Kheel Center

Documenting the World of Work

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Happy New Year! 🥂

Another John Baer cartoon to ring in the new year! Happy 2025 everyone🥂🎉

📸Collection 5693 G

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Happy Holidays from the Kheel Center!

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the Kheel Center! We hope all who celebrate have a wonderful holiday with their family and friends.

📸5693 Labor Editorial John Baer Cartoons Collection

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Extended Holiday Break - 12/25 through 1/12

We are closed to the public starting tomorrow and will reopen Monday, January 13th, 2025. Happy Holidays!

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Look for the Union Label this Holiday Season!

One week until the holidays begin, is your shopping done? Check out these ILGWU posters urging consumers to look for union labels in the clothes they're shopping for! 🎁

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On This Day - Rose Pesotta

On This Day, December 15, in 1965 Rose Pesotta addressed the floor at the annual ILGWU convention.

Rose first joined the ILGWU in 1914 and was active early in the union, picketing, attending the union’s education classes, and taking trips to Unity House. Pesotta was elected as Vice President of the ILGWU in 1934, traveling across the country organizing strikes, including the UAW's Flint sit-down strike in 1937.

Along with her work for the union, Pesotta was a well-known author, worked for the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Trade Union Council. Rose also became known for her anarchist organizing and writings; most notably her volunterring for the defense in the Sacco and Vanzetti case in Boston, MA.

📸Kheel Center Flickr Digital Photo Collection

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Study Period & Final Exams

Cornellians, good luck as you study for exams and start writing papers this week/weekend! ✍️📝

Pictured above , Asian American ILGWU members of Local 23-25 take an English class sponsored by the union's prominent educational programs. These were developed in the 1960s to encourage their workers to learn skills to prepare them for success in their workplaces. This worker-family education program began offering ESL in New York City in 1986.

📸Kheel Digital Flickr Collections

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Kheel Center Poster Collections

Happy Monday! It's been a while since we showcased some #posters from our collections, so here's one titled: Against the Wall: Protest Posters of Three Centuries.

It displays a quotation from President Lincoln about worker solidarity and was released by several unions featuring the art of Robert Koehler (1886).

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Archives Feast 🍗🍴🍂

Thanksgiving was last week, but we're still celebrating an #ArchivesFeast here at the Kheel Center!🍴🍗

The ILGWU published this illustration as part of an advertisement in the New York Times Magazine, Collection 5780/125G.

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Alice Hanson Cook

Alice Hanson Cook (1903-1998) was a labor educator first, through her work with the YWCA industrial department, Textile Workers Union, and Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union Joint Board in Philadelphia. She continued by contributing to research at Cornell through the ILR Extension working on a project titled "Integrating of Unions and Community", where she was then recruited by ILR to teach Labor History and Union Administration courses. Beyond teaching and research, she supported local Ithaca women's groups such as the Ithaca American Association of University Women, Professional Skills Roster, and Tompkins County Chapter of National Organization for Women.

While she retired in 1973, she was far from done with labor rights activism: she continued on to write several amicus briefs for discrimination cases worldwide, worked for the Ford Foundation on a study about working women worldwide, and published "Women and Trade Unions in Eleven Industrialized Countries", among other publications. She also wrote an autobiography, "A Lifetime of Labor", where she describes her self-proclaimed "patchwork career". Now, a dorm on West Campus is named in her honor, Alice Cook House.

📸 Collection 4354/009

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Happy Thanksgiving! 🍗🦃🍂

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you have a wonderful time eating good food and spending time with loved ones.

📸Kheel Center Flickr Photo Collections, 3 Midvale Company employees looking over bushel baskets of Thanksgiving food prepared for F.L.U. on November 11, 1953.

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Happy Birthday Jacob Potofsky!

Happy Birthday to trade unionist and the second president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Jacob Potofsky!

Jacob Potofsky was a Ukrainian-born American labor union organizer and he stayed with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) for over 26 years! Potofsky was hailed by President Jimmy Carter as "one of the giants of the labor movement".

In the above image, Potofsky is pictured conversing with David Dubinsky.

📸 Kheel Center Flickr Photo Collections

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Scabiversary

Today, November 20th, is the anniversary of the first use of the word “scab” in print in 1816. The term was coined 200+ years ago by the Albany Typographical Society, referring to individuals who cross a picket line while workers strike. Here's some examples of the word "scab" mentioned in our collections.

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Anniversary of Ted Kheel

On this day November 12 in 2010, distinguished labor arbitrator and influential public advocate Theodore (Ted) Woodrow Kheel passed away. The Labor Management Documentation Center at Cornell was renamed the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives in 1996 after Ted Kheel and his wife Ann Sunstein Kheel in recognition of the Kheel family’s generous contributions to ILR and Cornell.

Born in Brooklyn in 1914 and graduating from Cornell with a degree in Law in 1937, Kheel went on work on the National Labor Relations Board and the National War Labor Board during World War II. Through his mediating abilities and private practice he reached acclaim for his work and was known to be a strong advocate for workers and management at the same time. He became known as the "Michelangelo of collective bargaining" mediating difficult labor disputes including the New York City Newspaper Strikes of 1962-1963, the NYC subway strike of 1966, the 1964 Railroad Strike, and the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers dispute. Using his expertise, he decided more than 30,000 disputes throughout his career as New York’s premier arbitrator serving under every New York City mayor from O'Dwyer to Beame and was active in the Kennedy/Johnson Administration. He was also a noted philanthropist, heading the Gandhi Society for Human Rights in the 1960s, which helped the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. raise money for the civil rights movement. 📸 #6021P Theodore Kheel Photograph Collection

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The Labor Action Coalition of New York was made up of union locals to integrate labor issues into the environmental movement, including avid advocacy against toxic chemicals and nuclear waste (Last Words, Jacqueline Dowd Hall)

📸Coll. 6092 Labor Action Coalition Records

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Happy Monday!

A bit of labor organizing humor for your Monday morning-- happy first full week of November! 🍁🍂🦃

📸Collection 6092 Labor Action Coalition Records

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Happy Halloween! 🍬🍭🍫

As you eat your Halloween candy, maybe consider... what was it really like working in a candy factory? And in the 1920s, they didn't know either! This study, published in a pamphlet titled "Behind the Scenes in Candy Factories" was produced by The Consumers' League of New York and set out to uncover the true conditions behind the production process of the food the public consumes. To learn more about the Consumers' League of New York and the Candy White List standards, explore Collection 5307.

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John Baer Voting Poster - Vote!

Just one of many voting cartoons by labor cartoonist, John Baer.

📸Collection 5693 G, Labor Editorial John Baer Cartoons, 1920-1949.