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Labor history is an important social studies topic often neglected in both textbooks and classrooms. We argue for the importance of including labor history in social studies and for the unique value of editorial cartoons as an educational resource to meet the challenge of making labor history relevant and engaging to students. Editorial cartoons are a unique form of visual rhetoric. To understand the meanings contemporary readers would have made from the cartoons, students need to engage both visual and written symbols that were current at the time of publication. These efforts help develop essential historical thinking skills by bridging semiotic gaps that impede meaningful understandings of history. A critical analysis of labor-related editorial cartoons not only helps students understand labor history, but also develops the skill of analyzing visual rhetoric, an invaluable tool for civic life in an information society saturated with images designed to persuade. Additionally, political cartoons that illustrate issues of exploitation, marginalization, and oppression provide unique and engaging points of entry for classroom discussions about issues of social justice, particularly as it relates to labor. To aid practicing social studies teachers, this article includes specific pedagogical approaches, resources, and examples of labor-related editorial cartoons that social studies teachers can introduce into their classrooms.

John Andrews Fitch spent a year studying labor conditions in the steel industry around Pittsburgh during 1907 and 1908. The results of his research became The Steel Workers, one of six volumes in the Pittsburgh Survey, a groundbreaking 1910 analysis of conditions faced by working people in a modern industrial city. Introducing his discussion of common employment practices in the steel industry, Fitch declared, “A repressive regime…has served since the destruction of unionism, to keep the employers in the saddle.” He traced the origins of management’s arbitrary power to the Homestead lockout of 1892, when Carnegie Steel destroyed the last stronghold of organized labor in the mills of western Pennsylvania. During his stay in Pittsburgh, Fitch saw the results of fifteen years of management domination. “The steel worker,” he wrote, “sees on every side evidence of an irresistible power, baffling and intangible. It fixes the conditions of his employment; it tells him what wages he may expect to receive and where and when he must work. If he protests, he is either ignored or rebuked. If he talks it over with his fellow workmen, he is likely to be discharged” (Fitch, 1989, pp. 206, 232–233).

Chester Whitney Wright (1879–1966) received his A.B. in 1901, A.M. in 1902 and Ph.D. in 1906, all from Harvard University. After teaching at Cornell University during 1906–1907, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1944. Wright was the author of Economic History of the United States (1941, 1949); editor of Economic Problems of War and Its Aftermath (1942), to which he contributed a chapter on economic lessons from previous wars, and other chapters were authored by John U. Nef (war and the early industrial revolution) and by Frank H. Knight (the war and the crisis of individualism); and co-editor of Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics (1913). Wright’s Wool-Growing and the Tariff received the David Ames Wells Prize for 1907–1908, and was volume 5 in the Harvard Economic Studies. I am indebted to Holly Flynn for assistance in preparing Wright’s biography and in tracking down incomplete references; to Marianne Johnson in preparing many tables and charts; and to F. Taylor Ostrander, as usual, for help in transcribing and proofreading.

This chapter uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Muller is typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours. However, this chapter argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place – the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon – the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. This chapter investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors – Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, this chapter offers an intersectional reading of Muller that incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

General strikes emerged as part of an industrial repertoire of collective action that included singular strikes. While individual strikes continue, the United States has not experienced a general strike since 1946. What conditions facilitated the selection of this tactic by American labor? Why did the general strike disappear from labor's tactical repertoire after 1946? These questions are answered through a sequential analysis of the emergence of four American general strikes beginning in 1877 through 1946. Through a repertoire of collective action lens, I identify general conditions that increased the probability of general strike emergence. These general conditions, however, were also present in cities that did not have general strikes. To move beyond general conditions, I look at how they informed the local histories and historically contingent events that resulted in the “snowball effect” through which general strikes emerged from singular ones. I propose that American general strikes disappeared after 1946 due to changes in conditions that produced the industrial repertoire of collective action, foremost, changes in patterns of state repression through the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.

To demonstrate that, at its core, Marx’s critical theory is not a critique of a mode of class exploitation that distorts modernity, undertaken from a standpoint that affirms labor, but rather one that uncovers and analyzes a unique form of social mediation and domination that structures modernity itself as a historically specific form of social life.

Critical reconstruction, interpretation, and application of Marx’s critique of political economy as developed in the Grundrisse and Capital, to the massive global transformations of the past four decades.

Marx’s critical analysis is well-suited to function as the foundation for a theory that systematically illuminates modern society in the 21st century. It is more conducive to grasping the contemporary world than traditional Marxism or most versions of post-Marxism.

The historical transformations of the past century suggest the central significance of a critique of capitalism for an adequate critical theory today. Such a critique must be capable of grasping the core of a social formation that is generative of a peculiar dynamic of identity and non-identity, of pointing beyond itself while reasserting itself. It indicates that the realization of the possibility of the abolition of proletarian labor is a necessary response to a deep structural crisis of capitalism.

David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning.

Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

This paper examines the labor policies of the United Typothetae of America (UTA) from its birth in 1887 through the late 1920s and argues that labor policy differences among its members (personified by two prominent New York City-based printing employers, Theodore DeVinne and Charles Francis) created a “house divided” that not only prevented it from creating and maintaining a unified labor policy but also ultimately led to its demise as an employers' association and reconstitution primarily as a trade association. It will do so by analyzing key episodes in the UTA's labor history to show how the two competing labor philosophies – DeVinne's absolute authority & independence and Francis's stability & order – interacted with industry conditions – intense price competition, a decentralized industry structure, proprietor autonomy, the relative power of unions, and economic conditions – to impact the UTA's labor policies and its institutional survival. The UTA's experience reveals the diversity of American employers' experiences as well as the challenges that they have faced when attempting to act collectively in the industrial relations arena. Moreover, recent IR research on employers' associations around the world also reveals that, as unions have declined in power, many also are shifting their focus away from labor relations to other member services.

In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

This paper aims to depict the pivotal role played by Rose Schneiderman and Frances Perkins in early twentieth-century labor and safety reform in the USA. The paper also examines the contributions made by these notable women through the lens of stakeholder theory and the feminist ethic of care.

The review process commenced with a comprehensive search for women in history who advocated labor and safety reform and campaigned for safer organizational practices in the workplace. History books, academic journals and newspaper articles, including writings from Schneiderman and Perkins, were the main sources used for this research endeavor.

Schneiderman and Perkins were both instrumental in playing a major role in fighting for labor and safety reform in the early twentieth century, albeit in different ways. Through their work, there was a heightened understanding of organizations’ duties and obligations to their stakeholders and, in particular, to their employees. They also embodied the feminist ethic of care by being attentive to the needs of others, accepting responsibility and demonstrating competence, while being responsive to their needs.

The influential women in management history are often given scant recognition or not recognized at all. This article highlights the contributions of two women who greatly impacted labor and safety through their struggle for the improvement of working conditions in the USA. The originality of this manuscript also lies in the ethical perspective in which it is grounded.