UW professor and undergraduates research radical labor union (IWW)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_3029f084-0036-11e5-b5b3-4fab30b2c855.html

Katie Anastas

During the past year, UW history professor James Gregory has been researching the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union founded in 1905. This research is part of Gregory’s larger project called the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Project, which he started in 2007.

With the help of undergraduate researchers, Gregory has assembled an impressive database of information about the IWW and its impact on labor rights throughout the United States.

“Ever since [the IWW] started, it attracted attention with its daring tactics and reckless forms of organizing,” Gregory said. “The selflessness and recklessness of the organization [are] awe-inspiring.”

The IWW Research Project developed from an assignment in one of Gregory’s classes called “Class, Labor, and American Capitalism.” Students were asked to create yearbooks tracking people and events related to the IWW. Gregory quickly discovered the project’s potential, and Becca Flores, a senior who was a student in the class, began editing essays and assembling databases for the project the following summer.

FULL story at link.

Reach reporter Katie Anastas
at [e-mail].
Twitter: @KatieAnastas

[yallerdawg]

1. One big union!

“We’re in a time that needs as radical social change and economic change as we needed in 1915 or 1920,” Hermida said. “It’s really easy to be scared away from trying, because it seems so impossible to do anything. It seems so impossible to get $15 an hour at times. It seems so impossible to get equal rights for undocumented workers. But then you read these stories of things that really happened. They weren’t elected officials, they were just people who were passionate, and they got things accomplished.”

[jwirr]

2. Is this a book or is it going to be? I would love to read that.

[yallerdawg]

3. Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Project

http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/

No part of the United States claims a labor heritage or a civil rights history quite like the Pacific Northwest. Labor and civil rights movements have been central to the region's history and remain a powerful force in contemporary society and politics. This page is a gateway to a consortium of labor and civil rights history projects directed by Professor James N. Gregory at the University of Washington and supported by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Pacific Northwest.