A
new report (PDF) by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Labor Studies Center argues that history textbooks exclude labor from the history that American schoolchildren learn. Their review of four leading high school history textbooks finds that the books:
- often implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) represent labor organizing and labor disputes as inherently violent;
- virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency;
- ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement; and
- pay scant attention to unionism after the 1950s, thus completely ignoring the rise of public sector unionization, which brought generations of Americans into the middle class and gave new rights to public employees.
Textbooks are incredibly political documents, as the recent Texas textbook controversies have reminded us. But by the time Texas got busy trying to write Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority into high school history books and Anne Hutchinson and Thurgood Marshall out, the struggles of working people and the contributions of their unions to foundational pieces of today's society such as the 40-hour work week and Social Security had already been largely written out. As the new report details, inclusion of labor history in school curricula has been under attack since the 1930s.