March 8 is International Women's Day, launched a century ago by the international workers' movement. To mark the occasion, the UE NEWS asked labor historian Rosemary Feurer to write about the legendary labor organizer Mother Jones. Feurer teaches at Northern Illinois University and is the author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950, (published 2006) an excellent history of UE District 8.
|
Since the founding of the United States, working people have had to fight to win, and to keep, the right to vote. And through American history, rich and powerful people, often calling themselves "conservatives", have tried to maintain their privileges by depriving other Americans of the right to vote.
|
July 4 is the birthday of the United States, the date when the Continental Congress adopted a Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, which turned an ongoing revolt against Britain's oppressive policies into an anti-colonial and anti-monarchical revolution.
Dave Roediger is a labor historian who, over the past 20 years and with other scholars, has plowed new ground in an area of social and historical inquiry that is sometimes called race studies or "whiteness" studies. Roediger's roots are in a small German-American working class community in Southern Illinois.
Robin D. G. Kelley, age 48, has over the past two decades become one of the most respected historians of African American life, politics and culture. At the center of all his work is a focus on labor, and on the ways people have struggled not only to survive, but to make a better world.
For the past three decades, the conventional wisdom in much of the labor movement has been that all of our present troubles started when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981 and broke their union.
British Petroleum, the company responsible for the worst single-source environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, has over its 100-year history caused a number of environmental and workplace disasters. But the harm BP has caused goes further. In the early 1950s, BP and the British government convinced the U.S. to overthrow the democratic government of Iran – an action that has had disastrous consequences for Iran, the U.S., and the Middle East to this day.
March each year is Women’s History Month, so this is a good time to reflect on the contributions that UE women have made to their union and to the long, continuing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.
Some were murdered. Many were brutalized, many more jailed. Young and old braved police dogs, water cannons and batons, the jeers and stones of mobs, the bullets of snipers. But despite the odds, thousands of Americans, black and white, tore down the oppressive system of racial segregation that had dominated the South for decades.
This timeline was originally published as a companion piece to the UE News Feature "People In Struggle Changed History: The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s"
UE becomes the first American union to seek no-discrimination provisions in all contracts.
UE launches national campaign for laws against poll taxes and lynching.