Adolfho Romero
  • BOCES Employees Association
  • BOCES Teachers Association
  • Bricklayers Local 17
  • Carpenters Local 603
  • Civil Service Employees Association Local 561
  • Civil Service Employees Association Local 605
  • Civil Service Employees Association Local 849
  • Civil Service Employees Association Local 855
  • Cornell Security Employees Union
  • Cortland United Teachers
  • Electrical Workers Local 43
  • Electrical Workers Local 79
  • Electrical Workers Local 241
  • Electrical Workers Local 961
  • Fire Fighters Local 1737
  • Fire Fighters Local 2737
  • Ithaca Paraprofessionals Association
  • Ithaca School District Employees Association
  • Ithaca Teachers Association
  • Laborers Local 589
  • Machinists Local 1607
  • Machinists Local 1608
  • Musicians Local 132
  • National Writers Union
  • Operating Engineers Local 71 & 71A
  • Operating Engineers Local 545
  • Painters Local 178
  • Plumbers Local 267
  • Postal Workers Local 1151
  • Public Employees Federation Local 251
  • Service Employees Local 200A
  • Sheetmetal Workers Local 112
  • TCCC Faculty Association
  • Teamsters Local 65
  • United Auto Workers Local 802
  • United Auto Workers Local 1326
  • United Auto Workers Local 1774
  • United Auto Workers Local 2300
  • United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1
  • United Steel Workers of America Local 12460
  • United University Professions
Member unions, as printed down the margin of the Coalition's letterhead in 1994 (see the letter).

Labor Coalition records

Tompkins-Cortland Labor Coalition and Midstate Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, 1984–2003

For two decades, local unions in Ithaca, Cortland, and the surrounding counties pooled their strength through this coalition. They supported each other's strikes, trained members in health and safety, ran a labor newspaper, and tried new ways to organize. These are its working papers, photographed from the originals.

Start with the 1986 Cargill salt mine strike, the fight over plant closings and Smith Corona, or how the Coalition was founded and joined the AFL-CIO. Or search the text of every page.

213 items and 503 page images, mostly from 1984 to 2003. The earliest is a 1973 AFL-CIO rulebook the Coalition kept with its affiliation papers.

Cargill salt mine strike, 1986The 1986 strike by IAM Local 1607 at Cargill's salt mine in Lansing, and the community campaign to support it.Founding and the AFL-CIOHow local unions formed the Coalition in 1984, and how it joined the AFL-CIO as the Midstate Central Labor Council in 1992–1994.Plant closings and Smith CoronaThe fight for an Ithaca plant-closing law (1985–1989) and the investigation of Smith Corona's layoffs in Cortland (1989–1992).

Showing all 213 items

About these records

The originals belong to the Tompkins-Cortland Labor Coalition records, collection 6185 at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library. Adolfho Romero photographed them for research on worker power in the Tompkins County labor movement. Three batches of photographs, 503 page images, are online so far; more will follow. Pages photographed more than once in the same batch appear only once.

When did the Coalition begin? Its 1984 papers show unions meeting at Cornell's ILR Extension in February 1984 and electing the first officers that June. Later documents disagree: a 1996 grant proposal says 1982, and a 1997 press release says 1984.

Many folders were photographed back to front. Each item here is shown in reading order, and every page lists the file and page number it came from. Where a document was photographed more than once, the extra copies appear below the first.

What is not online

Some pages from this batch are not published: petitions and phone lists with home addresses, records about individual staff members' employment and pay, a 1998–99 personnel dispute, and newspaper articles still under copyright. Mailing labels on newsletters have been covered. The originals remain available to researchers at the Kheel Center.

Copyright not evaluated. Copyright in these documents may belong to the organizations and people who created them. They are shared here for study, teaching, and organizing education. If you hold rights in an item, or think something should not be public, write to ar2539@cornell.edu.

Download the catalog as CSV or JSON. File checksums are in the manifest.