Primary Sources: The 1970s: Labor & Employment

"During the mid-twentieth century, the American Labor Movement reached a pinnacle of power and influence within society. The extent of labor's reach was often seen in its concerted efforts to secure better pay, better working conditions and reliable pensions for its members. This digital repository enables scholars to study broad trends in U.S. labor and industrial relations by providing access to original materials from a variety of authors, organizations and government agencies, which together provide a multi-disciplinary perspective on the life and times of the labor movement between 1945 and 1980. The collection includes original documents, pamphlets, company publications, union reports, student papers and theses, and is divided into five areas of focus: General Labor; Longshore Workers; Minority Workers; Older Workers; and Personnel Policies."

"ILHOP is the largest and longest-running, labor-focused oral history project in the world.
You can access more than 1,000 streaming audio files and interview transcripts through the University of Iowa’s Digital Library, or by visiting the State Historical Society of Iowa. "Description from https://www.iowalaborhistory.org/ilhop-1

NPR producer Felix Contreras conducted an interview with his father, Luis Contreras, about the elder Contreras' early life as a member of a migrant farm worker family.

"This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students."

"Georgia State University's Southern Labor Archives, established in 1971, is dedicated to collecting, preserving and making available the documentary heritage of Southern workers and their unions, as well as that of workers and unions having a historic relationship to the region. The largest accumulation of labor records in the Southeast, the Archives holdings include organizational records, pamphlets, periodicals, photographs, personal papers of labor leaders, oral histories, collective bargaining agreements, constitutions and bylaws, and convention proceedings from 1888 to the present."

"This collection presents 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in 1994. The documentary materials presented in this online collection explore how Paterson's industrial heritage expresses itself in Paterson: in its work sites, work processes, and memories of workers. Included are interpretive essays exploring such topics as work in the African American community, local foodways, the ethnography of a single work place (Watson Machine International), business life along a single street in Paterson (21st Avenue), and narratives told by retired workers."

"The Working People's History of New Mexico Project (WPHNM) is an oral labor history project created to gather the labor stories of working people in New Mexico. While part of the interviews focus on the specific jobs that the interviewees performed, the interviews also explore labor-management relations as well as union, workers council, and social activism participation. The interviews contain information about family and social relationships and offer themes of social and historical interest in New Mexico and the US. The project was initiated by Prof. Richard Wood's Sociology 452 class from Spring, 2016 and continues under the direction of independent researcher Diane Pinkey."

"In the early 1970’s, author Studs Terkel went around the country with a reel-to-reel tape recorder interviewing people about their jobs.

But until now, few of the interviews have ever been heard before... You can stream the stories on this page, or hear them all on the Radio Diaries Podcast."

African American Women in the Workplace

"During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by women workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that female employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment. Many jobs traditionally identified as women’s work, however, continued to pay lower salaries than those historically classified as jobs for men. The following studies included in testimony to a 1970 Congressional hearing investigating employment discrimination against women presented a statistical snapshot of women workers. The battle for equal pay for work of comparable worth emerged as the “issue of the eighties,” in the words of Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). By the end of the 1980s, the EEOC had initiated lawsuits against more than 40 states for employment discrimination. More than 1,700 localities passed legislation to address pay inequity. "