1934 International Longshoremen's Association and General Strikes of San Francisco
This collection consists of 544 modern prints made from original negatives held by The Bancroft Library. The negatives are part of the photograph archive of the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin newspaper photograph archive (BANC PIC 1959.010) and were taken by staff photographers of the newspaper.
Bunker Hill Labor History Collection
Correspondence documenting Bunker Hill's infiltration of Worker's Organizations during the upheaval of 1899-1901.
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
Centralia Massacre and the Industrial Workers of the World Collection
This collection of pamphlets, leaflets and letters, originally held by the now defunct I.W.W. Seattle Office, focuses on the Centralia Tragedy of 1919 in Centralia, Washington. The event is also known as the Armistice Day Riot and the Centralia Massacre, a term coined not largely adopted by the labor movement and social justice advocates because it suggest a one-sided confrontation, when in fact both sides were armed.
215 images including photographs, art work, oral histories and movies that help tell the story of the 1916 labor confrontation known as the Everett Massacre.
Everett Massacre Collection at the University of Washington (UW)
This collection, documenting labor's perspective of the 1916 Everett Massacre and its aftermath, currently holds 39 articles from the Seattle Union Record as well as 49 other items including pamphlets, fliers, hand- and typewritten works, postcards and a photograph.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Flint Sit-Down Strike
Oral histories of strike participants and their memories of what transpired.
Long-form oral history account of the 1936-37 strike in Flint, Michigan from one of its leaders.
Hart, Schaffner and Marx Labor Agreement Records 1919-1920: United Garment Worker's (UGW)
The records contain correspondence, grievance cases, and trade rulings.
Haymarket Affair Digital Collection
Digitized collection of trial documents, broadsides, photographs, prints and artifacts relating to the Haymarket Affair of 1886-1887.
The Dramas of Haymarket examines selected materials from the Chicago Historical Society's Haymarket Affair Digital Collection, an electronic archive of CHS's extraordinary Haymarket holdings. The Dramas of Haymarket itself is organized in the form of a drama, a tragedy in five Acts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Each of the seven parts consists of an interpretive essay and either three or four topical sections including visual materials, artifacts, documents, manuscripts, and many kinds of printed texts.
Herrin Massacre Investigation Proceedings
Only excerpts of the investigating committee’s proceedings have survived, on a microfilm whose provenance is unknown. Various sections of the proceedings have their own numeration system, and the microfilm does not provide information on the section/date to which the pages refer to. The digital files made available here were generated in exactly the same sequence as found in the microfilm. Each digital file consists of approximately 100 images of text, and should be read in sequence. Given the poor quality of the original, full-text searches are not always reliable.
SeaTac/Seattle Minimum Wage Project
In November, 2013, the small suburban city of SeaTac passed Proposition 1, authorizing a $15 minimum wage policy phased in over several years; after surviving a lawsuit filed by business groups, the policy went into effect in January, 2014. Six months later, the Seattle City Council, led by socialist council member Kshama Sawant and Mayor Ed Murray, expanded a similar $15 minimum wage policy to nearly 20,000 workers. These policy innovations arose from struggles by a broad coalition of labor unions and community partners around a host of issues concerning low wage workers’ rights in the years following the Occupy movement. Building on similar struggles for and by low wage workers around the nation, the victories in the Puget Sound catalyzed a proliferating array of campaigns to raise the minimum wage in many cities and states.
This digital web archive documents the stories of those involved, as supporters and opponents, in or affected by the struggles over a $15 minimum wage at SeaTac and in Seattle as well as the broader, ongoing effects and efforts at a national level.
The Homestead Strike: Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW)
In the summer of 1892, at the Homestead Steel Works in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a dispute between a labor union and the Carnegie Steel Company led to violent conflict. This primary source set uses illustrations, documents, and photographs to tell the story of the Homestead Strike.
I Am a Man: The Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike
In 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, the labor movement and the civil rights movement came together in a monumental struggle for human and public employee rights. On February 11, over 1,300 sanitation workers — nearly all were African American — went on strike demanding their basic rights to organize a union, to gain a living wage and to receive the respect and dignity due all working men and women. During the strike Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis to support the workers but was tragically assassinated. This exhibit explores the drama of this historic strike where marchers wore signs simply stating: I AM a Man.
Reporting the General Strike: Contemporary accounts of "The Nine Day Wonder"
Read more than 450 documents relating to the 1926 General Strike, including strike bulletins, transcripts of radio broadcasts and internal reports produced by the strike coordinator, the Trades Union Congress.
San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-1969
This site was created to bring all of the strike-related collections and resources in San Francisco State University’s Special Collections and Archives together in one place. Here you can view all of our digital collections arranged by format, listen to the oral histories of strike veterans, view the strike chronology through an online exhibit, and access finding aids and other resources.
This multimedia website explores the history and consequences of the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Below you will find original research articles, digitized newspaper articles and other important documents, photographs, and extensive bibliographic materials.
The Seattle General Strike of 1919, & its Aftermath
The University of Washington's digital collections include correspondence, manuscripts, ephemera, and photographs which illuminate Strong's career in connection with the labor movement in Seattle, and the Seattle general strike in particular.
The University of Washington makes available, in its digital collection of Vietnam War Era Ephemera, examples of posters, fliers, and pamphlets distributed in Seattle that advocated workers' rights. The primary emphasis of these documents is on the importance of boycotting non-union produce to support migrant farm workers, and the work of Cesar Chavez to organize these workers. Some materials focus on the use of the 1919 general strike as inspiration for activism, and on continued efforts by some groups to advocate for a more radical labor movement to oppose capitalism and the interests of corporations.
This gallery contains early imagery of organized labor, including strikes, demonstrations, organizing efforts, and other related events. Topics include the 1913-1914 Copper Country Strike.
Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia for the Pacific Northwest
This project assembles the most extensive online collection of materials about labor history for this, or any other, region. Here you will find detailed information and primary sources about key historical events, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the unemployed movements and labor crusades of the 1930s, farmworker campaigns from the 1930s to 1980s, timber worker unions, waterfront strikes, Filipino cannery worker unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the history-making WTO confrontation of 1999.
This site includes original sources on the fire held at the ILR School's Kheel Center, an archive of historical material on labor and industrial relations.
The documents, reports, cartoons and photographs shown in this section are a selection taken from the General Strike Collection in the TUC Library Collections held at the London Metropolitan University. The General Strike Collection comprises material collected by library staff in 1926 and includes TUC documents and bulletins, printed publications and newspapers from Britain and overseas.
The Uprising of '34 is a documentary film, released in 1995, that tells the story of the General Textile Strike from the perspective of those who experienced it firsthand. During the film's production, over 300 hours of interviews were conducted with former mill workers, their children and grandchildren, labor organizers, mill owners, and others who experienced or were affected by the strikes. The recorded interviews are held in Georgia State University Library's Special Collections and Archives.
World Trade Organization (WTO) Seattle Collection
The protests depicted in this collection took place between November 29, 1999 and December 3, 1999, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) held its ministerial meeting in Seattle. This collection of images was chosen to illustrate both the diversity of the protests and the mobilization efforts that brought so many activists to Seattle.