Labor:
Its History,
Its Resistance,
and Labor Today

Describing work as human beings’ “prime impulse,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oral historian Studs Terkel set out to understand work in this country and how it functions in our society. This curiosity led to the publication of his 1974 book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The book features interviews from many different workers in a wide variety of careers from newspaper delivery boys and farm workers to editors and priests. Through this bevy of oral histories, Terkel ultimately comes to the conclusion that while it presents many challenges and pitfalls, work can foster meaning in people’s lives. This interesting and captivating oral history captured the attention of theatre artists Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, who eventually adapted the book into a successful musical.   

Known as “Mr. Chicago,” Terkel was perhaps best known for his long-running radio program The Studs Terkel Show—which ran from 1952 to 1997 in Chicago, Illinois’s WFMT. Terkel authored many different oral histories, such as on The Great Depression, World War II, racial relations in the U.S., and the notion of “the American dream.” Terkel had a life-long commitment, in the words of scholar Alan Weider, to his “quest for social justice.” (12) Our production of Working, a musical, centers the long and storied history of labor in the United States, especially in Washington, D.C. Today, this post will briefly explore labor history and its contemporary reverberations.

Labor: Its History and Its Resistance

In their book, Labor in America: A History, scholars Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin track history from “colonial America” to contemporary iterations. According to Dubofsky and McCartin, labor in the United States began with colonial contact and the instantiation of the system of enslavement, in which captive African people were exploited and extracted from, resulting in the structural oppression we see embedded in our infrastructure today. Many historians and scholars, particularly within disciplines in African American Studies and History, agree with this assessment. In particular, historian Edward Baptist similarly explores the link between the United States’ economic system of capitalism and slavery, arguing that the insistence on slavery is only emblematic of America’s past, rather than a conscientious attention to the ways it continues to structure our present.

As the United States transitioned into the nineteenth century, labor shifted as well. The advent of the nineteenth century saw a huge growth in a modern economy, due in large part to the technological advancements courtesy of the Industrial Revolution which brought along breakthroughs in transportation and communication. These innovations began to foster a global economic network; the world was becoming smaller and the demand for labor was growing bigger. With this change in economic structure, labor exploitation became easier and the norm. As aforementioned, the system of slavery depended solely on this exploitation and extraction—and in turn, there was resistance from enslaved people in the form of fugitivity via the Underground Railroad, laboring less, and large-scale rebellions such as the Haitian Revolution. This legacy of resistance has continued into labor movements across time and location. As important as it is to understand the history of labor, it is equally as prescient to understand the crucial resonance of labor movements.

In the summer of 1881, a group of twenty black washerwomen initiated a labor strike in Atlanta, Georgia. Beginning several weeks before the International Cotton Exposition, the strike took place over the course of a month. It followed the organization of the Washing Society, an organizing collective in Atlanta’s Summer Hill neighborhood. The collective was a product of the black social structure of nineteenth-century Atlanta; as black communities gained a critical mass of members, they began to recognize their collective political power. The washerwomen’s strike, thus, underscored black sociality in the New South; the strike emerged from informal connections among these black female laborers. They were able to leverage their private relationships for public recognition, an important space for black women in subsequent political movements and inspired other washerwomen strikes across the South.

There was also the El Monte Berry Strike in 1933—during The Great Depression— in which 1,500 workers walked out of the berry fields in El Monte, California to demand higher wages. The strike was particularly important because it disrupted the growing economy in Southern California, illuminated racial tensions among Mexican, Japanese, and white communities, and eventually ended in the workers receiving higher wages, though poor working conditions remained. Another significant strike in labor history is from the Dollar Store Strikers, led by activist Sue Ko Lee to protest the horrid working conditions in San Francisco’s factories. Lee organized the strike, demanding an end to this poor environment and higher pay and was able to receive that. These three examples are just a small portion of the long history of labor resistance, a practice that can be found across races, ethnicities, geography, time, and career fields.