Labor History Week, West Virginia: Print Resources

From the carpenter's union in colonial Philadelphia to the strike in 2007 by Chinese restaurant delivery men in New York City, the history of how brave working people struggled to gain fair wages, and working conditions.

Covers the diversity of labor history including events, individuals, industries, laws, occupations, organizations, and concepts ranging from abolitionism to "yellow dog" contracts.
This resource is available at the State Archives Library. It is not available for check out, but can be used in house.

From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

Chronicles the labor-management struggle at the Ravenswood Aluminum Company (RAC) in the small town from 1990 to 1992. The 1,700 unionized workers faced what is familiar to American labor movement participants and observers over the past 15 to 20 years. Confronted by increasing competition and mounting debt, Kaiser Aluminum sold the aluminum smelting and fabrication plant to a new breed of corporate owners with international financial interests whose primary concern was to improve bottom-line financial results by changing existing work practices. Faced with a militant local union, management went on the offensive by locking out the union employees and operating the plant with salaried staff and non-union replacement workers.

The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts was a watershed moment in labor history as significant as the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Triangle fire in New York. In Bread and Roses , veteran journalist Bruce Watson provides a long-overdue account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills in Lawrence on a frigid January day. Despite owners’ predictions to the contrary, the walkout soon became a protracted Dickensian drama that included twenty-three thousand strikers from fifty-one nations singing as they paraded through Lawrence, bayonet-toting militiamen patrolling the streets, and the daring evacuation of the strikers’ tattered and hungry children to Manhattan, where they lived with strangers and wrote loving letters to their parents on the picket line. Based on newspaper accounts, magazine reportage, and oral histories, Bread and Roses is vividly narrated and teeming with colorful characters—including rags-to-riches mill owner William Wood and radical labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. A rousing history with the narrative drive of a novel, Bread and Roses is the true-to-life tale of a strike that became the fabric of a community and an inspiration to workers around the world.

This title focus on the industry's start and early years in West Virginia and traces West Virginia's socioeconomic development and efforts to create an industrially based economy with glassmaking as a key component. Towns like Moundsville, Clarksburg, and Fairmont show how different facets of the glassmaking industry expanded in the early 20th century followed by capital consolidation and a concurrent decline in the power of organized labor.

Provides all the essential information workers need to thoroughly protect themselves, and help them strengthen their position in the event of a job related legal problem.

Traces the historical influence of the Mafia on New York's waterfront, drawing on the investigative series of New York Sun reporter Malcolm "Mike" Johnson into the region's racketeering, violent territorial disputes, and union corruption.

After the landslide elections of 1936, Roosevelt was unstoppable, and so was the New Deal. Then Roosevelt sought to commemorate his stunning victory by "packing" the Supreme Court. Journalist Shogan (political science, Johns Hopkins U.) remarks on what happens when the president exerts, or attempts to exert, extraordinary powers and what effect other forces may have on his success. He covers all the players: those in Congress, within the unions, in the media and in the court system--and their reactions to Roosevelt; the perceptions of the unions about the New Deal; and the reasons why, to some extent, the election of Roosevelt to his third and fourth terms has overshadowed some aspects of this pivotal episode in US history.

Provides readers with an understanding of labor history that is directly relevant to the economic and political crises working people face today. This collection has much to offer union leaders, social advocates, and all those curious about the future of the labor movement.

Richard Brisbin offers a compelling study of the exercise of political power. In considering the legal significance of the strike, Brisbin asks the larger question of whether even extreme transgression or resistance can fracture the "imagined coherence of the law." He shows how each party in the strike invoked the law to justify its actions while attacking those of the other side as unlawful. In the end, both sides lost; although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the union, most of the strikers faced elimination of their jobs and an ongoing struggle for pensions and health benefits.

Award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us on a journey into the secret history of coal mining in the American heartland. Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy." "Reckoning at Eagle Creek digs deep into the tangled roots of the coal industry beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, chronicling the removal of Native Americans and the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln. It uncovers a century of regulatory negligence, vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety, and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining.