ADDITIONAL STUDY MATERIALS

BOOKS

  • A curated set of books and media that illuminate the history, theory, and practice of working-class struggle, spotlighting key uprisings, organizing strategies, and movements that have reshaped labor in the United States.

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  • A sweeping people's history of American labor rebellion, tracing wildcat actions, mass strikes, and grassroots uprisings from the 19th century to the present. Brecher highlights how ordinary workers, not institutions, have driven transformative change.

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  • A groundbreaking study of Mexican American women who powered California’s food-processing industry. Ruiz documents their labor, community life, and the unions they built, revealing their central role in the fight for workplace justice between 1930 and 1950.

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  • A detailed account of the nationwide railroad strike of 1877, one of the first major mass uprisings of American industrial workers. The book chronicles how spontaneous worker revolt shook the nation and established the template for future labor struggles.

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  • Korstad examines the Tobacco Workers International Union Local 22 in North Carolina, where Black women workers led a pioneering movement that fused labor organizing with civil rights demands, reshaping southern labor and democratic politics in the mid-20th century.

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  • A contemporary portrait of labor revitalization, Blanc documents how rank-and-file, worker-to-worker organizing is powering historic wins across industries. The book offers a roadmap for rebuilding working-class power from the bottom up.

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  • A definitive history of the 1981 PATCO strike and the Reagan administration's response. McCartin uncovers how the defeat of the air traffic controllers reshaped American labor, politics, and employer power for decades to come.

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FILMS/VIDEOS

  • A landmark 1954 film based on the Empire Zinc strike, portraying Mexican American miners and the women who sustain the struggle. Made by blacklisted filmmakers, it remains one of the most politically significant labor films in U.S. history.

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  • A documentary tracing the transformation of the American labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the rise of industrial unionism and the mass organizing drives that reshaped the political landscape.

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  • A definitive documentary tracing the rise of the United Farm Workers and the leadership of César Chávez. Through archival footage and firsthand testimony, the film chronicles the organizing drives, strikes, boycotts, and community-led campaigns that reshaped farm labor and advanced a broader movement for dignity and civil rights.

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  • On the Line interviewed Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Fight Attendants (AFA-CWA). As one of the leading progressive labor voices in the country, Sara has pushed the labor movement to respond to the attacks by the Trump administration on the working class during his first administration and again today. Sara spoke to us about what she has learned from nearly three decades in the labor movement and what she sees as our path forward today.

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  • On the Line interviewed Jimmy Williams Jr, the General President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT). In this moment of political upheaval and attacks on the working class, Jimmy has been outspoken about the need to organize and fight back to defend our immigrant communities, to defend free speech, and to defend the labor movement. The political leadership of the Democratic party has failed to build any real resistance. The labor movement must step up to lead working class resistance to the billionaire agenda.

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  • In this episode, we're On the Line with Taher Dahleh, member of CWA local 1109 and organizer with PYM, and Yajaira Cuapio, School Social Worker in SFUSD and Executive Board Rep for UESF to discuss the connection between Palestine organizing and the workplace struggle.

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  • In this episode, we're On the Line with Naomi Harris, Waffle House worker and founding member of USSW, and Quichelle Liggins, 13 year Hyundai worker in Alabama. We had the opportunity to interview Naomi and Quichelle at the Labor Notes 2024 conference, discussing how southern workers are fighting back from the service industry to auto.

    Check it out here.

COURSE GLOSSARY

STRIKES AND MOVEMENTS

  • A nationwide U.S. strike by railroad workers in July 1877 triggered by wage cuts and poor working conditions. It spread across multiple states, involved tens of thousands of workers, and was violently suppressed by state and federal troops. It reached its highest sophistication in St. Louis where the strike expanded to a general strike across the city.

  • A citywide, interracial general strike in New Orleans in November 1892 involving roughly 30,000 workers across industries. Workers shut down the city to demand union recognition, better wages, and the eight-hour day, becoming one of the most significant multiracial labor actions in U.S. history.

  •  A reference to the cluster of large U.S. strikes and labor unrest in 1934 - including the West Coast waterfront strike, the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and other industrial actions - signaling a major upsurge in working-class militancy during the Great Depression.

  • A major U.S. strike by longshoremen and maritime workers from May to July 1934 on the West Coast, lasting about 83 days, involving mass work stoppages in ports, violent clashes with police and National Guard, and eventually recognition of the unions. As the strike went on, it led to the general strike in San Francisco that year.

  • A mass mobilization planned by A. Philip Randolph and Black labor leaders to protest segregation in defense industries and the military. The march was called off after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802.

  • A massive post–World War II wave of strikes involving millions of workers demanding higher wages and better conditions after wartime wage suppression. Industries hit included auto, steel, coal, electrical, and meatpacking.

  • A series of nationwide boycotts, strikes, and marches leading up to a national day of action on May 1st protesting proposed anti-immigrant legislation. Millions of people participated by not working, not shopping, and skipping school to show the economic power of immigrants and demand reform.

  •  A series of strikes and walkouts by teachers and school staff in the U.S. during the 2010s, protesting low pay, deteriorating working conditions, and minimal school funding. They reinvigorated the educator labor movement’s militancy by combining with student and family organizing for shared demands to improve working and learning conditions.

  • A five-day violent confrontation in May 1934 in Toledo, Ohio during the strike at the Auto-Lite (Automotive Lite) plant, where workers clashed with National Guard/private forces and the state, resulting in fatalities and injuries. Thousands of unemployed workers supported the strike and defended them from attacks.

  • The name given to July 5, 1934 during the West Coast waterfront strike when police in San Francisco shot and killed longshoremen, escalating the conflict in the strike.

