Labor History Today

On this week’s Labor History Today: The FIFA World Cup is once again captivating fans around the globe as the 2026 tournament heads into the semifinal round, with France facing Spain on July 14 and England taking on Argentina on July 15. While soccer is often viewed as a relatively recent arrival in the United States, the game actually has deep roots here, thanks to immigrant workers from Britain and Europe who brought football to mining towns, factories, and mill communities in the late nineteenth century. This week's Labor History Today – originally released during the 2022 World Cup -- explores the long—and often overlooked—history of soccer as a workers' game.

From 1927 to 1935, the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) established the Labor Sport Union, a coalition of worker athletic clubs, primarily located in the urban Northeast and Midwest. The CPUSA’s 1925 sport manifesto emphasized that sports should be used as a medium for class struggle and even to create “proletarian fighting units against militarism and fascism.”

One of their successful sporting accomplishments was the Workers’ Soccer Association, or WSA, which organized leagues in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. This communist soccer league played two seasons per year and competed for city, regional, and national championships.

On today’s show, Gabe Logan recounts the history of the Workers’ Soccer Association and explains an overlooked aspect of U.S. soccer that intersected political ideology, labor, and athletics.

On this week’s Labor History in Two: No Justice, No Bagels!

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.

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On this week's Labor History Today: As the nation reflects on Independence Day, we turn from the "Great Men" of history to the voices of the people. We begin with Frederick Douglass's searing 1852 speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, performed by James Earl Jones, then hear from the Labor and Working-Class History Association's People's 250 project, where workers, historians, and activists share stories that place working people at the center of the American story. Plus, on Labor History in 2:00: July 4 Freedom to Join a Union

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. Thanks to Democracy Now for the James Earl Jones clip. 

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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