Sites organized Topically

Capitalism
Radicals and Labor
Repression
Hierarchy in the Workplace
Shorter Hours
Labor Day/May Day
Occupational Safety and Health
Construction Trades
Women at Work and in the Labor Movement
African-Americans, Labor and Race

Note: there are a number of topical listings within the chronological page on this site.
Here is a list of some topics available there, within specific chroonological time frames.
Native American Labor
Indentured Servants
Slave Labor
Asian Labor (and reaction to) in the late 19th century
U.S. Sweatshops/Child Labor late 19th-early 20th
Miners and mine strikes
Labor and Religion in 19th century
Radicals of the Early 20th century labor movement
Global Labor

I will have more topical listings on this page in the future

Capitalism

The system, simplified:

Thanks to Steven Barleen for recommending this. Click picture to order

Radicals

Primary Sources /Bibliography

• Early American Marxism, 1864-1946 thousands of pages of documents, lots related to labor struggles
• Marxist Internet Archive includes Marxism and Labor Organization
• Mark Lause's list of 19th century on-line books on labor and radicalism
• Tamiment Reference Sources for US radicalism
• Michigan State University sources on US radicalism -digitized
• Exhibit of Radical Children's Literature Syracuse University
• Haymarket materials in Chronological page
• Anarchist Pamphlets from the Labadie Collection
• Dead Anarchists site some writings on labor available
• Labor and Radical Papers of the Pacific Northwest
• The Masses On-Line
• Debs Collection at Indiana State University -many documents have been digitized
• Social Democracy Red Book, 1900 -entire book
• Declaration of the Brewery Workmen, 1903 (pdf)– influence of late 19th century radical ideas on AFL unions
• Class Ceiling by Scott Nearing: death vs. class mobility would a worker be more likely to die than to get into management?
• Speech by Eugene Debs “Monstrous System of capitalism”
• Debs Collection at Indiana State --access to primary sources
• Socialist Party Platform, 1912 (pdf)
• How I became a socialist agitator – Kate Richards O’Hare see also: 1915: Booze and Revolution
• War of the Classes--how I became a socialist—by Jack London (the famous author of Call of the Wild and White Fang
• The Question of the Maximum by Jack London
• Excerpt from Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore (pdf)

Industrial Workers of the World  (see chronological page as well)   

• Jim Crutchfield's site -an amazingly site, with many many primary sources. These include s views of the IWW by outsiders
• IWW site - even more wonderful materials from their library
• Memories of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl” (speaking at Northern Illinois University in 1962)  
• Sabotage, by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
• Why I am A Member of the IWW
• 19 documents from the IWW  from Michigan State University website
• Trial of Big Bill Haywood, 1907
• Bill Haywood, The General Strike (1911)
• Lucy Parsons, Knights of Labor activist and anarchist, became a member of the IWW
• Lucy Parsons, 1853-1942 — Industrial Workers of the World leader
• Lucy Parsons (1853-1942): The Life of an Anarchist Labor Organizer — by Joe Lowndes, Free Society
• The Lucy Parsons Project  Links to articles and primary documents about Parsons
• Life of Albert Parsons by Lucy Parsons (1889-entire book)
• Ben Fletcher – the renowned African-American Wobbly Organizer
• Emma Goldman
• THE LIFE AND TIMES OF EMMA GOLDMAN  A Curriculum for Middle and High School Students  (free speech fights)
• When Toil Meant Trouble: Butte's Labor Heritage IWW Frank Little
• Holt Labor Library site on the Bread and Roses strike —has poem, numerous links, bibliography
• Camella Teoli Testifies about the 1912 LawrenceTextile Strike
• The Paterson Strike Pageant Program
• Eight Hours in the Forenoon, Eight Hours in the Afternoon”: An IWW Organizer Describes the Horrors of Rural Work
•  Hunter bear’s reflections on Little
• More Old Time Wobbly Stuff by Hunter gray
• Hunter Bear’s perspective on the Wobblies influence
• T-Bone Slim Pens “The Lumberjack’s Prayer”
• Historical background to the Everett Massacre, 1916 (free speech fight, repression)
• Socialist Songbook

