Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The job, the union, the weekend, the strike, and the law that governs them were all made, and most of them recently. This lens denaturalizes the world of work by tracing how the working class was formed, how it organized, and how the ground rules were set through struggle, victory, and defeat. It builds directly on the historical lens of the capitalism theme, which covers how people came to have nothing to sell but their ability to work.

Anchor questions

• Where did the eight-hour day, the weekend, and the minimum wage come from? Who fought for them, and who died for them?
• If most people once worked land or trades, how did they end up working for wages? What did that take?
• Unions did not always exist. When and how were they built, and against what?
• Why is so much labor law written the way it is? Whose strikes and defeats shaped it?
• Whose labor history gets told, and whose gets left out?
• Were enslaved people workers? If they withdrew their labor and broke the Confederacy by doing it, what was that, if not a strike?
• In the colonies, the fight against the boss and the fight against the empire were the same fight. Why did they come apart in the United States?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

Books

• Jeremy Brecher (b. 1946), Strike! (1972, updated later). A narrative history of US mass strikes from 1877 to 1970 told from the rank and file’s point of view, covering the 1877 railroad uprising, the 1934 city-wide strikes, and the 1946 strike wave. The best single-volume entry point for this lens. Free: libcom.org
• E. P. Thompson (1924 to 1993), The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The founding work of “history from below,” reconstructing how English workers made themselves into a class through struggle, custom, and culture between 1780 and 1832, rather than being made by economic forces alone. Long and endlessly readable. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Philip S. Foner (1910 to 1994), History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 1 (1947). The opening volume of the standard left history of American labor, from colonial times to the founding of the AFL, covering early unions, the ten-hour movement, the Knights of Labor, and the 1877 uprising. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977). A focused account of the first national strike wave, drawn from Foner’s larger history and useful when a session wants to study one generative event closely. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Richard O. Boyer (1903 to 1973) and Herbert M. Morais (1905 to 1970), Labor’s Untold Story (1955). A popular union-published history of American workers from the Civil War through the New Deal, written to be read by workers themselves. Partisan and readable. Free to borrow: archive.org
• David Montgomery (1927 to 2011), Workers’ Control in America (1979). Essays on how workers fought for control over production and how management fought back, connecting shop-floor struggle to the rise of the modern firm. A bridge from labor history into the theoretical lens. No borrowable copy exists, and Cambridge blocks automated checks though the page is live. Paywalled: cambridge.org. A free Montgomery lecture survives, very niche at about 4,300 views; he died in 2011 and the record is thin: youtube.com

Unfree labor, and the workers the story leaves out

The books above tell the story through the free wage worker, who was mostly white and mostly male, and through the unions that admitted him. That worker was never the majority of anyone’s workforce. This section puts the people the standard account leaves out back where they belong, which is at the center.

• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 to 1963), Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Read Chapter 4, “The General Strike,” for this theme: Du Bois’s argument that enslaved people withdrew their labor from the Confederacy and destroyed it, which makes them workers who struck rather than people to whom freedom was granted. The most important labor history claim in American historiography, and it is not in most labor histories. Du Bois wrote it as a Black Marxist against the white supremacist consensus of his profession. Shared with the anti-Blackness theme. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Peter Linebaugh (b. 1942) and Marcus Rediker (b. 1951), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). The sailors, slaves, and commoners of the revolutionary Atlantic as one multi-ethnic working class, organizing across every line the authorities drew to divide them. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
• Hugh Tinker (1921 to 2000), A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (1974). How Britain moved more than a million indentured Indian workers to Mauritius, Natal, Fiji, and the Caribbean to replace the enslaved after abolition, and whether the contract they signed made them free. The category the room needs is the unfree waged worker. Tinker writes as a liberal anti-colonial historian, and his title thesis, that indenture was slavery renamed, is contested by later scholars who argue it erases the migrants’ own agency. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (Stanford University). Recovers the roughly 20,000 Chinese workers who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad, including their strike of 1867, among the largest of that century and absent from most accounts of it. The project works largely without the workers’ own written records, which is itself the lesson about whose labor history survives. Free: web.stanford.edu
• Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers (Marissa Aroy, 2014, 27 min). Larry Itliong and the Filipino farmworkers who walked out of the Delano vineyards in September 1965 and then asked Chavez’s mostly Mexican union to join them, which is how the UFW happened. The standard telling drops them. Made by a Filipina American documentarian recovering her own community’s history, affectionate toward the manongs and pointed about their erasure. Free on PBS: pbs.org

Labor outside the United States and Britain

Everything above happens in two countries. The pattern elsewhere is different in a way that matters: where the state was colonial or authoritarian, the labor question and the national question were the same question, and the strike was the thing that broke the regime.

