Labor History

  • Labor History: September 11, a volunteer's story
    Jo Cagan
    Sep 14 2009 - 10:17pm
    Labor Notes #271, October 2001

    The media reports of New Yorkers coming together are certainly true, and in some ways this has been a really inspirational time. I was lucky enough to volunteer both Wednesday and Thursday nights.

    After a friend and I waited on line for over an hour at the Javitz Center, we arrived at the volunteer registration table just as my declaration of “good communication and people skills” came in handy. (I’d been so regretting that I couldn’t put a check mark next to “welder” or “medic.”)

  • Once the Started, Sit-Downs Spread Like Wildfire
    Dana Frank
    Jul 15 2009 - 12:56pm
    ** Print only

    Since workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago occupied their factory last December—and won—many people have been trying to remember the big wave of sit-downs that swept through the U.S. during the Great Depression. Could there be a similar wave today?

  • Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement
    Jennifer C. Berkshire
    Jul 15 2009 - 12:21pm
    ** Print only

    I was a student and aspiring labor journalist when I volunteered for picket duty with the locked-out workers from A.E. Staley Co., the giant corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois. By then, 1994, the lockout was already months old and much of the action was taking place far away from the plant, as the “road warriors,” union members turned activists, crisscrossed the country to spread the word about the labor struggle that had turned their central Illinois town into a war zone.