Repression then and now

•  Freedom of Information site of the FBI. Declassified FBI records, many labor-oriented
• Use of the Illinois National Guard in Labor Conflicts
• From Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America  (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22. (doc file)
• Pinkerton Labor Spy (1907, entire book) by Morris --expose' of sabotaging of Colorado labor unions
• Coming soon
• The Confessions of Harry Orchard (1907, entire book)Under threat of death, Harry Orchard "confessed" to Pinkerton agents that the Western Federation of Miners had assassinated the former Idaho governor. This is the well-distributed result.
• Bill Millikan on the Citizens' Alliance of Minneapolis- early 20th through 1930s(see also section on 1934 strike-scroll down)
• The CIA in St. Louis (large pdf) see also section of Radical Unionism website
• Bethlehem Mines Corp. Police Department Report 1926
• Thugs for Hire: Ads for Security Guards
• Plugging the Leaks: A Specialist Spies on Union Activities, 1903
• Union-Busting at Cripple Creek
• Pride and Joy: Specialists in Breaking Strikes, 1917
• “I Was Not Wanted Any Longer”: A Retail Worker Joins the Union in 1914 and Gets Fired
• Pinkertons in the Couer d’Alene Uprising of 1892
• strike breaker number one (article on Pearl Berghoff 1930s strikebreaker)
• Rosemary Feurer, "Union City, Company Towns" (essay, pdf) includes seminal role of A.A. Ahner Agency in midwest in 1930s
• Section of Radical Unionism material about spies and agents at community level in 1930s, and the Mohawk Valley Formula
• New name, same mission: Employer's Association continues the anti-union work of its predecessor, the Citizen's Alliance By Bill Millikan
• Bustin' unions: Under ‘Crape-Hanger’ Davidson, businesses perfected ways to crush workers (Minneapolis)
• The Labor Spy Racket by Leo Huberman (entire book for download- follow link to pdf file)
• The 1983 Morenci Mine Strike 
• Private Police: Armed & Dangerous Covert Action Quarterly on the reemergence of goon squads UNFAIR ADVANTAGE  Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards by Human Rights Watch, 2000
• Kate Bronfenbrenner No Holds Barred (2009 report) The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing
• Annual Survey of violations of trade union rights

Ads from a St. Louis business journal

Members of the St. Louis Posse Comitatus in the 1900 streetcar strike, organized by the St. Louis businessmen's Citizen's Industrial Alliance. (large pdf file)

Special Response Corporation Guards Taping locked out Celanese workers at the plant gates, Meredosia, Illinois, 2005. SRC's owners in Meredosia videotapes children outside the homes of locked out workers to raise the tensions of workers, in a common tactic used--provoke violence in order to get stronger injunctions

Shorter hours & unemployment

IWW Poster, date unknown

• References for shorters hours and American Labor history
• The Labor Project for Working Families - advocacy and policy organization providing technical assistance, resources, and education to unions and union members on family issues in the workplace including: Childcare, Elder care, Family leave, Work hours, Quality of life.
• Shorter Work Time Group U.S. based group
• Unemployment and the Machine IWW pamphlet (1934)

Women at Work and In the Labor Movement 

• Reference sources for Women and Labor
• WORKING WOMEN'S HISTORY PROJECT
• Women Working 1800-1939 provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including 7,500 pages of manuscripts
  • 3,500 books and pamphlets 1,200 photographs"
• Alexander Street site for women social movements history, has numerous documents and lesson plan ideas ; this is the list of materials available chronologically some of these, such as How Did the Perceived Threat of Socialism Shape the Relationship between Workers and their Allies in the New York City Shirtwaist Strike, 1909-1910? are restricted to subscription access only, through a university. Sometimes the site allows free access-inquire.
• Women workers in Industry, from the University of Pittsburgh --documents 20th century examples, including Fannie Sellins
• Women Pioneers in American Memory: On the Job

• What the pay gap costs families: Equal pay has been the law since 1963, but the reality has not caught up with the law
• Gender Pay Gap by Occupation 
• Gender Gap of Earnings    Navigate to about midway through the webpage, go to Race and Sex, then see paragraph and charts beginning with “News on the Gender Gap”  and through to the end of that section on women. The source of the information is at the bottom of the page

Some documents: see others in chronology page

•    Women as Bread Winners—the Error of the Age” An AFL spokesman presents an argument against women as workers, 1897
• Hours and Conditions of Mercantile Jobs for Women, Indiana, 1914 (entire book)
• Report on conditions of women and children in 19 volumes, 1912-1916 (entire book/volume; other selected volumes slowly becoming digitized)
• Beyond Bed Pans: The Life of a Late 19th-century Young Nurse
• A Separate Peace: Alice Henry on Women and Unions  (1915)
• Dissatisfied With the Lives They Live: Farm Women Describe Their Work in a 1913 U.S. Department of Agriculture Report
• Housewives in Uniform: Domesticity as Military Duty (WWI)
• “Sadie’s Servant Room Blues”: 1920s Domestic Work in Song
• “Experiences of a ’Hired Girl’”: An Early Twentieth-Century Domestic Worker Speaks Out
• “When the Whistle Blows . . . I Come Home and Get Supper”: Women and Work in the Interwar Years
• U.S. Labor And Industrial History World Wide Web Audio Archive  including UE’s Nathan Spero who argued for comparable worth for women in the 1940s, Teach In with the Labor Movement (1997), Sam Darcy
• Rosie the Riveter: Real Women Workers in World War II
• WORKING WOMEN'S HISTORY PROJECT – documents from the 1970s about work, organizing
• Mr. Smith, Take a Memo from Womankind (1971) The intensely sexist world of clerical work as told by an insider.
• Cleaning Up from Womankind (1972.) A first person account from a City Hall janitress about her fight against race and gender discrimination.
  On Being a Waitress from Womankind (1972) An experienced waitress explains what it is like to serve your food. Not always an appetizing job.
• “I Climbed Poles, I Ran Cable, I Ran a Jackhammer:”  Faith Robinson Describes Harassment On the Job

