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The NYLHA Working Group is an energetic group of young people who have been holding monthly meetings since January 2013.  They organized a night of short films on contemporary organizing drives for the very successful Second Annual Workers Unite! Film Festival in May 2013.

Their latest project is a poster now being widely distributed among unions and labor history groups.  The aim of the poster is to attract a new generation of labor activists.  Together they continue to work to create programs and opportunities to learn about the hidden history of labor.

Currently, they are working on organizing walking tours, setting up a book club, and organizing an evening of films for the upcoming Third Annual Workers Unite! Film Festival.

Interested?  E-mail them at nylhaworkinggroup@gmail.com, or join their Facebook group: New York Labor History Association Working Group.

Download the PDF version of the poster here: NYLHA learn history poster

Our thanks to everyone who made the John Commerford Labor Education Awards reception, held on December 3, 2013, so successful.  This includes the more than 150 people who attended; the awardees; Barbara Bowen,  President of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, and Eric Foner, prize winning historian, for their excellent remarks; Gail Malmgreen for coordinating the event; Rachel Bernstein for her help in securing the site and other important support; Regina Olff for arranging for the food; Loraine Baratti, Art Fleischner, Philoine Fried, Jane Latour and Kimberly Schiller for their work at the event; President George Gresham, President of 1199 SEIU, United Healthcare Workers East, for providing the site; and our patrons whose financial support made the evening possible:

• AFSCME, DC 37
• Center for Worker Education, CCNY
• Larry Cary, Esq.
• Local 372, DC 37
• Local 1930, DC 37
• New York State United Teachers
• Organization of Staff Analysts
• Professional Staff Congress/CUNY
• United Federation of Teachers

More details on the wonderful event will follow in our next newsletter, Work History News, which will be mailed out to members and available on this website soon!

The New York Labor History Association is proud to announce that the 2013 Barbara Wertheimer Prize is being awarded to Sarah Stern for her senior honor’s thesis, “We Cast Our Lot with the Farm Workers’: Organization, Mobilization, and Meaning in the United Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in New York City, 1967-70.” Stern’s paper is a NYU Honors thesis written for Linda Gordon. Rather than look at either the UFW or the farm workers themselves, she focuses on the New Yorkers who made the boycott a cause of their own. Relying on letters in the UFW archives at the Reuther Library at Wayne State, the paper is very well written. Her discussion of the boycott as a broad-based social justice movement in NY in the late-60s is particularly relevant to the efforts to revitalize labor today. An abstract of her paper will be posted on the NYLHA website.