Nation's oldest popular labor history society, devoted to Illinois worker history.
The ILHS supports the preservation of Illinois labor history and works to share this history with researchers, students and the general public through its website, archival collections and labor history tours. THe ILHS holds the title for the Haymarket Monument in Forest Park, IL and was central to the development of the new Haymarket monument in downtown Chicago. It's Union Hall of Honor Dinner honors men and women who have made important contributions to the state's labor movement.
Operating as usual
February 6 - Seattle General Strike | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1919. That day began the week-long general strike in Seattle, Washington. As World War I drew to a close many workers in the city were frustrated by two years without pay increases due to the war. 35,000 workers in the shipyards walked off of the job.
February 5, 2016 Shot Down for Standing Up | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1913. That was the day that Ida Breiman was killed while she stood up for the rights of working people in Rochester, New York. Ida was born in Russia to a Jewish family.
Even during war, Ukraine's parliament tries to restrict workers' rights
As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler describes how Ukrainian workers and their trade unions have become an undeniable force for solidarity and community support throughout the country.
Remember the real Rosa Parks...
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913. Far from being a face of respectability politics, she was a defiant and seasoned working-class organizer who despised the cringing submission that Jim Crow induced and who doggedly fought oppression in all its forms.
Remembering the Lattimer Massacre https://conta.cc/3HtkI6a
February 4 - Canal-building in America | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1825. That was the day the Ohio legislature authorized the Canal Act. The act called for the construction of two canals.
An Illinois State University WGLT-FM / NPR story on retiring labor leader John Penn - one of our 2022 Union Hall of Honor inductees.
John Penn, a labor legend who shaped working life for decades of McLean County residents, is finally taking some time off. He retired this week from LiUNA (Laborers International).
Climate change & heat impacts workers
Labor reporters are increasingly focusing on how extreme heat kills workers — and what should be done about it
February 3, 2016 Another Senseless Tragedy | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1971. That was a day of tragedy for the workers at the Thiokol Chemical Corporation plant in southeastern Georgia. An explosion killed twenty-seven workers, and injured dozens more.
February 2, 2016 Calling Doctor Blackwell | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1821. That was the birthday of the first woman to earn her medical degree in the United States. Her name was Elizabeth Blackwell.
https://slucuny.swoogo.com/7February2023
They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. — New Orleanian, political scientist, and, according to Cornel West, “the greatest demo...
February 1, 2016 Sitting for Change | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1960. That was the day that four black freshmen students from the Agricultural andTechnical College of North Carolina sat down to make a stand for justice.
Illinois State University's WGLT-FM did an in-depth retrospective on the 1978 Normal IL Fire Fighters strike - well done...
Here’s the story of a strange strike in which everybody went to work, and everybody got paid, and everybody went to jail.
January 31, 2016 The End of Slave Labor | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1865. That was the day that the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the constitution, abolishing slavery. President Lincoln had already issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But there was worry that the proclamation, an emergency wartime measure, would....
January 30, 2016 Chicago Gravediggers End 43 day Strike | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1992. That was the day that the gravediggers of Chicago ended their forty-three day strike. The United Press International’s headline declared, “The dead will rest in peace now that Chicago-area gravediggers have reached a tentative contract.” The grav...
January 29 - President Jackson Sets a Precedent | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1834. That was the first time in United States history that a President called in federal troops to settle a labor dispute and It would certainly not be the last. President Andrew Jackson ordered federal troops to quiet the workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio...
The Bloomington Pantagraph today featured one of your 2022 Union Hall of Honor recipients, John Penn, on his retirement.
January 28, 2016 Unemployment Insurance for Workers | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1932. That was the day the first unemployment insurance law in was established in the United States. It happened in Wisconsin. Governor Phillip LaFollette signed the Unemployment Compensation Act.
January 27, 2016 Working Class Stamps | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1950. The cost of a first-class stamp was three cents. And starting on this day, one of the options for first class postage bore the image of US labor leader Samuel Gompers. The British-born Gompers was a founder and long-time head of the American Federation...
January 26, 2016 TR Getting Money out of Politics | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1907. That was the day that President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law an effort to get corporate money out of national politics. The law was called the Tillman Act. The act was named after its sponsor, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/briefing/game-worker-union.html
Unions and Video Games
Gaming is a huge industry, and workers are trying to unionize.
