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Although outsiders have played an important role in social protest in the U.S., outsiders’ role in the U.S. labor movement has been the focus of spirited debate. Debate about outsider organizers, in particular, reached a fevered pitch in the late 1990s, and continues today. This paper scrutinizes two of the core assumptions of this debate: that insider and outsider organizers operate differently on union recognition campaigns, and that workers respond to them differently in these settings. We analyzed 153 in-depth interviews with workers and organizers conducted at the height of the debate, in order to answer two questions: What is the role of outsider organizers during private sector union recognition campaigns, and how do outsider organizers secure workers’ consent in these settings? All of the organizers in our data-set were graduates of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, and 64 of them were outsiders. The outsider organizers in our data-set confronted barriers that insider organizers did not, including workers’ concerns about their youth, inexperience and lack of professionalism, and their own inability to relate to workers. While many critics of outsider organizers claim that these barriers are insurmountable, we found the opposite to be true. The vast majority of outsider organizers in our data-set successfully secured workers’ consent by demonstrating commitment, building relationships, and being honest and forthright. After proposing changes in organizer training and leadership development in response to these findings, we conclude with a brief discussion of the enduring debate about outsiders’ role in social protest in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a collection of papers that respond to an essay that compares the role of political repression in the early American labor movement and European labor movements. One paper questions the severity of political repression in the U.S. during the period in question, 1870 to 1914, and offers additional historical moments that influenced the labor movement in the U.S. Another paper discusses how the essay addresses the issue of American exceptionalism in the early American labor movement. An additional paper argues that the essay utilizes a crude conceptualization of political repression of labor movements and does not allow room for alternative explanations.

Abstract This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What does the unique political space of cities tell us about the forms working-class politics took and the barriers it confronted during the period of rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? Three points of reference are crucial. First, city politics addressed immediate, tangible needs of workers and their families that were common to urban, industrial life irrespective of national boundaries. Second, the forms of political mobilization and relative success of these movements were remarkably congruent across the industrializing world but with interesting and important variations; and the US case at the municipal level, contrary to the tradition of 'American exceptionalism', was not an outlier. Third, municipal activists crafted a new local politics, that was internationalist in orientation (recall the contemporary slogan: “think globally, act locally”), and that challenged the nationalist aspirations of their parliamentary-oriented party colleagues. This divergence had profound consequences in the World War I era. With the city as the unit of analysis, we are able to transcend the framework of national political narratives that has so stamped the historiographies of the respective countries. Borders dissolve, at least conceptually, and we can examine the new political landscapes of industrializing cities for what they have in common and for their distinctiveness. We can talk about Cripple Creek, Colorado, and Broken Hill, New South Wales, in the same breath, and similarly, Cleveland, Ohio, and Brisbane, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand, and Malmö, Sweden; Hamburg, Germany, and Liverpool, England; Vienna, Austria, and Chicago. But, what makes these comparisons that much more intriguing is that they are also linked through the cross-fertilization of political ideas. At a key point in this period, Milwaukee social democrat Walter Thomas Mills played a critical role in facilitating the organization of a New Zealand Labour Party. Two decades earlier Henry George's single tax swept through Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Sweden, shaping the thinking of working-class activists and middle-class reformers. Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited the US, Australia, and New Zealand on the eve of their own intensive examination of the history of English local government. They were preceded in Australia by the legendary British docker Ben Tillett and followed soon thereafter by Labour Party activists Tom Mann and E. R. Hartley. The traffic moved the other way as well. A young Christchurch organizer, 'Jimmy' Thorn, went off for four years to organize for the Independent Labour Party in Britain; Labour Party activists, Patrick Hickey in New Zealand and Claude Thompson in Australia, had each spent time with militant miners in the western United States; evolutionary socialist Eduard Bernstein spent a decade exiled in London before returning to Germany, imbibing the experience of independent labour activists and imparting his own evolving ideas to sympathizers in London. Using a few selected cases, drawn from research in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US, this paper will examine both the international networks municipal activists forged and the lessons of local political mobilization they shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of historical evidence shows that welfare states originate in fear—class fear, and this is no less true of the United States than Western Europe. Drawing on the history of the American labor movement, populism, and progressivism, this paper questions the theory of American “exceptionalism” as well as Theda Skocpol's argument that the autonomy of capitalist states relegates Marxist theories of the state to secondary importance. The expansion and contraction of welfare states are best understood in terms of class conflict, which moves Marxism from the sidelines to the center of efforts to explain capitalist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the Western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this 'double divide'. The first is a combination of organisations, including unions and NGOs in both North and South, that are focusing on blatant violations of the dignity of workers in apparel export processing zones in the South. This 'basic rights complex' has resulted in important victories. A second complex of organisations, also involving unions and NGOs in both North and South, has raised broad macro issues of governance focusing particularly on the anti-democratic character of current proposals for a free trade area of the Americas. Neither of these complexes is without its weaknesses, but each makes it clear that bridging the double divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as work in progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the summary of the paper Britain, United States and Australia: Some Comparative Reflections, presented at Irish in British History conference held on March 12, 1992 in Liverpool, England. For the Liverpool-Irish, sectarian and ethnic associational culture offered identity, pride and protection to workers without access to exclusive or institutionalised forms of class-based organised labour. For the Catholic Irish this cultural provision was fostered first in the pub, later by the parish. Building upon their ethnic networks, Irish-Americans constructed a labour movement which was essentially instrumental, offering protection against the vicissitudes of industrial America, an approach endorsed by Irish-American women, numerically preponderant by the late nineteenth century.

