International Workers’ Day is May 1.
8
Date in April that National Library Workers Day was celebrated this year. Since 2004, it has been commemorated on the Tuesday of National Library Week.
25,000
Number of library workers represented by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). AFSCME represents more library workers than any other union in the US.
2024
Year that Jacqueline Jones’s No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Jones’s book documents the systemic barriers Black Bostonians faced in employment equality, despite the city’s abolitionist reputation.
22
Number of photos from the 1939 Harlan County (Ky.) Mine Strike available at University of Kentucky Libraries’ Bert T. Combs Appalachian Collection. The photos, taken during the Harlan County War—a multiyear conflict between miners and coal companies—show workers clashing with Kentucky National Guardsmen, who were deployed to intervene.
$1 million
Grant amount that University of California, Santa Cruz’s library received from the Mellon Foundation in 2024 to establish an archive chronicling the life and work of Dolores Huerta. The labor activist is most famous for cofounding United Farm Workers alongside César Chávez.
2,218
Number of playbills available in the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) Theatrical Programs collection, held in New York University Library’s Wagner Labor Archives. AEA has represented stage actors and stage managers for more than a century.
3
Number of survivors from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire whose oral histories are housed at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The fire is one of the deadliest workplace incidents in US history.
10
Number of strikes that labor historian Erik Loomis chronicles in his critically acclaimed book A History of America in Ten Strikes (The New Press, 2018). Loomis documents fights for the eight-hour workday, particularly the unrest in Chicago in 1886, the auto industry’s 1937 Flint (Mich.) Sit-Down Strike, and the 1990 Justice for Janitors Movement in Los Angeles.
