labor history 
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/26/2021
The Deep South Has a Rich History of Resistance, as Amazon Is Learning
Columnist Jamelle Bouie draws on the work of historians Michael W. Fitzgerald, Paul Horton, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Robert Widell, Jr. which shows that Alabamians, and Black Alabamians in particular, have organized to fight both racial oppression and labor exploitation.
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SOURCE: Talking Points Memo
2/1/2021
Why Biden’s Forceful Endorsement Of Labor Is The Strongest From A POTUS In Decades
Labor historians Karen Sawislak and Erik Loomis discuss how Joe Biden's endorsement of freedom of workers to form a union (without mentioning Amazon in particular) goes against decades-long trends in the political power and cultural esteem of labor unions.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
2/23/2021
'We Deserve More': An Amazon Warehouse’s High-Stakes Union Drive
Historians Joseph McCartin, Michael Innis Jiménez, and Kerri Leigh Merritt discuss the historic union drive at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama center and where it fits in the history of labor and civil rights in the south.
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2/21/2021
From Red Finn Halls to The Lincoln Brigade: Class Formation on Washington’s “Red Coast”
by Jerry Lembcke
If the current crisis revives interest in class as an analytical concept, a recent book on union organizing on the Washington state coast offers a model for reconstructing the work, community and social life of a community.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/10/2021
Curt Flood Belongs in the Hall of Fame
Sportswriter Jemele Hill makes the case for Curt Flood as an advocate for the labor rights of ballplayers and especially the right of players of color to be paid for their skill, even at the cost of being blackballed from the game.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/8/2021
The Alabama Town That Could Defeat Jeff Bezos
The industrial suburb of Bessemer has a long history as a rare center of union activity in the South and now is the focal point of an effort to organize Amazon's warehouse workers. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who has written about interracial labor militancy in Alabama, gives context.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/29/2021
Amazon’s Cynical, Anti-Union Attack on Mail Voting
by Craig Becker and Amy Dru Stanley
Even before the pandemic, forcing unionization elections to be held at the workplace was the equivalent of holding a political election at one party's headquarters. Workplace democracy requires allowing workers to vote by mail to decide whether to be represented by a union.
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
2/1/2021
The Forgotten History of Wyoming’s Black Miners
African Americans were an important, but largely forgotten, presence in the mining industry of the far west, a story that connects race, national expansion, and labor politics in the Gilded Age.
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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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