Collecting area: Labor

Local of the Graphic Communications International Union that represented over 1000 bindery workers in the Holyoke, Massachusetts area. Records include detailed minutes, shop reports, committee reports, reports of delegates sent to the Holyoke Central Labor Union and national conventions, copies of agreements, notes on contract negotiations, copies of three newsletters, and subject files that document activities as well as the emergence of factionalism within the union.

Five organizers affiliated with the Communist Workers Party were murdered by Klansmen and Nazis in Greenboro, N.C., on Nov. 3, 1979. Although an all white jury acquitted the defendants of murder and a second jury acquitted them of civil rights violations, a civil suit filed by survivors of the assault resulted in eight Klansmen being found liable for wrongful death in 1985. First conceived in 1980 as an organization to support the survivors of the assault, the Greensboro Justice Fund grew to support grassroots organizations and activists working for civil rights, social change, and radical democracy in the South.

The records of the Greensboro Justice Fund offer dramatic testimony to the impact of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, and the manner in which a community of survivors and supporters cooperated to establish an organization that supplied grants to support grassroots social justice initiatives throughout the South.

The self-styled “insane architect” Aurin F. Hill (b. 1853) was a free thinking carpenter and architect in Boston who waged a concerted campaign for his vision of social reform at the turn of the twentieth century. A Spiritualist, social radical, and union man, Hill carried the torch for issues ranging from the nationalization of railroads and corporations to civil rights and women’s rights, and joined in opposition to vaccination, Comstockery and censorship, capital punishment, and lynching. A writing medium, married to the Spiritual evangelist Izetta Sears-Hill, he became President of the National Spiritual Alliance in 1915, a Spiritualist organization based in Lake Pleasant, Mass.
Esoteric, rambling, and often difficult to follow, the Hill papers provide profound insight into the eclectic mind of an important Boston Spiritualist and labor activist at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether written as a diary or scattered notes, a scrapbook, essays, or letters to the editor, Hill’s writings cover a wide range of topics, from spirit influence to labor law, from his confinements for insanity to police strikes, hypnotism, reincarnation, and housing. More than just a reflection of one man’s psychology, the collection reveals much about broader social attitudes toward gender and race, sexuality, urban life, politics, and religion, and the collection is a particularly important resource for the history of the American Spiritualist movement between 1890 and 1920.

Local 2 of the Independent Condenser Workers Union represented employees of the Sprague Electric Company in North Adams, Massachusetts. Beginning in the 1930s, Sprague was one of the largest employers in the Berkshires. Employing 4,000 workers, Sprague provided one-third of the area’s jobs, many of them held by women. By the 1960s, however, Sprague began increasing layoffs, and in 1985 the company moved its world headquarters out of North Adams, closing all but two small facilities.

Records of Local 2 include by-laws, constitutions, correspondence, company publications, and minutes of meetings between management and union representatives.

Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the New Zealand expatriate Rewi Alley threw his considerable talents behind the war effort. Building upon knowledge acquired over a decade of living in China, Alley helped organize the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement (CIC). The CIC coordinated the creation of industrial cooperatives throughout unoccupied China to keep industrial production flowing, and it sponsored a series of industrial schools named after Alley’s friend Joseph Bailie to provide training and support.

The Indusco Bailie School Collection includes documents and photographs relating to the establishment and operation of the Bailie Schools in China during and immediately after the Second World War. Probably associated with the Indusco offices in New York City, these documents include a model constitution for industrial cooperatives, typewritten reports on Bailie Schools, and published articles describing the schools’ efforts. The reports extend through 1949, and include three mimeographed newsletters from the Shantan Bailie School for the months immediately following the school’s liberation by Communist forces. Also included are printed works by Alley and eighteen photographs taken between 1942 and 1944 of students and scenes at Bailie Schools.

The records of Northampton Local 36 of the IBEW provide insight into the adjustments of union members to the introduction of new technology, the changing labor environment, and the local debates over the merits of the use of nuclear power in the region. Collection includes by-laws, reports, correspondence, contracts, membership lists, and materials relating to nuclear energy.

First organized as Eagle Lodge in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the United Brotherhood of Paper Makers was granted a charter by the AFL in May 1883. Almost as soon as the union was established, however, it faced a serious struggle for power from within. Hoping to maintain their higher economic and social status, the machine tenders ultimately organized their own union, and the two remained separate for a number of years until they finally merged in 1902 as the International Brotherhood of Paper Makers.

The surviving records of the Eagle Lodge, Local 1 of the International Brotherhood of Paper Makers, include by-laws, minutes, correspondence, some contracts, a ledger, and three histories of the local and the early days of the union.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, organized in 1903 when two leading team driver associations merged, is one of the largest unions in the U.S. Local 170, representing central Massachusetts, and Local 404, representing western Massachusetts, were both granted their charters with the Teamsters in 1933, and continue to thrive today. The records of these locals consist entirely of agreements between the union and local businesses.

Restricted arbitration and grievance files for individual employees organized under Local 213 of the IUE in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Local chapters of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers representing workers in Connecticut. Records document a full range of union activities from elections and contract negotiations to arbitration and grievances. Also includes some union realia such as button, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.