LABOR HISTORY SOURCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST.

Massachusetts workers have engaged in some of the most important struggles in American labor history. Yet, until recently, there has been no systematic attempt to document the Bay State's labor organizations. The Archives and Manuscripts department of the University of Massachusetts (UM) at Amherst hopes to ensure that the state's more recent labor history does not suffer due to negligence. UM previously had eight volumes of minutes and dues books of the Loom Fixers Association of Fall River, a small, elite craft union in the industry, and a minute book for the Fall River Yarn Finishers Union. But the paucity of labor records reflected both the lack of interest by repositories and the sporadic strength of textile unions until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1986, the University acquired the records of the New Bedford Joint Board of the Textile Workers Union of America, documenting the resurgence of New England textile unionism from 1940 through its decline in the 1970s. The holdings of UM have begun to provide the raw material for the story of the Bay State's labor history.