Iowa Labor History Oral Project - ILHOP

09/06/2021

Celebrate Labor Day with our new episode!

Keokuk teachers stand strong and demand the school board drop the Rainbow Schedule before teachers will agree to leave jail or stop the public pressure. But, even as they celebrate the jail cell contr

05/03/2021

Notes from the Archive: The Typographical Union organized workers at the University of Iowa's newspaper, the Daily Iowan, including students, as far back as the 1920s.

02/23/2021

with Richard Breaux | Richard Breaux needed a hobby. He began collecting 78 rpm records as a break from his work as a profess...

02/23/2021

Introducing: The Studs Terkel Radio Archive Remix Contest! The Studs Terkel Radio Archive is proud to present our first ever reuse competition! We have been lucky enough to have our materials used by film-makers, museums, and students over the years, now we want to hear from YOU! This is your chance...

01/30/2021

A wonderful appreciation by one of our current ILHOP advisory board members (Shel Stromquist) for one of our founders, Ellis Hawley:

In Memoriam Ellis W. Hawley (1929–2020) Historian of the United States; AHA 50-Year Member Shelton Stromquist | Dec 23, 2020 Ellis Hawley, a much-admired historian of the 20th-century United States, died on September 15, 2020. He was a beloved faculty member, colleague, and mentor to a veritable a...

01/23/2021

Check out (and share!!) Episode 3 of our first season of Speaking of Work, "They Jail Teachers, Don't They?," in which we dive deep into the Keokuk school workers' strike of 1970.

In the spring of 1970, Keokuk teachers and other school workers launch an illegal strike to shine a bright light on injustices that they believe threaten not only them but their students and community

10/23/2020

Announcing our new podcast, Speaking of Work! The first season, Citizen Worker, focuses on the struggles of Iowa's public-sector workers from the 1960s to today. You can find, subscribe, and rate the podcast on Apple, Google, or Stitcher, and find more information .org. https://soundcloud.com/ilhop/citizen-worker-e1-trailerkeokuk-before-the-strike-remix

A remix of our season opener.

09/07/2020

Happy Labor Day! Today is a great day to kick back and listen to the stories of Iowa workers, past and present. Check out this archive edition from Iowa Public Radio featuring voices from ILHOP:

This program originally aired on Septmeber 5, 2019.Since the late 1970s, the Iowa Labor History Oral Project has been collecting interviews from the…

05/18/2020

Check out (and share) this new video from the University of Iowa's Obermann Center featuring the work of ILHOP and the rest of the UI Labor Center! It's part of the Obermann Center's series on how people from across the university are responding to the pandemic.

In this conversation, we talk with two members of the Iowa Labor Center (https://laborcenter.uiowa.edu/) about the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on workers ...

05/12/2020

The current health and safety crisis in meatpacking is part of a much longer history of packinghouse workers' struggles on and off the job. In this clip from ILHOP, Mario Ruiz describes workers' use of collective action to defend fair pay against employers' demands for ever faster production at a plant in Illinois:

The Iowa Labor History Oral Project was founded in 1974 to record the stories of Iowa workers and their unions. It is a joint project of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, the University of Iowa L

05/06/2020

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the teachers' strike in Keokuk, Iowa, which paved the way for collective bargaining rights for all Iowa public employees. Since we can't hold an event in Keokuk, we're sharing stories from ILHOP. Here is Billie Peters-Anderson, who, in 1970, went to jail with other leaders of the Keokuk Education Association to defend teacher rights.

In 1970, faced with a school board that refused to negotiate, Keokuk teachers engaged in an illegal strike to bring attention to their cause. One of the teachers arrested was Billie Peters (later Pete