Papers, newspapers, and photographs made by working people organizing in Tompkins and Cortland counties, New York. They show how local unions backed each other's strikes, argued over strategy, and kept their members informed.
Everything here can be read online, searched, downloaded, and cited, for a class, a training, a campaign, or a dissertation.
The working papers of the Tompkins-Cortland Labor Coalition, later the Midstate Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. They run from the Coalition's first meetings in 1984 through the 1986 Cargill salt mine strike, the campaign for an Ithaca plant-closing law, the investigation of Smith Corona's layoffs, and the council's move into the AFL-CIO, with minutes, newsletters, organizing proposals, and financial reports along the way.
The Coalition's own newspaper, digitized from microfilm and searchable page by page. Its first issue led with the Cargill strike, and the same story runs through both collections.
More is being prepared: further batches of Labor Coalition records and more issues of The Working Press. Each new batch will be added to these collections or appear here as its own collection.
Using these materials
Find: search words that appear anywhere in the documents, or browse by topic, kind of document, and year.
Read: every item opens to its pages in reading order. Zoom in on any page to inspect handwriting, stamps, and signatures.
Download: each item comes as a PDF with searchable text and as a plain-text file.
Cite: each item has a permanent link and a ready-made citation you can copy.
The page text is machine-read and contains errors. Always check quotations against the page image.
What this archive leaves out
This archive publishes historical records, not research data. It never includes interview recordings or excerpts, private fieldnotes, internal documents shared by present-day partners, personal contact information, or unpublished maps of relationships between people and organizations.
Within the historical records, pages with home addresses, individual pay, or personnel disputes are held back, and so are newspaper articles still under copyright. If you see something that should not be public, write to ar2539@cornell.edu.
