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Civil Workers, Uncivil Problem: The 1934 Civil Works Administration Strike in Utica, New York
The history of the labor movement in the Mohawk Valley is an extremely rich yet untapped field. This is not to say that there’s no labor historiography of the region, but it seems lacking compared to other areas of New York. Utica itself has experienced or been adjacently involved with a number of strikes since […]
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How the Mohawk Valley Popularized a Brutal Method of Strikebreaking

Labor unrest has been a part of history for generations. Some sources even point to the first ever recorded strike taking place in 1170 BCE Egyptover delays in receiving building materials. With the emergence of organized labor, it was a dialectical inevitability that the bourgeois class would take on their own efforts to undermine the […]
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How Donald Trump Worked to Destroy America’s Labor Unions

Although Donald Trump has been eager to garner support from American labor unions for his re- election campaign, there are lots of reasons he’s not going to get it. Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement. During his decades as a wealthy businessman, Trump clashed with unions repeatedly. And, upon […]
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One Big Union

When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW aka The Wobblies) was established in 1905, their goal was to see One Big Union formed in the USA. The Wobblies came from the socialist Western Federation of Miners organization led by William D Haywood. Up to that point the major union organization at the time was […]
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May Day Resurrected
Another May Day has come and gone, and most Americans never noticed. It wasn’t always like this. In decades past, thousands of workers of different ages, ethnicities and genders celebrated the first of May by marching in support of worker rights. Workers traditionally wore red on May Day to show unity in their struggle against […]