By German Lopez
Jan. 24, 2023
You’re reading The Morning newsletter. Make sense of the day’s news and ideas. David Leonhardt and Times journalists guide you through what’s happening — and why it matters.
Tonight, tens of millions of Americans will wind down from a day of work or school with a leisure activity that did not exist a century ago: video games.
Until fairly recently, games were considered a niche hobby, typically associated with children. But the industry has grown widely in recent decades. About two-thirds of Americans, most of them adults, play video games. The video game industry was worth nearly $200 billion in 2021 — more than music, U.S. book publishing and North American sports combined. It employs hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. alone.
Some of you non-gamers are probably wondering why you should care. My answer is that the game industry’s story is a universal one, of a new business growing up and becoming a major cultural institution, one that hundreds of millions of Americans regularly engage with. It is similar to the rise of the movie industry or football over the past century. They are now cornerstones of American life that started as niche forms of entertainment.
And similar to the types of abuses and tragedies in Hollywood or the N.F.L. that reverberate beyond fans of movies and sports, the game industry has also faced accusations of brutal work conditions, discrimination and harassment.
The conditions have prompted more workers to move to unionize. This month, Microsoft recognized its first union after video game testers organized. Today’s newsletter will look at how game developers are confronting problems that have entangled other companies, including Amazon and Starbucks, as workers push to shape a relatively new industry.
“Game developers are not alone in this,” said Johanna Weststar, an expert on labor in the game industry at Western University in Ontario. “There’s been a rise in worker activism across many different sectors.”
Unsafe workplaces
A common refrain in the video game industry is that no one goes into it for the money; they could earn more doing similar jobs at other software companies, but instead passion drives them to games. Industry workers have accused employers of taking advantage of this devotion to allow poor conditions to flourish.
“The impact so many games have had on me — I want to be part of giving that to someone else,” said Amanda Laven, a game tester at the company Activision Blizzard. “Corporate leadership know we’d rather be here testing a video game than another piece of software, so they can pay us way less.”
Among the more criticized practices of the industry is “crunch,” when employees are pushed to work 60 to 100 hours a week for up to several months to hit a milestone on a project. Jason Schreier, a video game journalist, highlighted the issue in Times Opinion in 2017. While crunching, one programmer working on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011 ended up at an emergency room three times because of severe stomach pain. After he stopped crunching, the pain disappeared.
Video game companies say that they sometimes need crunch to finish projects on time and on budget, but are working to minimize their use of it. Workers like Laven argue that many companies have done too little and continue to overuse crunch.
Activision Blizzard says it pays employees more than its competitors on average and tries to mitigate crunch by paying overtime, spreading hours among team members and expensing meals. “We care deeply for our employees,” said Joe Christinat, a spokesman for Activision Blizzard. “We don’t want any of them to feel like they have to make unfair sacrifices.”
Another pervasive claim: gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment. In 2021, California sued Activision Blizzard for what the state described as the company’s “frat boy” culture in which women were underpaid and sexually harassed. Activision Blizzard said that the accusations were a misrepresentation of the company’s inner workings, and that it had taken steps to improve its culture in recent years.
The accusations got a lot of attention, but those in the industry say the problems go beyond Activision Blizzard. Other big companies have also faced claims of discrimination and harassment, including Riot, Ubisoft and Sony. Those companies’ responses have ranged from saying they’re working to be more inclusive to dismissing some accusations.
Schreier has written that many of these problems go back to the early days of the industry, when game developers facilitated “a frat-like image of boys who pulled all-nighters to make their games, pounding Diet Cokes and pizzas and who kept pictures of sc****ly clad women on their desks.” But as games have grown, workers’ expectations have changed.
Moving to organize
The conditions have driven more employees to try to unionize, including several studios at Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. Organizers told me that dozens more efforts are underway in the U.S., though most are not public yet. Most game developers support unionization, a recent survey found.
Companies have responded differently to the efforts. Microsoft pledged neutrality when its workers moved to unionize. Activision Blizzard (which Microsoft is trying to buy) has tried to block unionization drives.
