labor history 
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SOURCE: The American Prospect
12/17/2020
The Saddest Union Story
by Harold Myerson
The recent announcement of a settlement between federal prosecutors and leaders of the United Auto Workers union presents a dire contrast to the heyday of the union, when the leadership of Walter Reuther made the union the only influential social democratic institution in American history and anchored the midcentury middle class.
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SOURCE: Valley Public Radio
12/11/2020
UC Merced Acquires Photo Collection Documenting Farmworkers In The 1960s
Historian Mario Sifuentez discusses the photographs of Ernest Lowe and the activism of Central Valley farm workers.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
12/14/2020
Civil Rights Unionism and Democracy for Teachers
by Jesse Chanin
Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.
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12/6/2020
Plus ça change...? Alienation and Violence from Both Sides of Labor's Rise and Fall
by James Ottavio Castagnera
Violence in the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s may or may not have been the work of an Irish secret society, but showed the anger and frustration that fueled the rise of the American labor movement. What will become of social anger today when that movement is moribund?
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SOURCE: In These Times
12/1/2020
The Great Black Radical You've Never Heard Of
by Peter Cole
The author of a new book on an understudied Black labor radical presents context for an exerpt of an interview Ben Fletcher gave to the New York Amsterdam News, a rare surviving case of the organizer telling his own story.
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SOURCE: Public Books
11/20/2020
The Enduring Disposability Of Latinx Workers
by Natalia Molina
"For over a century, we have excused systemic inequalities, justifying them by pointing to Mexicans’ difference from 'us'."
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SOURCE: Labor and Employment Law Daily
10/13/2020
Labor Pulse: Is This Election Labor's Last Chance?
by Jim Castagnera
The election presents organized labor with a choice between a death sentence and a reprieve that will prove temporary unless unions can put their needs at the center of a Biden presidency's priorities.
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10/11/2020
Corporate Money Turns Democracy Upside Down in California Initiative Process
by James Thornton Harris
Intended as a tool to circumvent the power of big business in the state legislature, California's ballot initiative process has become yet another channel for the political influence of big money.
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SOURCE: West Virginia Public Broadcasting
9/30/2020
Bob Murray, Who Fought Against Black Lung Regulations As A Coal Operator, Has Filed For Black Lung Benefits
The coal magnate, who for decades ran the largest privately owned underground coal mining company in the United States, has also been at the forefront of combatting federal regulations that attempt to reduce black lung, an incurable and ultimately fatal lung disease caused by exposure to coal and rock dust.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
9/18/2020
Scapegoating Antifa for Starting Wildfires Distracts from the Real Causes
by Steven C. Beda
The idea of left-wing radicals starting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest dates back to timber companies blaming the Industrial Workers of the World for blazes as a way to discredit demands for workers' power through unions.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
9/10/2020
American Democracy Is in the Mail
by Daniel Carpenter
The Postal Service has been a circuit of information vital to democracy, a non-exclusionary employer, and a service connecting all communities in the nation. It's also been a tool of conquest and voracious capitalism. For good and ill, the history of the USPS is the history of America.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
9/10/2020
The Wages of Whiteness (Review Essay)
Hari Kunzru's review essay examines the current vogue for white antiracism (and antiracist training) through the history of whiteness as a political and academic concept, concluding that many of the most popular books and multicultural pieties strip the idea of its structural elements and reduce it to a question of personal purification.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
8/27/2020
Abolishing Child Labor Took the Specter of ‘White Slavery’ and the Job Market’s Near Collapse During the Great Depression
by Betsy Wood
Reformers who sought to ban child labor had to make significant compromises with agricultural interests and white supremacists, explaining why significant loopholes in the ban exist.
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SOURCE: Vanity Fair
8/25/2020
Blue Bloods: America's Brotherhood of Police Officers
by Eve L. Ewing
“How many unions are there where you’re assigned a gun and told you can shoot people?” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner asked me during a phone interview. “I mean, they have superpowers. They are given superpowers over the lives and freedom of other people. Over the integrity of their bodies.”
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
8/3/2020
Remembering Our Friend and Colleague, Professor David H. Bensman
A champion for workers, Bensman mentored two generations of future labor activists, organizers, and scholars during a 42-year career at Rutgers.
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7/7/2020
Unions Are Essential for Eliminating Racism
A new study finds that unions don't just increase wages and benefits for workers on the job — union membership is also linked to diminished racist attitudes among white workers. If we want to defeat racism, building strong, democratic unions is essential.
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SOURCE: The Progressive
7/7/2020
The Story Behind the Lee Statue in Richmond, Virginia
by Peter Rachleff
Now the time has come for the story of the Workingmen’s Reform Party, the building of Richmond’s City Hall, and the solidarity-based politics of the Black and white members of the Knights of Labor, to come out into the light.
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SOURCE: The New York Times
6/29/2020
The Long, Unhappy History of Working From Home
As the coronavirus keeps spreading, employers are convinced remote work has a bright future. Decades of setbacks suggest otherwise.
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SOURCE: TIME
6/25/2020
21 Lessons From America's Worst Moments
Historians reflect on the lessons to be learned from the worst episodes of American history (if Americans can look unflinchingly on them).
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SOURCE: Vox
6/24/2020
How Police Unions Became so Powerful — and How they Can Be Tamed
Over about half a century, police unions have become one of the most powerful lobbies in local government. Historian Will Jones is among the experts who explain how.