Archives is that of the Upholsterers' International Union (UIU), covering the period from 1937 to 1976. The papers comprise approximately 175 linear feet and, while unprocessed, some sections are available for easy access. In particular, the extensive minutes of the Executive Board are a valuable source, containing the actions and correspondence of the board on every UIU resolution, dating from Sal Hoffman's election as president in 1937.

The Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, was the second labor archive established as a result of the activities of the Association of Southern Labor Historians. This group of historians concerned about the lack of attention paid to the southern working class on the part of labor historians, developed during the 1966 meeting of the Southern Historical Association with the purpose of stimulating study of the southern trade union movement by collecting union records and presenting papers on labor history at meetings concurrent with those of the Southern Historical Association. Dr. George Green of the University of Texas (UT) at Arlington, Texas, returned home from this meeting and began a series of conversations with UT faculty and administrators, as well as Texas labor leaders. These discussions led to the creation in 1967 of the Texas Labor Archives at UT. The Southern Labor Archives is a very young repository. The Archives seeks, however, to become a major regional and national research resource by concentrating its efforts on documenting the development of the labor movement in the South.

The paper presents annual bibliography of articles on American Labor History. Some of the articles on general history are — "Collective Action, Marx's Class Theory, and the Union Movement," by D.E. Booth; "Southern Workers and Social Change: Concepts and prospects," by Michael J. Cassity; "Occupational Classification in the United States Census: 1870-1970," by Margo A. Conk; "Work in a New America," by R.M. Kanter; "Work: A Short and Critical History," by D. Whitsett and K. Lash and "Occupational Folklore and the Folklore of Working," edited by Catherine Swanson and Philip Nusbaum. Some of the articles on American labor movement are — "Racial Discrimination Against Free Blacks in Antebellum Virginia: The Case of Harry Jackson," by Raymond C. Bailey; "House Servants and Field Hands: Fragmentation in the Antebellum Slave Community," by C.W. Harper; "Indentured Servitude: The Philadelphia Market, 1771-1773," by Robert O. Heavner and "A Variety of Panaceas: The 'Social Problem' and Proposed Solutions to It in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York State," by Edward Pessen.

The article presents a bibliography on labor history, which is organized into the following twelve sections, Theories of the American Labor Movement/Working Class; Cross-Period Studies and Surveys; Periods of Development; Labor and Political Action/The State, Labor and Radicalism; Women; Immigration, Ethnicity, and Minority Groups; City, State, & Regional Labor Movements/Working Class; Industries, Occupations, and Trades; Comparative; Related/Thematic Works; Marxology and Archival, Reference & Bibliography, Professional, Non-Print Formats/Media, New Serials.

The article focuses on the organized labor in the U.S. Taking care of business belongs to a long tradition of literature that has castigated the U.S. labor movement even as it has hailed the enduring virtue of the U.S. working class. Dating at least back to Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais's Labor's "Untold Story Strike," and James Green's "World of the Worker," partisans of working-class radicalism have contradistinguished the inherent decency and potential radicalism of working people, on the one hand, and the conservatism and cynicism of the real, existing labor movement on the other. Paul Buhle's contribution to this genre is a kind of scholarly polemic-scholarly because it rests on broad acquaintance with the academic literature relating to its subject, a polemic because it marshals its evidence without much regard for nuance on behalf of a rousing agenda of popular struggle. Despite this long, doleful record, those seeking historical sustenance for progressive labor activism do nonetheless have a rich tradition on which to draw. Radical laborites, notably members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local grass-roots movements in the 1930s, projected a free-wheeling, democratic brand of unionism that remains of inspirational and tactical relevance.

In early August of 1894, John McBride, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), announced his intention to form an Ohio labor party and to merge the party with the state's People's party. Historians who have examined the Federation's stance toward political action have mistakenly concluded that McBride shared Samuel Gompers' union philosophy. Gompers's unionism went by a number of names-business unionism, trade unionism, voluntarism, pure and simple unionism, prudential unionism-but it rested on two fundamental assumptions. First, Gompers saw an inherent and unalterable conflict between employers and those who worked for wages. This led Gompers and like-minded unionists to eschew alliances with farmers, small producers, and shop keepers. Second, Gompers saw the conflict between labor and capital as essentially economic in nature. In the past decade, scholars have attempted to explain the decline of labor republicanism and the rise of business unionism in hopes of understanding the conservative nature of American politics. For in the United States alone among Western industrialized nations, the labor movement did not organize politically after the turn of the century to challenge the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism.

