This comprehensive compilation of documents integrates institutional labor history (movements and trade unions) with aspects of social and cultural history. It charts changes in trade union and managerial practices and integrates the economics and politics of labor history. An impressive array of documents details household as well as industrial relations; women as domestic workers, unpaid household labor, and factory workers; African American, Hispanic American (especially Mexican and Mexican American), Asian and white workers. It offers readers insight into the full historical spectrum of workers, their daily lives, and the movements that they created.

1. Labor in the colonial and early national periods, to 1828
2. The rise of free labor, the factory system, and trades organization, 1828-1877
3. Workers in a maturing industrial society, 1877-1914
4. Wars, depression, and the struggle for industrial democracy, 1914-1947
5. The era of the postwar social contract, 1947-1973
6. Era of economic change and union decline, since 1973