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.

Renowned labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he resided throughout his life except for two periods when he was incarcerated for his labor and antiwar activities. After his death, Marguerite Debs Cooper, the sole surviving family member left in Terre Haute came into possession of Eugene's and her father's private papers, including family and other correspondence. In 1962 the Eugene V. Debs Foundation had been founded with the primary goals of historic preservation of the Debs Home and its utilization as a museum open to the public. Many charter members of the Foundation were professors at Indiana State University at Terre Haute, whose campus now surrounds the Debs Home. Having faculty as members of the Foundation helped ensure from the start close and productive ties with Cunningham Memorial Library, where the Debs Collection is now located in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The initial gift establishing the Debs Collection contained 3800 letters, 6000 speeches, 220 telegrams, 170 typescripts, 60 manuscripts, and 300 other items, including campaign memorabilia and photographs. A gift of particular significance came to the Collection through the efforts of J. Robert Constantine, a member of the university's Department of History, who for many years was Secretary of the Debs Foundation and was instrumental in the inception of the Debs Collection.

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 information on some problems of the new unionism in the U.S. The new unions have made great progress; but they must overcome a number of difficulties if they are to become an important part of the labor movement. It should be stated at the outset that new unions have achieved much in the face of great odds and obstacles. Their successful organizing of many thousands of hitherto unorganized workers is an achievement that will rank high in the permanent records of labor. This paper proposes to deal with some difficulties that they face and some problems that they must overcome if they are to become a permanent part of our economic picture and succeed in bringing the remaining unorganized workers under the banner of unionism. The new unions may be defined as those labor organizations which have been formed since the latest upsurge of unionism beginning with the N.R.A. Some of the new unions have been organized by the American Federation of Labor and have remained in that organization, though the majority have followed what is now the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Problems of the new unions in the American Federation of Labor concern mainly the federal locals.

The Ohio Historical Society, during the period 1975 to 1979, conducted the Ohio Labor History Project. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ohio American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and also enjoyed the sponsorship of the Ohio Network of American History Research Centers and the Labor Education and Research Service of the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. The purpose of the project was to locate, inventory, acquire, and preserve labor union records and the personal papers of Ohio trade unionists, as well as to conduct oral history interviews. Since 1979, the effort to preserve Ohio's labor heritage has continued as a major component of the Society's Manuscripts Department. In 1980 the Society published a bibliographic guide to the sources identified and collected by the project. This publication, "Guide to Primary Sources in Ohio Labor History," describes 207 collections housed at each of the eight network centers, eighty-seven additional collections in Ohio union offices, eighty oral history interviews, and ninety-five titles of labor-related publications.