Here's one for you: there seems to be such a lack of labor history in our culture. The population does not seem to understand how working people's groups fought and sacrificed for many of our contemporary social arrangements. So, in short, which historical works do you prefer to highlight labor history in the US (and/or the West)? Could you share some with us? Thanks, and love the blog!

By: vivian on domingo, fevereiro 08, 2015

First, thanks for the compliment! Okay, so I have to admit I have not done much reading up on labor history. So I can mostly direct you to the classic The Jungle — the author, Upton Sinclair, went and lived in the Chicago Lithuanian district for two years, and everything he wrote about was entirely true. The conditions in the killing factories, the rampant exploitation of workers, the disgusting frauds that were sold as “food” like milk that killed children and meat that was rotting so they sold it to poorer neighborhoods. And what America cared about was that their cattle might have tuberculosis. In fact, Americans got so angry about this that the FDA was created because of this book.

There’s also a relevent thread in /r/askhistorians, on why labor unions are not very strong in the US today. The big answer is that businesses painted them as not in Americans’ interests, the government helped.

Related post