This week’s Point is written by Nick Juravich, Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies and author of the recently published Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.
What’s the Point?
A short, illustrated history of union newsletters and how they inspire this one
Proto-Point: An early front page of the FSU Newsletter, circa 1977
Here at The Point, we are mindful that all our wonderful FSU colleagues receive a lot of email. Seeing the latest edition of our bi-weekly missive land in your inbox, you could be forgiven for wondering why it is that we publish this newsletter, in addition to the weekly Nuts and Bolts emails our FSU leaders send out.
I – Nick Juravich, one of four Point committee members – am a labor historian. I joined the Point team, in part, because union newsletters are some of my favorite archival sources to use in research and teaching. These documents – from professionally-printed broadsheets to mimeographed pages with hand-drawn art – are packed with insights: the nuts and bolts of membership benefits and contract campaigns, of course, but so much more.
Before digital and social media content outstripped our capacity to consume it, union members used newsletters to build camaraderie, exchange and debate ideas, and connect their struggles to the wider world of labor organizing. On our trips to the University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) Reading Room—where our archivists and librarians steward an impressive collection of labor archives, including the FSU’s records—students are often amazed by the range of perspectives and materials they find in these records.
In the spirit of sharing this experience, FSU Vice President, archivist, and fellow Point committee member Jessica Holden and I have teamed up to put together this gallery of union newsletters from our UMass Boston Archives. Read on to see what inspires us as we put The Point together!
The back page of that same 1977 issue of the FSU Newsletter, featuring a report of clerical organizing in the UK with a tongue-in-cheek headline and a cartoon from the labor press.
Connecting union members to local resources and organizing
One fascinating newsletter in our archives is Shop Talk, launched by United Packinghouse Workers of America Local 616 after their “long strike” of 1954-55. The UPWA – which later merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and then the United Food and Commercial Workers – was vocally committed to racial and gender equality. Edited by Mary Beasley, a Black woman, Shop Talk carried news of the struggle to desegregate Boston schools, reports on farmworker organizing in California, and by, the 1970s, selections from Our Bodies, Ourselves and feminist newsletters that Beasley collaged for her fellow workers.
As UMass Boston History MA student Shannon Leary wrote in an excellent research paper last year, “Shop Talk serves as direct evidence of Local 616’s extraordinary efforts to foster community, support integration, end racial discrimination, and advocate for equity for women and people of color in the workplace—qualities that would be essential to the union’s culture and success, both immediately after the strike and beyond.” (quotation and photos reproduced with Shannon’s permission)
Standing in solidarity with the labor movement
In 1977, teachers in Franklin, MA were jailed and fined when they went on strike. FSU carried news of the strike, and our union’s response, in the FSU Newsletter (you can read all about Franklin’s strike at the MTA’s excellent “School Strike History” site).
Another union newsletter in our UASC collections is the Boston Union Teacher, the paper of our Columbia Point neighbors, the Boston Teachers Union (BTU). BTU featured the work of their own in-house cartoonist on covers throughout the 1980s (as seen below), and like our FSU Newsletter, urged BTU members to support labor struggles across Greater Boston.
A front page from the Boston Union Teacher, 1980. BTU members fondly remember the hand-drawn covers of this era of their union newspaper.
In the midst of a fight with Boston Mayor Kevin White over budget cuts, the Union Teacher still covered the strike of Boston School Bus Drivers in a two-page spread in this 1980 issue.
These pages were reproduced as part of a digital exhibit, BTU Standing in Solidarity, built by UMB History MA student Maci Mark for a Digital Public History course in 2022. Mark turned their interest in this strike into an oral history project with the Boston School Bus Drivers Union, now also housed at UMass Boston.
And finally … cries for contributions!
While we don’t have an image to share with you here, one constant in union newsletters are the pleas for participation from editorial committees. The best issues of any union newsletter feature a range of voices, ideas, and perspectives, and that, too, inspires us at The Point. If anything you see here motivates you to share or suggest a Point essay for the future, get in touch!
The committee for this year’s The Point includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.