Labor Culture

In 1912, 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, participated in what came to be known as the “bread and roses” strike. These workers—mostly women—struck to demand not only better pay and working conditions but also dignity and respect. The strikers staged shows and dances and organized huge marches, where they would sing, chant, and carry banners. One such banner read, “We want bread and roses too!” coining a slogan that would come to signify the American labor movement's efforts to inspire union members and to enrich their lives through culture. For many in the labor movement, culture is a means of envisioning and working toward a more just and decent world, and cultural tools such as music, art, and theater are an important part of the struggle for change.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the use of creative tactics developed as a widespread organizing strategy, largely because of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Wobblies, as they were known, created an extensive and unified workers' culture by using pamphlets, flyers, poems, drawings, cartoons, and labor ballads to reach and unite a diverse coalition of workers, including women, African Americans, immigrants, and unskilled laborers, into “one big union.”

During the Depression, many major American cities started workers' schools, which often included courses in art, music, creative writing, fiction, poetry, and drama. Many schools had their own theaters and staged art exhibits, musical celebrations, fiction readings, and plays. Also during this era, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and other unions started cultural divisions. These efforts represent the labor movement's recognition of the need to attend to the various dimensions of workers' lives.

Today, one of the best-known and widest-reaching cultural organizations in the labor movement is Bread and Roses, a program of 1199/SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Founded in 1979 by organizer Moe Foner, Bread and Roses provides cultural resources and arts education for union members and their families. In addition to offering classes, plays, concerts, and poetry programs, Bread and Roses holds regular art shows and photography exhibitions at Gallery 1199, the labor movement's only permanent exhibition hall, in New York City.

The Labor Heritage Foundation (LHF) was founded in 1982 by Joe Uehlein, a lifelong union activist and musician, to strengthen the labor movement through the use of music, art, poetry, theater, murals, posters, cartoons, puppets, film, and websites. The LHF sponsors the annual Conference on Creative Organizing to train union activists in the use of picket line songs, chants, skits, and other creative organizing tactics. They also run the Labor Culture Consulting and Referral Service, which counsels unions in the use of art and music at rallies and demonstrations, and the Great Labor Arts Exchange, an annual event that provides an opportunity for union activists, labor educators, artists, and musicians nationwide to share [Page 816]cultural resources and develop cultural programs for ongoing campaigns.

Other organizations exist to preserve labor culture and history. Labor Arts is a web-based archive of art and cultural artifacts by and about working people, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and murals, as well as posters, buttons, banners, flyers, badges, ribbons, cartoons, sheet music, and songbooks from the early 1900s. New York University's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives contain a unique and diverse archive of print materials, photographs, films, and oral history collections that document the history of the labor movement. Cornell University's Kheel Center maintains the Labor Photos database, a collection of thousands of images of work, union activities, and events in labor history.

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