News & Updates

Register now – and save -- for the 2025 Great Labor Arts Exchange!

The Great Labor Arts Exchange (GLAE) is an annual gathering of labor and community activists from around the United States and Canada in celebration of labor arts and culture. Registration for this year’s gathering -- June 20-22 in Silver Spring, Maryland – is $125 for LHF members before March 1 ($150 after that date) and $150 for non-members (before March 1; $175 after that date); Details and registration here! Whatever your art form — music, dance, song, poetry, hip hop, podcasts, photography, murals or writing, you’ll find “exactly where you’re supposed to be" at the GLAE.

Sent in by Korey Hartwich (NNU); click here for the magazine. Send your suggestions to us at info@laborheritage.org

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MLK on The Dignity of Labor

Who's Gonna Build Your Wall | Tom Russell

Sent in by Nancy MacLean. Send your suggestions to us at info@laborheritage.org

“Let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, AFSCME Memphis Sanitation Strike, April 3, 1968

CLICK HERE for our complete labor arts calendar; look for our Labor Arts Calendar edition on Monday

WEEKEND LABOR ARTS CALENDAR

Fri, Jan 24: "Working the Ranch and Range: The Music of the Black Cowboy"

Fri, Jan 24: Gospel of the Working Class: Artist Talk and Q&A

Fri, Jan 24: “Laugh While It’s Still Legal”: Tom Neilson with Lynn Waldron

Fri, Jan 24: People's Music Network Winter Concert

Sat/Sun, Jan 24-25: People’s Music Network Winter Convergence

Sat/Sun, Jan 24-25: Social and Economic Justice Music Festival

Sat, Jan 25: Joe Uehlein Solo - Songs of Love & Resistance

January 24, 1935

Krueger Cream Ale, the first canned beer, goes on sale in Richmond, Va. Pabst was the second brewer in the same year to sell beer in cans, which came with opening instructions and the suggestion: "cool before serving".

On this week’s Labor History Today: Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting Columbine: While historians have written prolifically about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, there has been a lack of attention to the Columbine Massacre in which police shot and killed six striking coal miners and wounded sixty more protestors during the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike, even though its aftermath exerted far more influence on subsequent national labor policies. In her 2023 book Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike, Leigh Campbell-Hale reorients understandings of labor history from the 1920s through the 1960s and the construction of public memory—and forgetting—surrounding those events.

LAST WEEK’S QUIZ: President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988 on Jan. 17, 1962, guaranteeing federal workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively; Truman’s Executive Order 9981 in 1948 required equality of opportunity in armed forces; in 1941 Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order barring discrimination in defense industries.  

SAG-AFTRA donates $1 million for LA fires relief (1/17)

Tabitha Arnold’s Gospel of the Working Class (1/10)

Get ready to choose the 2025 Labor Grammy winners! (1/3)

Picket signs from the Amazon & Starbucks strikes! (12/20)

The Kaos of class struggle on Netflix (12/13)

Cliff Divers & Whiteboard Geeks unionize (12/6)

Carsie Blanton on “Rich People” (11/22)

Animation Heroes, Assemble! 11/15

No Contract, No Wordle! (11/8)