The push to unionize is part of a broader trend in relatively new industries, including tech and digital media. Spurred by what they see as poor conditions, many employees in those sectors have come to see unions as the best way to protect themselves. The total number of union members nationwide increased by nearly 300,000 last year, my colleague Noam Scheiber wrote.
Some workers described this drive as part of a process as the game industry is fairly new and still experiencing growing pains and professionalization. By leveraging the current moment, they hope to change the industry for good.
“We are trying to help ourselves,” Laven said. “But we’re also trying to help everyone who comes after us.”
Related: The ability to work from home, create collective power and support co-workers are other reasons game developers gave for unionizing, the gaming website Polygon reported.
Gaming is a huge industry, and workers are trying to unionize.
January 25 - Shays’ Rebellion | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1787. That was the day known as Shays’ Rebellion. The United States was a new nation, and the Constitution had not yet been written. The revolutionary army had won the war with Britain, but the young nation was mired in debt.
January 24, 2016 The Boycott | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1984. That was the day that Nestle agreed to terms in order to end a seven year international boycott against the company. The boycott was over the unsafe and dangerous ways that Nestle marketed and sold its baby formula in third world countries.
Tune in on Tuesday, January 24th at 5:30pm to join our Executive Director and labor historian and educator, Janet Wells Greene, for episode 3, season 4 of Mine Wars Forum!
Janet Wells Greene was born in McDowell County, West Virginia. In recognition of her lifelong efforts to bring labor history to the general public, she was awarded the prestigious John Commerford Award by the New York Labor History Association in 2010. Her research includes oral history projects with miners and their wives, industrial workers in New York City, and archival documentation of working people and their unions from the 18th to the 20th century.
Janet retired to Newark, Ohio, with her husband David Greene in 2009, where she co-founded The Freedom School in Licking County, an all-volunteer adult education program designed to help people learn their own history and "read the world" around them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXcSvbexc0E
January 23, 2016 More Labor than they Planned | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1936. That was the day when twenty laborers who were part of the Civilian Conservation Corps got involved in a type of “labor” they probably never expected. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a program established by President Franklin Roosevelt to get ...
January 22, 2016 Birth of Terrance Powderly | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1849. That was the birthday of U.S. labor leader Terence Powderly. Powderly was born the second youngest of twelve children to Irish immigrants in Carbondale, Pennsylvania.
People are ready to organize - if the law was not an obstacle.
According to the latest data, the ranks of unionized workers grew by 200,000 between 2021 and 2022. If the United States’ unionization rules in place weren’t so biased toward bosses, tens of millions more workers indicate they would have joined a union, too.
Too often we forget Coretta Scott King and her wonderful gifts
Friday's Labor Folklore Coretta Scott King "Music was the first love of my life." Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927 in Marion, Alabama in her parents home. Delia Scott - her great-grandmother a
January 21, 2016 The Charleston Five | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 2000. Just after midnight six hundred police officers clashed with picketing longshoreman in Charleston, South Carolina. The port in Charleston ranked the fourth largest in the United States.
January 20, 2016 The First MLK Day | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1986. That was the first time Dr. Martin Luther King Day was observed as a national holiday. A powerful voice for Civil Rights, Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee while standing on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel.
January 19 - Gunned Down in Cold Blood | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1915. That was the day that two striking workers were shot and killed by gunmen hired by a fertilizer plant in New Jersey. In addition to the 2 killed many more were injured by the hired guns.
January 18 - Showing the Pride | Labor History in 2:00
Have you ever worn a union button or t-shirt to work? On this day in Labor History the year was 1912. Members of the Australian Tramways Association in Brisbane, Queensland decided to put on their union badges at work.
UIC faculty union to strike after failing to reach agreement with administration
The union representing faculty members at the University of Illinois Chicago say they remain far apart in bargaining with school officials on compensation. They are set to strike Tuesday.
January 17, 2016 Give Us Our Daily Bread | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1915. It was the day that the people in Chicago stood up to demand an end to hunger and unemployment. Their stand began at a meeting at Bowen Hall, part of the Hull House complex founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams.
civil rights work in the Gary steel mills.
“I needed a job like yesterday, so I went upstairs like I was supposed to. I had to stick it out,” Dennis Whittington recalled.
Dr. King - union activist --
One often-overlooked aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and career was his strong support of labor unions, calling them America’s first anti-poverty program.
