Erasing Virginia’s labor history

History standards in Virginia are updated every seven years. The new proposed standards put forth by Governor Glenn Youngkin and his Virginia Department of Education would remove the American labor movement; the state’s labor movement is fighting back, and last week on the Your Rights At Work radio show, we talked with the Virginia Education Association’s Shane Riddle and Brian Peyton from Teamsters 322.

In our second segment, Labor History Today producers Mel Smith and Patrick Dixon get a hands-on feel for labor history when they visit the George Meany Memorial Archives at the University of Maryland College Park, where Ben Blake and Alan Wierdak showed off a collection of construction hardhats and talk about how such physical artifacts provide an entry point -- as well as a key to understanding -- labor history.

On this week’s Labor History in Two: Gompers embraces anti-immigrant legislation.

Be sure to stick around at the end of the show for a special bonus; a song by the R.J. Phillips Band which recalls the events of the Columbia Eagle incident in 1970,
when two merchant seamen staged a strike – at sea it’s called a mutiny -- against the war in Vietnam.  

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com

Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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