Labor, Work, and Organizing: 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?
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 PDF: bard.edu
- 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: archive.org
- Philip S. Foner, The Great Strikes 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: 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. Free to borrow: archive.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
Status
This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome, especially histories of labor outside the United States and Britain, of unwaged and enslaved labor, and of workers left out of the AFL craft-union story.