Primary Sources: The 1970s: Labor & Employment

"The Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP) is an innovative statewide initiative to document Iowa’s rich labor and working class history through the collection and preservation of oral histories. A joint project of the Iowa Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO), the University of Iowa Labor Center, and the State Historical Society of Iowa, ILHOP is widely recognized as a model for long-standing university-community engagement, and as one of the most comprehensive state-level labor oral history collections in the world."

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."

"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. "