There are four distinct types of documents within this collection: proceedings, legislative voting records, selected publications of the CIO, and California AFL-CIO News. The name "California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO" is used as the organization name for all publications other than those that were published by the CIO before its merger. The organization's prior names, e.g., "California State Federation of Labor," are included in the metadata as added name entries.
The default display of these four classes of documents is by year, earliest first. To retrieve all publications in a single year or series of years, enter those years in the Search box (e.g. 1901, 1902). Do not enter dates with a dash to signify a time period, e.g., 1901-1905; this will not return results properly.
Because there are essentially just two organization names, the Federation itself and the CIO before its merger with the Federation, it should not very difficult to identify documents by date or date range.
Some key highlights of this collection include:
Resolutions: The record of resolutions that were adopted by the Federation provides an interesting record of social issues facing unions, employers and workers at any given time.
Voting Records: The Federation closely followed labor legislation from its earliest days as an organization. The proceedings volumes and other publications provide a list of labor issues and corresponding votes by legislators. All documents that cover legislative issues have been grouped together for easy searching by year. The format for these data varies over the years; in the earlier volumes, the data appear as a section within the text, and later on they become sufficiently important to be published separately, as The Sacramento Story and Force for Progress.
Special Note Regarding Legislative Voting Records for Certain Years Between 1945 and 1962
California AFL-CIO News: The News covers strike activity, union-management dialogue and conflict, political news and profiles of the everyday lives of union members. It is anticipated that a full run of the News will be added to this collection by the end of 2009.
Using this Web Site: The metadata surrounding each document is searchable, but not the full text of the document itself. Therefore the best results will be gained by first searching by date, and then downloading the document.
Searching with Adobe Acrobat: The text of the PDF document may be searched very effectively using Adobe Acrobat (8.0 or higher recommended). Download the file and select the search function (this may appear as a "binoculars" icon in the tool bar). For example, in Volume 2, No. 48 of California AFL-CIO News, Entering the string "Burns Committee 1959" returns three instances, which are highlighted.
Contact
Terence K. Huwe
Director of Library and Information Resources
thuwe@library.berkeley.edu