The History of Unions: America and the World

How working people organized, and what it cost them. The American arc from the Knights of Labor and Haymarket through the Triangle fire, the Wagner Act, Taft-Hartley, Memphis, and PATCO to today's union density, told with the parts a comfortable course skips: the law's deliberate exclusion of farm and domestic workers, unions' own record of racial and gender exclusion, and the corruption chapters. Then the world: there is no single "union" model. Nordic sectoral bargaining, German co-determination, Japanese enterprise unions, China's state-run federation, Solidarity and COSATU as democratic opposition, and the Gulf's migrant workers, who have almost no rights at all. You finish able to look at any country and ask the right four questions. Cited throughout to BLS, the NLRB, the ILO, the OECD, the Library of Congress, and the statutes themselves.

Meets 88 academic standards across 31 jurisdictionsshow

Coming soon

This course is being reviewed

Every course on Learn.WitUS is checked against its sources before it opens, so the lessons are not available yet. What the course covers is above, and any academic standards it meets are listed with it. Enrollment opens when the review is finished.

Want to help this course open? Test it, or vet it →

Put your name in

A course is checked against its sources before it opens. If you want to read it early and send notes, or you know this subject well enough to check the claims, say so here. The instructor decides who reviews their own course, so this is a request, not a login.

How would you like to be involved?

I want to take this courseTell me when it opens. Nothing else is expected of you.I will test this course before it opensRead it early and send notes on what is confusing, broken, or wrong. Nothing you do is recorded, so no progress, no scores, no certificate.I can vet this course as a subject matter expertCheck the claims and the sources against what you know. Tell us your background below so the instructor can weigh it.

Your name

Email address

How we reply, and how a review invitation would reach you.

Phone number (optional)

Include your country code, for example +44 20 7123 4567 or +1 555 0100.

Anything else (optional)

Anything you want the instructor to know.

Your phone number and your background are shown only to this course's instructor and this school's admins. They are never published, never sold, never added to a mailing list, and never sent to any other service. Both are optional: leave them blank and email is enough.

Your name, your email address, and which of the three you picked go to the WitUS team's inbox so a person actually reads this and replies.

Already studying this course? Sign in and it will open as usual.