By Bill Usher, MAL Legislative Committee

This month I will deviate a little from my usual subject matter and tell you about an interesting labor History Project I was fortunate enough to be associated with. It was the Labor Review Archive Project. Since I am one of our Union’s delegates to the Central Labor Union Council I was able to volunteer to help with this effort. I became part of a committee of four and our job was to somehow archive all the back issues of the Labor Review.

The Labor Review is the Minneapolis Union paper put out by the Central Labor Union Council, CLUC, which is the local AFL-CIO organization. Many of our members get this paper because we are an AFL-CIO affiliated Union. This little Paper has been running continually since 1907.

It has always covered local Union news, whether it was strike coverage, contract negotiations, or issues pertaining to the labor movement as a whole. This paper used to be much larger just as the labor movement in this country was much larger. A much higher percentage of the American work force was unionized in the past. The labor Review was there reporting all that happened all these years.

Some leaders in the CLUC started to become concerned about the state of some of the earlier issues of the paper. They were all stored in plastic tubs in an office in the United Labor Center. Some early issues were becoming brittle and discolored with age. A way had to be found to save these 97 years of labor history.

A former editor of the review, Wally Nelson, came up with a plan to save all the back issues of the Review. He was instrumental in starting a new company in Minnesota called ArcaSEARCH. This company does digital archiving of old, newspapers, documents, books, or text anyone wants saved and put on computer. The President of the CLUC, Bill McCarthy was also very concerned about saving the review and all the labor history in it’s pages and started getting people together to preserve all this important history.

So a committee was started chaired by a member of AFSCME Glenda Meixall, and three others including myself with a lot of great help from the review’s present editor Steve Share. We found out we could photograph every page of every issue and put all this on a web-sight hosted by the ArcaSEARCH Company. To save costs we rented the equipment and started the shooting.

The number of pages we had to shoot was mind numbing. So we enlisted a group of volunteers including our own Jerry Kolb, MVS and Don Sevre, past local officer and the State President of the APWU. We ended up with about 40 volunteers mostly from various local unions and began the actual archiving April 26. We photographed over 20,000 pages. Virtually every page of every issue was shot.

The process of digitizing the papers was actually pretty simple. We would put a page of the paper on a flat table which had a high quality digital camera mounted above it. Two strobe lights were used to insure good lighting and the camera and lights were synchronized by the computer. Each issue was shot and became a computer file. To start the next file the date of the next issue became the file name. After shooting was completed all the files were sent to ArcaSEARCH and will soon be put on a web-sight hosted by this company. One of the most exciting things about this whole project is that this web-sight will be available to the public for free. By simply registering and using you own made up password you will be able to read years of labor history including the Great Postal Strike of 1970.

Also if you have a relative who was active in the labor movement in the past you can find any articles about this person written by people who lived these events.

So as soon as this sight is up and running which should be a matter of a few weeks we will put out a bulletin to let you know how to log on. Please take the time to visit this sight as it will be full of rich Union history and everyone will be able to learn about the sacrifices and hardships our predecessors had to endure so that we can enjoy decent standard of living.

I would like to thank President Jerry Sirois for encouraging me to be part of this endeavor and also would like to thank the committee members, Chairperson Glenda Meixell, AFSCME local 3159 and Wes McGee, AFSCME local 34 and John Niedenfuer Painter’s Union local 385. Also a special thanks to Steve Share the Editor of the Labor Review who’s time and effort helped make this project a success. And a very special thanks to our own local members who because of a generous and unanimous vote at a general membership meeting donated 500 dollars to help sponsor this worthy effort.