  • A 1950–52 strike led by Mexican American miners in New Mexico against discriminatory wages and living conditions at the Empire Zinc Company. The struggle is remembered for the pivotal leadership of miners’ wives and for inspiring the film Salt of the Earth.

  • The 1936–37 Flint Sit-Down Strike saw General Motors workers occupy factories to prevent the company from breaking their union effort. Their victory helped establish the United Auto Workers (UAW) as a major force in U.S. labor.

  • W.E.B. Du Bois’s term for the mass withdrawal of labor by enslaved people during the Civil War, who fled plantations, sabotaged the slave economy, and aligned with Union forces – functionally crippling the Confederacy.

  • The Haymarket Affair was a labor protest on May 4, 1886 in Chicago for the eight-hour day that turned violent after a bomb was thrown and police fired on demonstrators. May Day (International Workers’ Day) commemorates labor activism worldwide, including the events of 1886, which was a year of massive uprisings.

  • A post-World War II campaign led by the CIO to organize industrial workers in the South. It largely failed due to racist divisions, employer repression, and the emerging Cold War/anti-communist climate.

  • A strike by the federal workers’ union Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization on August 3, 1981, seeking better working conditions, shorter work-weeks and higher pay. The strike was declared illegal by President Reagan, who then fired all striking workers.

  • A series of labor conflicts in the coalfields of West Virginia (1912–1921), including the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strikes and the Battle of Blair Mountain, where miners confronted coal operators’ private armies and state forces.

  • A series of military campaigns from 1876 to 1877 between the U.S. government and allied Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne tribes, triggered in part by U.S. desires to take the Black Hills for gold and treaty violations by settlers and the government.

PEOPLE

  • A Black labor leader and civil rights organizer, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a key strategist and organizer in the Civil Rights Movement, including as a leader of the March on Washington movements.

  • An enslaved man who escaped bondage, became a Union spy, organizer, and political leader during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and helped mobilize Black political participation in North Carolina.

  • A Black lawyer, judge, and Congressman known for defending labor activists and political prisoners, including victims of COINTELPRO-era repression, and for his civil rights advocacy.

  • A Black communist theorist and organizer, central to formulating the “Black Belt Nation” thesis and influential in Communist Party approaches to Black liberation and self-determination.Item description

  • An American industrialist (1831-1881) who was President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, influential in the expansion of railroads, corporate consolidation, capitalist enterprise, and labor-management relations in the late 19th-century United States.

  • A Black sociologist, historian, socialist, and co-founder of the NAACP. His work Black Reconstruction transformed the understanding of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

TERMS

  • A major anti-labor law that restricted union power, outlawed certain kinds of strikes and solidarity actions, required labor leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits, enabled “right-to-work” laws, and allowed government intervention in labor disputes.

  • A socio-regional area within the South that represents both an area with naturally fertile soil and also one with a high concentration of Black people, both historically and contemporarily.

  • The theory developed by Harry Haywood that African Americans are a historically oppressed group in the United States, especially within the Black Belt region of the South. Forged by the shared history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and brutal sharecropping exploitation, the Black population in the U.S. has been treated as an internal colony. Haywood places the Black freedom struggle as central to the broader class struggle in the U.S..

  • A 1941 order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries and government employment, establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

  • The federal committee created by EO 8802 to investigate and prevent racial discrimination in war-related employment. It was the first federal civil rights agency since Reconstruction.

  • A U.S. federal law enacted in 1938 that establishes a minimum wage, mandates overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a week, sets age-limits and working-conditions rules for young workers, and requires record-keeping by employers. Passed in response to the mass labor movement of the 1930s.

  • An informal agreement resolving the disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, in which Hayes was awarded the presidency in return for the removal of federal troops from the South. This effectively ended the Reconstruction era.

  • A left-leaning industrial union representing miners, smelter workers, and metal workers across the U.S. and Canada. It became known for organizing multiracial workforces and resisting employer and government anti-communist repression.

  •  Founded in 1869, a major U.S. labor organisation that aimed to include skilled and unskilled workers across industries and racial lines, advocated the eight-hour day, opposed child labor, and sought broad economic reforms via collective action. They played a critical role calling for the general strike actions in 1886 for the eight-hour day.

  • The movement of workers organizing on the basis of their shared experience in the same workplace or industry. Most commonly understood as those in unions or organizing unions. Unions are the most basic form of the organization of workers.

  • In the late 19th century in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields, a group of Irish-American miners known as the Molly Maguires were accused of violence and murder. The investigation refers to the Pinkerton and state prosecutions of these miners in the 1870s.

  • The 1932 Norris–LaGuardia Act restricted federal courts from issuing injunctions against strikes, picketing, and other labor actions. It also protected workers from “yellow-dog contracts,” which forced them to promise not to join a union.

  • A term describing how northern liberals, unions, or political forces often ignore or underestimate the strategic centrality of the U.S. South – particularly its racial order and labor system – in shaping national politics and working-class power.

  •  The period circa 1865–1877 in U.S. history following the Civil War during which the federal government sought to rebuild the South, integrate formerly enslaved people into civic life, and restructure labor and land systems.

  • A multiracial union founded in Arkansas in 1934 that organized tenant farmers and sharecroppers against exploitation by landlords and New Deal exclusion.

  • The percentage of the workforce that is represented by a union.

  • During Reconstruction, a network of political clubs that mobilized militias of formerly enslaved people, performed political education, and defended communities against white supremacist violence.

  • The 1935 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) established workers’ legal right to form unions, bargain collectively, and engage in concerted activity. It also created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce these rights.