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Image of where the rust belt is located on a US map

Economic Mobility, Not Manufacturing Decline, Is the Real Rust Belt Story

A look at popular interpretations and actual labor fluctuations in the Rust Belt over time.
by Norbert Michel, Jerome Famularo via Cato Institute on June 12, 2025
Cattle in pens in Chicago in 1947.

The Industry that Stayed

How meatpacking remained domestic.
by Christopher Deutsch via Clio and the Contemporary on May 12, 2025
Blue and yellow photo of a woman holding up a sign with the word "Union" on it

Unspooling Norma Rae

The story of Norma Rae, based on the union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton.
by Kit Duckworth via Oxford American on September 5, 2023
Two garment workers picketing in New York City during a 1910 strike.

We've Been Fighting Fast Fashion Since the Industrial Revolution

From the Triangle Factory Fire to Shein, fast fashion can’t escape ethical quandaries.
by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox via Zócalo Public Square on March 23, 2023
Vintage drawing of a man attempting to hypnotize a crowd of people, sitting in chairs.
partner

Mesmerizing Labor

The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with “magnetizing” their enslaved people.
by Emily Ogden, Matthew Wills via JSTOR Daily on January 18, 2022
Industry at Night, by Horatio C. Forjohn, 1940.

Weary of Work

When factories created a population of tired workers, a new frontier in fatigue studies was born.
by Emily K. Abel via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 28, 2021
A car being made in a car factory

Talking About Auto Work Means Talking About Constant, Brutal Violence

It's remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered is how brutal life on the factory floor was – and still is.
by Jeremy Milloy, Micah Uetricht via Jacobin on October 23, 2020
Picket line march of auto workers.

Detroit Autoworkers’ Elusive Postwar Boom

The men who made the cars could not afford to buy them.
by Daniel Clark via The Metropole on January 30, 2020

Factory Made

A history of modernity as a history of factories struggles to see beyond their walls.
by Padraic X. Scanlan via The New Inquiry on March 30, 2018
Firefighters trying to put out the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911.

How Poor, Mostly Jewish Immigrants Organized 20,000 and Fought for Workers Rights

These women came ready to fight.
by Meagan Day via Timeline on March 9, 2018
The Miss Portland diner.
partner

The Making of the American Diner

Today's diners would surprise a 1940s patron. These restaurants were once vulgar boy’s clubs before becoming today's family-friendly establishments.
by Andrew Hurley, Erin Blakemore via JSTOR Daily on June 17, 2017

How Andrew Carnegie's Genius and Blue-Collar Grit Made Pittsburgh the Steel City

A third-generation mill worker pays homage to the controversial industrialist.
by Ken Kobus via Zócalo Public Square on April 7, 2017
"Wages for housework" posters: statue of liberty holding a broom and money, and an iron burning pants and the phrase "strike while the iron is hot."

The Care Factory

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.
by Emily Baughan via Boston Review on November 20, 2025

America’s Greatest Mistake

Globalization left millions behind as a policy and transformed the world politically, a new book argues.
by Siddhartha Mahanta via The American Prospect on October 3, 2025
Illustration of Henry Ford looking evil holding a town in his hand standing in a factory.

We’re Living in the World Henry Ford Built

Ford was a raving bigot and a tyrant who wanted complete control over his workers. Ford is a perfect example of why rich capitalists should not run the world.
by Nathan J. Robinson via Current Affairs on September 15, 2025
Amon Msane speaks at a press conference outside the 3M plant in Freehold, New Jersey, surrounded by leaders of OCAW Local 8-760. Stanley Fischer (beard, sunglasses) stands beside Msane, 1986. (Courtesy of Stanley Fischer)

When South African Unionists Struck for US Workers

In 1986, black workers in apartheid South Africa walked off the job in support of New Jersey unionists; marking a rare moment of international labor solidarity.
by Jeff Schuhrke via Jacobin on May 20, 2025
Garment workers use sewing machines at a textile facility in New York City in 1975.

Tariffs and the Shop Floor

A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.
by Ron Whitehorn via Jacobin on April 26, 2025
A group of women textile workers outside of their boarding house.
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Lowell’s Forgotten House Mothers

As vital to the success of industrial New England as the mill girls who toiled in the factories were the women who oversaw their lodging.
by Sarah Buchmeier via JSTOR Daily on April 2, 2025
A Wages for Housework protest on Boston Common, June 1977.

The Fight for Wages for Housework

In the Seventies, one feminist movement campaigned to make domestic labour both visible and recompensed.
by Alice Vincent via New Statesman on March 5, 2025
Bethlehem Steel Mill.

The Steel Mill That Built America

Bethlehem Steel was the birthplace of skyscrapers, bridges, and battleships. What happened after the plant's furnaces went cold?
by Matthew Christopher via Atlas Obscura on February 25, 2025
A “mosser” with a load of seaweed bound for the agar factory in Beaufort, N.C.

When Fishermen Harvested Seaweed: The Agar Industry in Beaufort, N.C. during the Second World War

How a small factory off the coast of North Carolina played a role in the war.
by David Cecelski via davidcecelski.com on February 12, 2025
Skeletons in a museum posed with varying postures, as if they are performing different tasks.

Why Americans Are Obsessed With Poor Posture

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.
by Zoe Adams via The Nation on November 20, 2024

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.
by Gabriel Winant via New York Review of Books on September 30, 2024
Uncle Sam sleeping on the job, avoiding looking at x-rays of damaged lungs.

Asbestos Is Finally Banned in the U.S. Here’s Why It Took So Long.

The carcinogenic effects of asbestos have been known for decades. We should have banned it long ago.
by Naomi Oreskes via Scientific American on May 14, 2024
A member of the Una Sewing Co-op making a doll

Blocks for Freedom

Sewing for voting in post-Jim Crow Mississippi.
by William Sturkey via Southern Cultures on April 15, 2024
The cover of "Beyond Norma Rae" by Aimee Loiselle

Who Makes the American Working Class: Women Workers and Culture

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.
by Brock Schnoke via UNC Press Blog on March 13, 2024
A group of Transappalachain migrant workers in Department 312 of the Anderson Delco-Remy plant pose for a photograph in February 1953.

On the New Book, "Hillbilly Highway"

Recovering the long-overlooked significance of the “hillbilly highway” in the US, with implications for labor history as well as US history broadly.
by Max Fraser, Joseph Rathke via LaborOnline on December 15, 2023
Display selling nuts

“Girls, We Can’t Lose!”: In 1930s St Louis, Black Women Workers Went on Strike and Won

During the Great Depression, St. Louis's Funsten Nut Factory was racially divided. But Black workers went on strike — and got their white coworkers to join them.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Jacobin on November 8, 2023
Employees working at desks in post office

Guaranteed Income? 14th Grade? Before AI, Tech Fears Drove Bold Ideas.

Three-quarters of a century before artificial intelligence concerns, rapid advances in automation prompted panic about mass unemployment—and radical solutions.
by Jerry Prout via Retropolis on October 29, 2023
African American factory worker assembling an automobile engine.

How the UAW Broke Ford’s Stranglehold Over Black Detroit

The UAW's patient organizing cemented an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.
by Paul Prescod via Jacobin on October 23, 2023
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