On this week’s Labor History Today, historian Eric Arnesen marks the centennial of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, tracing how A. Philip Randolph and Black railway workers built the first major Black-led union in 1925, fought for what Randolph called “manhood rights”—dignity on the job—and helped lay the groundwork for the 1941 and 1963 Marches on Washington, reshaping both the labor movement and the modern civil rights struggle.
Plus, on Labor History in 2:00: The Price of Demanding Equal Pay, The 1937 Woolworth Sit-Down, and Remembering E.D. Nixon.

NOTE: Arnesen’s February 10 talk was part of a special Black History Month and Labor Spring event featuring April Verrett, the first Black woman president of SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, sponsored by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. We’ll bring you highlights from Verrett’s talk in next week’s show.

Explore LHF’s new Labor Landmarks Map and suggest a site near you at laborheritage.org!

Questions, comments, or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week’s Labor History Today, host Chris Garlock explores how workers’ struggles leave lasting marks—not just on history, but on the physical landscape itself.

In Hamilton, Ontario, the 1946 Stelco strike helped secure collective bargaining rights for Canadian steelworkers—but also triggered a backlash that literally reshaped Woodlands Park, once known as the “People’s Park,” to prevent workers from gathering there again.
And in Marion, North Carolina, Chris traces the story of the 1929 Marion Massacre, when sheriff’s deputies opened fire on striking textile workers. Today, even the small gravestone marking where workers were killed may have disappeared—raising urgent questions about how labor history is remembered, and how easily it can be erased.
These stories are drawn from the Labor Heritage Foundation’s new Labor Landmarks Map, a growing, crowd-sourced resource documenting sites of working-class struggle, resistance, and memory.

In our second segment, Tales from the Reuther Library celebrates its 100th episode by exploring how bold philanthropy helped fund labor organizing and civil liberties movements during some of America’s darkest times.

Plus, four from Labor History in 2:00: Fighting for a Floor, The First Female Telegraph Operator, The Elusive 8 Hour Workday and Historic Sit-In by Memphis Sanitation Workers.

Together, these stories remind us that labor history lives all around us—in parks, factories, memorials, and the landscapes workers fought to shape.

Explore the Labor Landmarks Map and suggest a site near you at laborheritage.org!

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week’s Labor History Today: Labor History in 2:00 on the Sons of Vulcan’s 1865 strike, a Labor Jawn conversation with songwriter Mindy Murray about her song “Striking at Kings,” and a return to 1937 Anderson, Indiana, and the violence following the Flint sit-down strike. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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This week on Labor History Today: The 66th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins — a turning point that helped ignite the modern Civil Rights Movement and reshaped American politics. We feature an in-depth conversation from The Green and Red Podcast, tracing the origins of the sit-in movement, from Greensboro and Nashville to the rise of SNCC, and exploring how militant nonviolence, media exposure, and youth-led organizing forced a national reckoning — with powerful parallels to today’s struggles against state violence.
Then, on Labor History in 2:00, we revisit another watershed moment in collective action: the 1919 Seattle General Strike, when tens of thousands of workers shut down a city and demonstrated the power of solidarity.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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This week on Labor History Today, we remember Pete Seeger and how his songs helped build movements—from union halls to civil rights and environmental campaigns. Then we turn to the 1933 Funsten Nut Strike in St. Louis, led by Black women who organized more than 2,000 workers, and talk with the creators of the new play A Brick and a Bible.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

#LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA @ILLaborHistory @AFLCIO @StrikeHistory #LaborHistory @wrkclasshistory  

This episode of Labor History Today features historian Marcella Bencivenni on Arturo Giovannitti—Italian immigrant, poet, socialist, and labor organizer—whose role in the 1912 Lawrence textile strike made him a target of state repression and a powerful voice of labor resistance. Arrested for his words, Giovannitti turned imprisonment into poetry that helped define an era of immigrant-led radical organizing. The episode explores free speech struggles, anti-immigrant repression, and labor solidarity—lessons from more than a century ago that still resonate in 2026 America. We close with the Labor Song of the Month, featuring “Joe Hill’s Ashes,” performed by Otis Gibbs. Today’s show comes to us from the always fabulous Heartland Labor Forum on KKFI in Kansas City.

This week on Labor History Today, we explore how the 1892 Homestead Strike continues to live on—not just in books and archives, but in film, music, and living memory.

We begin with labor scholar and cultural critic Kathleen Newman, who takes us inside Ting Tong Chang’s The Hidden Shift, a two-screen film installation at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory. Inspired by the Homestead Strike, the piece layers a fictionalized labor drama with behind-the-scenes footage of museum workers making the work itself—blurring the lines between labor and culture, past and present.

Kathleen reflects on Homestead as both a proud moment in worker history and a shameful chapter in corporate history, and connects the strike’s legacy to today’s service-sector workers—from museum staff to baristas—whose labor too often goes unseen.

We close with music that has carried the story for more than a century. “Homestead Strike Song” turns the events of 1892 into a communal act of remembrance. In this 1980 recording, Pete Seeger sings the song, invites a singalong, and shares the story of how the song survived—passed down in halls and bars long after the strike itself was crushed.

Together, these segments remind us that labor history isn’t just remembered—it’s made, performed, and sung.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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This week on Labor History Today, Simon Sapper talks with historian Martin Wright, co-author of Made by Labour: A Material and Visual History of British Labor, 1780–1924. The book traces the rise of the world’s first modern labor movement through banners, boxes, coins, tools, and images created by working people during the Industrial Revolution and beyond—right up to the moment labor stood on the brink of political power in the 1920s.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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This week on Labor History Today, we move from repression to resistance—and from history to possibility.

We begin with Labor History in Two and the 1917 trial of labor leader Tom Mooney, a stark reminder of how the justice system has been used to silence working-class dissent.
Then we turn to the present with a report from the Working Class History podcast, bringing us to the 2025 Working Class Literature Festival at the occupied former GKN factory outside Florence, Italy—where workers are fighting not only to save their jobs, but to transform their workplace into a cooperative and tell their own stories.

We close with another Labor History in Two—the 2006 Sago Mine disaster—underscoring the deadly consequences of corporate negligence and regulatory failure.

History doesn’t just explain the world we’re in. It helps us imagine the one we’re trying to build.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week’s Labor History Today: From Camp Solidarity in Matewan, West Virginia—the heart of the legendary Mine Wars—UMWA President Cecil Roberts reflects on the long struggle of coal miners to claim America’s promise that “this land belongs to all of us.” On the eve of his retirement, Roberts’ words connect today’s fights for justice with a century of labor history rooted in the hollers of Appalachia. (Originally broadcast 9/21/25; updated with today’s Labor History in 2:00)

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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In this episode of Labor History Today, labor organizer and researcher Eric Dirnbach talks with Dave Kamper, author of Who’s Got the Power: Hope for Troubled Times, about the post-pandemic union upsurge. From graduate student organizing and teachers’ strikes to the UAW’s stand-up strike and bargaining for the common good, Kamper reflects on what history can teach us about moments of possibility, and why solidarity is re-emerging as a force for change.
Labor History in 2:00: Red Scare Hysteria Deportations Begin
Music: Little Flame, by Carsie Blanton.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

#LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA @ILLaborHistory @AFLCIO @StrikeHistory #LaborHistory @wrkclasshistory