January 16 - A Nation Demands a Raise | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1946. That was the day the United Packinghouse Workers of America went on strike. Their initial demand was for a twenty-five cent an hour raise. They were also joined in the strike by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union.
FREE = Workers Online Film Festival, Monday, January 16 - January 20 -- I would highly recommend the film "At the River I Stand" about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
January 15 - Fighting for Opportunity | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1941. That was the day that black labor leader, A Philip Randolph, issued a call for a March on Washington. He proposed the march to bring attention to the employment discrimination faced by African American workers.
January 14 - The Fight for the Eight Hour Day | Labor History in 2:00
On this day in Labor History the year was 1868. Representatives of more than forty locals of the International Union of Bricklayers of North America gathered in New York City. It was the third annual convention of the new union.
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SAG-AFTRA wishes you all a happy labor day!
And so it begins! about 60 people for our noon tour! Come by at 2 for our second tour, if you missed this!
Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge Commemoration
Today we spent the afternoon at Forest Home Cemetery. ILHS President Larry Spivack gave a tour of notable labor leaders buried there, including the Haymarket Martyrs of course, in honor and memory of Mark Rogovin. We were also there to unveil the Nina Van Zandt Spies grave marker. Mark was instrumental in locating Haymarket Martyr, August Spies’ widow, Nina and we finally have a stone for her. With additional commentary from ILHS members Bleue Benton and Julia Berkowitz.
2019 Union Hall of Honor Friday, December 6, 2019 5:00 to 6:00 pm Cocktail Hour 6:00 pm Dinner Teamsters 705 Union Hall 1645 W Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL 60612 Inducting CHARLIE HAYES, UNITED PACKINGHOUSE WORKERS OF AMERICA, IRENE GOINS, WOMEN'S TRADE UNION LEAGUE, RON POWELL, UNITED FOOD AND COMMERCIAL WORKERS UNION, BOB SIMPSON, INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS Guest Speaker AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Elissa McBride
Labor Day Kick Off with President Larry Spivack
Honoring the Martyrs’
Bucky Halker singing Union Maid with the Historical Society of Forest Park
Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge
Keynote speech by UMWA President Cecil Roberts. With Mother Jones Lives
Speech by ILHS trustee Judy Simpson. With Mother Jones Lives
The Casa del Obrero Mundial (English: House of the World Worker) from Mexico being told the story of the Haymarket Massacre by President Larry Spivack.
Just a preview of our UHH Keynote speaker this year!
UAW Region 4 UAW International Union UAW UAW Ford Department
UAW Region 4
President Larry Spivack along with Bucky Halker and Alma “Lucy Parsons” Washington put on a presentation yesterday for the Synapse School talking about Haymarket. They are on a school trip from California.
President Larry Spivack along with Bucky Halker and Alma “Lucy Parsons” Washington put on a presentation yesterday for the Synapse School talking about Haymarket. They are on a school trip from California.
President Larry Spivack along with Bucky Halker and Alma “Lucy Parsons” Washington put on a presentation yesterday for the Synapse School talking about Haymarket. They are on a school trip from California.
President Larry Spivack along with Bucky Halker and Alma “Lucy Parsons” Washington put on a presentation yesterday for the Synapse School talking about Haymarket. They are on a school trip from California.
The presentation of awards
Listen to Mother! With Mother Jones Lives
#ILHLives #MayDay2018 via ripl.com
Historical Society of Forest Park
Bucky Halker singing Solidarity Forever
Bucky Halker singing Storm the Fort, Ye Knights of Labor
Bucky Halker singing The Eight Hour Song
Pritzker Military Museum & Library
S Michigan AvenueThe Richard H. Driehaus Museum
E Erie StreetUniversity of Illinois at Chicago - Museum an
W Harrison Street
Chicago Women's History Center
N Humboldt Boulevard
Bronzeville / Black Chicagoan Historical Soci
S. King Drive
Pritzker Military Museum & Library
S Michigan Avenue
The DNA Discovery Center and Pritzker Lab at
S Lake Shore Drive
Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture
S Pulaski Road
The DuSable Black History Museum and Educatio
E 56th Place
Charnley-Persky House Museum Foundation
N Astor Street
The Richard H. Driehaus Museum
E Erie Street