Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Labor Unions
FDR's Secretary of Labor — the first female Cabinet member — also helped create the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, and the first tough child labor laws.
Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor at American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.
A never-before-seen report reveals just how fragile our great cities were, and remain.
There was a time when urban Americans weren’t afraid of terrorists, bombs, and poison gas. The worst thing that could happen in a city was a strike. Cities were unprepared for labor walkouts because nobody could tell who would strike or when and where. Mayors saw to it that they kept on good terms with unions.
What history says about the new split in the AFl-CIO
FIFTY YEARS AGO, unions seemed invincible, but they’ve been losing battles and members ever since. The reasons why their fortunes fell suggest that they’re sure to rise again.
What should a union offer its members? A century-old fight heats up again.
Not long ago, I opened the paper and discovered, without surprise, that the final figures were in on the 1996 election campaign and that it had been—at $2.2 billion—the most expensive in our history (so far).
Poisoned, ruined, and self-cannibalized, this city is still the grandest of all boomtowns.
It’s spooky up here on the top floor of the Metals Bank & Trust Building. Shards of glass and crumbled plaster crunch underfoot, obscuring the elegant tile pattern of the corridor floor. Heavy oak doors with pebbled windows and missing knobs stand open to the hallway.
HISTORY’S MOST PHOTOGENIC LABOR dispute lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, and finally won performers some respect.
Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas.
All the new lady brakemen on the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work on what was officially known as the Jersey Coast Extra List.
Uncle Max Ran the Union?
For me he was always just Uncle Max, and she, Aunt Sophie. They lived two houses down from me in suburban Long Island. And though I spent many hours of my childhood in his company in the late forties and early fifties, I never knew who he really was.
One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst.
Joseph Pulitzer, nearly blind, suffering from bouts of depression, and so sensitive to sound he exploded when the silverware was rattled, managed his newspapers in absentia for the last twenty years of his life.
At a time of crisis for American labor, an organizer looks back on the turbulent 50-year career that brought him from the shop floor to the presidency of the United Automobile Workers.
Douglas A. Fraser is unusual among American union leaders of this generation. He started out as a worker, not as a professional union man, during that fervid time of union organization, the Great Depression, and witnessed the founding of his own union.
For millions of women, consciousness raising didn’t start in the 1960s. It started when they helped win World War II.
DURING THE FIRST three years of World War II, five million women covered their hair, put on “slacks,” and at the government’s urging went to work in defense plants. They did every kind of job, but the largest single need was for riveters.
The great sit-down strike that transformed American industry
At General Motors’ Flint, Michigan, Fisher Body Number One, the largest auto-body factory in the world, it was early evening of a chill winter day.
BLOOD FLOWED IN THE PERENNIALLY TROUBLESOME COALFIELDS IN 1921, WHEN THOUSANDS OF MINERS DECIDED THEIR RIGHT TO ORGANIZE WAS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
On the morning of August 1, 1921, the Gazette of Charleston, West Virginia, carried under an eight-column banner on its front page the following dispatch from the city of Bluefield:
During the 1912 strike of 25,000 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers—the high-water mark of the Industrial Workers of the World’s turbulent career—a group of female mill hands marched under a banner that read “We Want Bread and Roses, Too.” Moved by the
Featured Authors
