Labor History Today

This week on Labor History Today: Silk stockings were all the rage in the 1920s, but the workers who made them paid the price. When the H.C. Aberle Hosiery Company in Philadelphia imposed wage cuts and harsher working conditions in 1930, more than a thousand workers walked out, setting off one of the city's most dramatic labor struggles.

As tensions escalated between strikers, strikebreakers, police, and company management, 22-year-old Carl Mackley was killed in a confrontation that galvanized Philadelphia's labor movement. Tens of thousands attended his funeral, and his legacy lived on in the pioneering Carl Mackley Houses, a union-sponsored cooperative housing project built during the New Deal.

Labor Jawn’s Sam James and Gabe Christy trace the origins of the strike, the violence that engulfed Kensington, the fight for arbitration, and how one young worker's death became a lasting symbol of labor solidarity.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

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 week on Labor History Today (originally broadcast 1/11/2026), 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 LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

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

On this week’s Labor History Today (Originally released October 12, 2025): A visit to the Donora Smog Museum, where a six-day inversion in 1948 trapped toxic fumes over a Pennsylvania mill town and changed how the U.S. thinks about work, health, and accountability.
And, on Labor History in 2:00: The Mother Jones Monument is Dedicated.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

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

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Labor History Today visits Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, widely considered the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.

In this excerpt from The Manufacturing Report, host Scott Paul tours the historic mill with National Park Service Ranger Allison Horrocks. Together they explore how Samuel Slater brought Britain's closely guarded textile technology to the United States, the role of Moses Brown and early investors, the rise of the Rhode Island mill system, and the transformation of work from home-based production to factory labor.

The conversation also examines the human costs of industrialization, including child labor, the commodification of workers, the emergence of wage labor, and the first worker resistance to the factory system.

Plus: Labor History in Two remembers the 1929 Gastonia textile strike and the struggle of Southern textile workers to organize.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

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

On Labor History Today: What happens if the labor laws that have governed workplace organizing since the 1930s simply disappear? Historian Leigh Campbell-Hale joins Labor Exchange host Robert Lindgren to discuss the 1927 Columbine Mine Strike, the stories labor history remembers—and forgets—and why those narratives matter for workers today.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

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