• The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa (Tricontinental, 2023). A 44-page dossier on the wildcat strikes that pulled some 60,000 African workers out across more than 100 firms and revived a movement the apartheid state believed it had crushed, running from Durban to FOSATU to COSATU. The clearest short account of organizing where the union was effectively illegal. Tricontinental is an avowedly Marxist institute writing in a movement-building register, sympathetic to the South African Communist Party tradition. Free: thetricontinental.org
• Richard Hart (1906 to 2006), Labour Rebellions of the 1930s in the British Caribbean Region Colonies (2002). The strike wave from the St Kitts sugar workers in 1935 to the Jamaican rebellion of 1938, where colonial police killed dozens, and how those rebellions produced the region’s unions and its independence parties together. Hart was a Jamaican communist who helped build both, so he writes as a partisan of the strikers and insists on the word rebellion over riot. Free: libcom.org
• John D. French, Charisma’s Birth from the Bottom Up (2022). Twenty-five open-access pages on the strikes of 1978 to 1980 in the ABC industrial belt of Sao Paulo, where metalworkers led by a lathe operator named Lula defied a military dictatorship, built a union independent of the state, and founded a party. A case of shopfloor authority made from below rather than handed down. French is sympathetic to Lula and the PT. Free: cambridge.org

Primary sources

• William D. “Big Bill” Haywood (1869 to 1928), selected writings including The General Strike (1911). First-person sources from a founder of the IWW and the Western Federation of Miners, giving voice to revolutionary industrial unionism at its height. Free: marxists.org
• U.S. Congress, National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) (1935). The full statutory text that legalized collective bargaining and created the National Labor Relations Board. The essential document for understanding how labor law both protected and constrained the union form, and worth reading against Taft-Hartley (1947). Free: archives.gov

Films and documentaries

• “The Industrial Economy: Crash Course US History #23” (CrashCourse, John Green, 2013). Roughly 13 minutes, about 4 million views, the most-watched item across this theme. A fast survey of post-Civil-War industrialization, the Knights of Labor, the AFL, and early strikes. Mainstream framing, useful as a shared starting reference to then complicate. youtube.com/watch?v=r6tRp-zRUJs
• “The Wobblies: Iconic Film on the IWW Rereleased for May Day” (Democracy Now!, 2022). Roughly 17 minutes, about 54,000 views. A segment of clips and interviews on the Industrial Workers of the World and the repression it faced. A short entry to radical industrial unionism, best paired with the Haywood readings. youtube.com/watch?v=t0ruK6IQLWc

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Jeremy Baskin, Striking Back: A History of COSATU (1991). The full history of the federation that became the industrial wing of the fight against apartheid, and then governed alongside the ANC. Baskin was COSATU’s own information officer, so this is an insider account committed to the alliance, and best read knowing that. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Internationalist Communist Tendency, Solidarnosc: Trade Unionism or Self-Organisation? (2019). Argues the 1980 Polish mass strikes were a genuine workers’ self-organization that the Solidarity union then contained and disarmed. An openly left-communist polemic hostile to unions as a form; useful precisely because it puts that argument at its sharpest against the rest of this lens. Free: libcom.org
• Cornell University ILR School, Labor Studies research guide (Catherwood Library). The gateway to the largest labor archive in North America: finding aids, digitized collections, and where to look next. The place to start if a group wants to research its own local labor history. Free: guides.library.cornell.edu

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on Indian and South Asian labor history, which remains the thinnest area here, and on labor in the socialist states and in the Middle East, which this lens does not yet reach at all. Note also that China Labour Bulletin, long the standard source on Chinese labor, was forced to close in 2025 and its site is gone; a replacement source would be valuable.