In 1993 the Governor-General of Australia, son of an American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) maintained that brutal employment conditions explained the rise of the IWW in the USA: "Direct action appeared justified." Not so in Australia, he insisted, where unionism was well established, Labor governments a periodic reality, and industrial relations avoided the "excesses" of the American system; Australian IWW tactics, therefore, were "self-destructive." As a former cabinet minister in a federal Labor government, Bill Hayden's perspective on the Australian IWW is typical of the Australian Labor Party, implying as it does that Labor's achievements rendered an Australian IWW unnecessary and counterproductive. A similar response is apparent in a 1919 Labor pamphlet, which described the IWW as "a serpent in the new Eden ready to poison the clear spring of progress." However, the Wobblies of the time maintained that it was precisely the discrepancy between promise and performance of Labor governments that discredited political action and demanded direct industrial action; and it was the persuasive power of this argument that found them an audience amongst militant workers. Thus it was the apparent success of the labor movement's incursion into parliamentary politics, the formation of governments that explains the appeal of the Australian IWW, as it developed and articulated a distinctively anti-political position.

This article discusses the emergence of public opinion in Gilded Age labor reform culture in the U.S. in the late 19th century. It may be that Gilded Age labor reformers' vision of coercive government was not as limited as their conception of a proper state. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, a wide variety of labor reform activists and trade unionists expressed an intense, and largely unexplored, interest in public opinion. They spoke often of the need and means of shaping it, and expressed a peculiar confidence in its power. It is true that labor reformers never produced a complete, coherent text on the public opinion question, and their comments on it are widely scattered. Nevertheless, talk of public opinion was common in labor reform circles, it crossed the standard organization and ideological dividing lines, and it endured across time. Minimally, the evidence indicates that reformers and unionists consciously discussed recruiting allies beyond their ranks and schemed to turn desire practices into publicly accepted customs.

The article details how union men's wives and wage-earning women formed a working class women's movement in Seattle, Washington in the early 1900s which combined a Seattle labor movement's women's organization with the feminist discourse of their time. During the nineteen-teens, union men's wives and wage-earning women formed a vibrant working-class women's movement in Seattle, Washington. What is particularly striking is the way these women combined the women's organizations made available to them within the Seattle labor movement with the feminist discourse of the early 20th century "Woman Movement" to produce a local movement of their own. Most scholarship on the efforts of working-class women to challenge such denials of their concerns outside the home has focused primarily on the organizing efforts of female wage workers and their middle-class feminist allies. The working-clan women's movement of early 20th-century Seattle demonstrates a different sort of challenge.

The article narrates Philip S. Foner's historical research of American workers. When Foner conceived and began his series in the era of World War II he took recourse to the way explored a generation earlier by John R. Commons. He also initially wrote at a time when labor militancy was fresh in the minds of many people and organized labor seemed to be a power in the land--a time when Summer Slichter predicted a "laboristic" society. The appearance of Foner's sixth volume provides an opportunity to assess how well he has managed to adapt and evolve his original framework as the field he would survey, continually changed under his own gaze. Foner's enterprise is an individual effort, formally the creation of a person who alone had to master a huge mass of sources and secondary material. Yet anyone who examines the text and endnotes in Foner's six volumes and has read the published and unpublished literature written on the subject since the 1940s realizes that this history is every bit as much a collective enterprise in reality if not always in acknowledgments.

The existence of temperance sentiments among groups of 19th century workers, and within the Knights of Labor in particular, is now familiar to historians. Such sentiments are derived from a conservative middle-class ideology revolving around self-help and self-discipline. Although these ideas may have played some role in the support which Joseph R. Buchanan and Joseph Murray gave to the Prohibition Party, other quite distinct concerns were predominant. Above all, they were seeking to undermine the influence of the urban saloon, an institution which they believed hindered the development of a unified labor movement and served as an important social base for a corrupt and anti-labor political machine. A study of their perspectives on the saloon and of the labor movement's efforts to build alternative social institutions to it demonstrates the wide gulf which separated labor's project from that of middle-class temperance reformers. The last two decades of the 19th century, saw the rapid development of new forms of recreation which constituted at least potential alternatives to the saloon.

The career of Richard L. Davis, a black coal miner from Ohio, has received significant attention from labor historians. With the re-publication of Herbert Gutman's seminal essay on Davis in his recently released collection of articles, "Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America," Davis's life and career as a worker and United Mine Workers of America (UMW) leader have achieved a prominence denied other rank and file black leaders in American labor history. Gutman's essay focused on Davis's commitment to the unionization of black miners and his tireless efforts on behalf of UMW as an organizer, particularly among his black comrades in Virginia, Alabama and West Virginia as well as in his own Hocking Valley. Gutman suggested that the standard picture of American organized labor in the late 19th century was inadequate for understanding what had been a complex and variegated movement, which at many points in time and in many locales and circumstances had encouraged the active participation of black workers in the emerging working class movement. While not minimizing such problems as the racism of white workers or black strikebreaking Gutman's essay concluded that UMW was by far the largest and most significant industrial union of its day with a strong commitment to interracial organization of the work force.