John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, thus keeping his promise of resignation if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1940 election against Wendell Willkie, Lewis took the United Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Industrial unionism is a trade union organising method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of skill or trade, thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations. De Leon believed that militarized Industrial unions would be the vehicle of class struggle.
Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.
The American Federation of Labor was a national federation of labor unions in the United States that continues today as the AFL-CIO. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions eager to provide mutual support and disappointed in the Knights of Labor. Samuel Gompers was elected the full-time president at its founding convention and was re-elected every year except one until his death in 1924. He became the major spokesperson for the union movement.
The nature and power of organized labor in the United States is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.
Labor history is a sub-discipline of social history which specializes on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was a United States trade union that operated from 1968 until its decertification in 1981 following an illegal strike broken by the Reagan administration; in striking, the union violated 5 U.S.C. (Supp. III 1956) 118p (now 5 U.S.C. § 7311), which prohibits strikes by federal government employees.
Philip Sheldon Foner was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books. He is considered a pioneer in his extensive works on the role of radicals, Black Americans, and women in American labor and political history, which were generally neglected in mainstream academia at the time. A Marxist thinker, he influenced more than a generation of scholars, inspiring some of the work published by younger academics from the 1970s on. In 1941, Foner became a public figure as one among 26 persons fired from teaching and staff positions at City College of New York for political views, following an investigation of communist influence in education by a state legislative committee, known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee.
These are References for Labor unions in the United States.
Edward Boyce was president of the Western Federation of Miners, a radical American labor organizer, socialist and hard rock mine owner.
The Commission on Industrial Relations was a commission created by the U.S. Congress on August 23, 1912, to scrutinize US labor law. The commission studied work conditions throughout the industrial United States between 1913 and 1915. The final report of the Commission, published in eleven volumes in 1916, contain tens of thousands of pages of testimony from a wide range of witnesses, including Clarence Darrow, Louis Brandeis, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Theodore Schroeder, William "Big Bill" Haywood, scores of ordinary workers, and the titans of capitalism, including Daniel Guggenheim, George Walbridge Perkins Sr., Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie.
The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) was one of two precursor labor organizations to the United Steelworkers. It was formed by the CIO on June 7, 1936. It disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America. The Steel Labor was the official paper of SWOC.
David Brody is an American historian, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of California-Davis.
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is a labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Melvyn Dubofsky is professor emeritus of history and sociology, and a well-known labor historian. He is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the Binghamton University.
New labor history is a branch of labor history which focuses on the experiences of workers, women, and minorities in the study of history. It is heavily influenced by social history.
The American Labor Union (ALU) was a radical labor organization launched as the Western Labor Union (WLU) in 1898. The organization was established by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in an effort to build a federation of trade unions in the aftermath of the failed Leadville Miners' Strike of 1896. The group changed its name from WLU to the more familiar ALU moniker in 1902 at its fifth annual convention. The group had a peak membership of about 43,000 — of which 27,000 were members of the WFM. The ALU was a precursor to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), established in 1905, which effectively terminated it.
Richard Schneirov is a professor of history and noted labor historian at Indiana State University.
Solidarity was a newspaper published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 to 1917. It was the official periodical of the organization in its early years. It was born as part of the McKees Rocks strike in 1909, initially by the IWW's Pittsburgh-New Castle Industrial Council. During the IWW's involvement in the local steel industry in New Castle and in Butler, Pennsylvania, the entire editorial and production staff of Solidarity was jailed.
Death in the Haymarket is a 2006 popular history book on the Haymarket affair, written by James Green.
