Some content or functionality may be temporarily unavailable.
Digital Collections website upgrade in process
Labor
Collecting Area
Includes historical records and personal papers related to labor and social justice movements in America from the late 19th century to today, including a large collection of photographs, audio recordings, video, posters, and artifacts.
Digital Collections
The Advancing Workers Rights Project
The Advancing Workers Rights Project: Digitizing the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department Records, a collaboration between Georgia State University and UMD, this project provides new insights into the intersection of the civil rights and labor movements, both nationally and in the South. It offers online access to over 100,000 selected digitized pages of text, photographs, audio recordings and films documenting the civil rights work of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 1943-1999.
Item types: documents and photographs
Digital Collection: Labor in America
This online database contains over 1500 digitized individual documents, photographs and artifacts from the Labor and Social Justice Collections. It includes protest newsletters, flyers, photographs, posters and buttons related to various social justice movements.
Item types: documents and photographs
Labor Film and Video Material
The labor collection includes film and video material from the AFL-CIO records and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
Item types: video recordings
Other Resources
For Liberty, Justice, and Equality
For Liberty, Justice, and Equality: Unions Making History in America Online Exhibit provides an overview of the UMD Labor and Social Justice Collections, including over 100 examples of digitized text, photographs and videos covering over a century of organized labor’s intersection with social justice movements for civil rights, women’s equality, immigrant rights, religious freedom, LGBTQ liberation and environmental justice.
Labor and Social Justice Collection Guides
This browse list contains over 120 collection guides to historical records, papers, and audiovisual materials in the Labor and Social Justice Collections, including some selected digitized material. Of note are guides to the historical records of the Civil Rights, Legislative, Political Education, International Affairs, and Organizing (unions) Departments of the national AFL-CIO, Pride at Work, the environmentalists Anthony Wayne Smith and Joseph Uehlein, and the Tobacco, Bakery, Carpenters and Shipbuilding unions.
Labor and Social Justice YouTube Playlist
This YouTube playlist, under the title George Meany Labor Archive, includes links to over 38 films and auto recordings related to the labor movement’s perspective on civil rights, women’s equality, farmworkers’ organization, international solidarity, LGBTQ rights, environmental protection, health care, and public education.
Historic Labor Newspapers
The Carpenter Magazine, 1881-1988
Published by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the digitized Carpenter Magazine provides a searchable and downloadable chronological database documenting over a century of one of the most important skilled building trades unions in America.
AFL-CIO News, 1956-1996
Published by the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the digitized AFL-CIO News provides a searchable and downloadable chronological database documenting the first 40 years of the labor federation’s work to unionize the entire American working class, particularly by opposing discrimination and organizing the public sector.
The CIO News, 1937-1955
Published by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the digitized CIO News provides a searchable and downloadable chronological database documenting the history of the federation of unions who organized the American industrial workforce.