• Lillian Roberts Describes Organizing Hospital Workers in New York City, 1960s-70s
• Debating the Equal Pay Act of 1963
• “All Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths”: Gloria Steinem Delineates American Gender Myths during ERA Hearings (1970)
• Explanation for why the pay gap existed in 1970, ==very good on the pay gap and limited job opportunities for women, including African American Women
•  Two Labor Union Officials Voice Opposition to the  ERA, 1970
• “The Bottom of the Economic Totem Pole”: African-American Women in the Workplace 1970 Congressional Testimony
• Women on Welfare -- 'Having babies for profit is a lie that only men could make up." Johnnie Tillmon testimony, 1971.
• Joey’s problem  --Sociologist Arlie Hochschild examined the way that problems that seem personal in nature often are derived from general political and social inequities that remain unexamined. In her book, the Second Shift, (1993) she suggested that work structures make life a battleground or a field of resignations
• Lots more links are in the chronology page, but this will be updated as well

African-American Labor History—20th century

• African-American Labor History  --lots of links, chronologies, booklists, video lists, some primary documents
• Black Worker resources
• Workplace Toxins and African Americans
• Still Cookin by The Fireside: African-Americans in Food Service
• A. Philip Randolph, 1889-1979 on-line exhibit
• Black History –slide show from the California Federation of Teachers, slide show
• Black Workers Remember by Jacquelyn Jones, article in the American Prospect
• Behind the Veil African American Life in the Jim Crow South
• The Power of Remembering: Black Factory Workers and Union Organizing in the Jim Crow Era — by Michael Honey, Organization of American Historians, 3/13/2001
• I AM A MAN : An Exhibit Honoring the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike
• National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis 1968 garbage strike
• Race and Money—statistics of income and jobs

  Documents

• A Black Migrant Recalls Life in Philadelphia
• Digging for Answers: A Black Miner Ponders Racism, 1891
• The Sayings of Henry Stephens Carl Sandburg, 1917 (pdf)black miner in Springfield Illinois
• Selected documents from the Gompers papers --contains some on black workers
• “Can I Scrub Your White Marble Steps?”
• We Are Literally Slaves”: An Early Twentieth-Century Black Nanny Sets the Record Straight
• Industrial Conditions Among Negro Men in Boston by John Daniels, Charities (Oct. 7, 1905). (to be posted)
• The Negro in Times of Industrial Unrest in 3 labor strikes in Chicago 1900-1905, by R. R. Wright, Charities (Oct. 7, 1905). (to be posted)
• “Drug Him Through the Street”: Hughsey Childes Describes Turn-of-the-Century Sharecropping
• “Still Livin’ Under the Bonds of Slavery”: Minnie Whitney Describes Sharecropping at the Turn-of-the-Century
• AMERICAN NEGRO PROBLEMSWorkers Library Publishers originally published this pamphlet, an arm of the Communist Party. This pamphlet is quite scarce in the original.
• The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the CIO—perspective by Bill Fletcher
• "The Bottom of the Economic Totem Pole": African American Women in the Workplace (1960s)

  Members of the National Negro Labor Council protest Sears' refusal to hire African-American women as clerks.   The 9 month protest resulted in victory, 1953. See (pdf)

• We Remember—website about the 1968 Memphis garbage workers strike; few people recognize that when King was killed, he was supporting garbage truck drivers in a strike. This was in the midst of his poor people’s movement, a movement designed to unite poor people of all colors
• The Poor People’s Movement—oral history  memories of King’s poor people’s movement, designed to unite people—incredible, heartbreaking
• We Must Destroy the Capitalist System that Enslaves us: Stokely Carmichael advocates black Revolution
• Excerpts from the Kerner Commission on Civil Unrest and the relationship between economic deprivation and urban uprisings. Powerful report, unfortunately, this was never acted upon
• Kerner Commission Report on Civil Unrest: The American Dream does not exist for All people another excerpt
• Moving Beyond the Notion of the “Black Rioter”— the reality of institutionalized racism in jobs and education. Powerful
• King's last speech in Memphis (Mountaintop speech);
• League of Revolutionary Black Workers — by A.Muhammad Ahmad. African-American labor organization formed in Detroit in the 1960s
• Steelworkers vs. Weber - On the affirmative action lawsuit that ended discrimination against African-Americans in the steel mills
• Ten Myths about Affirmative Action—one of the most polarizing issues of the era was based on much mythology
• “The White Man’s Law”: African-American Migrant Workers Tell Congress Their Version of a Strike, 1970
• Women on Welfare -- (pdf) 'Having babies for profit is a lie that only men could make up." Johnnie Tillmon testimony, 1971.