PROGRESSIVE ERA REFORM & CONFLICT
This 1912 strike of immigrant textile workers popularized the demand for “bread and roses.”
What is the Lawrence Textile Strike?
This term was used to describe informal gathering spots where unemployed, primarily Black, women sought domestic day jobs in the 1930s.
What were “slave markets” during the Great Depression?
Passed in 1935, this law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively.
What is the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)?
Founded in the 1930s, this federation organized workers across entire industries rather than by craft.
What is the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)?
During World War II, this board mediated labor disputes in war industries.
What is the National War Labor Board?
What is the Ludlow Massacre?
These grassroots organizations, led in part by the Communist Party, mobilized jobless workers in the 1930s through protests and relief activism.
What are unemployed councils?
This 1938 law established the federal minimum wage and overtime pay.
What is the Fair Labor Standards Act?
This 1936–37 factory occupation forced General Motors to recognize the UAW.
What is the Flint Sit-Down Strike?
This guest worker program brought Mexican laborers to U.S. farms during WWII and after.
What is the Bracero Program?
During the Progressive Era, reformers debated how democracy could coexist with industrial capitalism under this label.
What is the Labor Question?
During this stretch of time during the 1930s, housewives protested and boycotted butchers for price gouging.
What is the Meatless Summer of 1935?
This New Deal law created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
What is the Social Security Act?
This distinction separates unions organized by skill from those organized by industry.
What are craft unions vs. industrial unions?
This wartime law expanded federal power to seize plants.
What is the Smith–Connally Act?
This 1908 Supreme Court case upheld a maximum hours law for women, proving an exception to legal trends.
What is Muller v. Oregon?
This Southern union, founded by the Communist Party in 1931, organized Black and White tenant farmers despite violent repression.
What is the Sharecroppers’ Union?
This federal agency, created in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enforces anti-discrimination law in employment.
What is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)?
Comparison between the major integrated steel firms that accepted the Wagner Act and smaller steel producers who violently resisted unionization. Most relevant during the 1930s and 1940s.
What is Big Steel v. Little Steel?
During this early-20th-century legal era, courts relied on “freedom of contract” to strike down labor regulations.
What is the Lochner Era?
During the Depression, Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens were forcibly removed in this campaign.
What is repatriation?