ORONO – People who grouse about today’s workplace conditions might find comfort in considering the struggle and sacrifice of 19th and 20th century worker advocates who protested 14-hour workdays and children as young as 12 quitting school to work in factories.

In those times, employees could be punished physically for poor job performance and blacklisted if they quit or were fired. Those were the days before workers’ compensation, paid holidays, benefits, minimum wage and laws to protect workers from sharp blades and grinders or toxins often used in manufacturing.

Many of the documents and records chronicling the contentious history of the labor movement and the evolution of unions in Maine are being archived at Fogler Library’s Special Collections Department thanks to the efforts of the UMaine Bureau of Labor Education and Richard Hollinger, head of Special Collections. The bureau recently acquired another in a series of donations of boxes loaded with files, letters and newspaper clippings from the state’s early labor movement activities.

The additional material increases the breadth and volume of Maine’s largest collection of labor movement archives, according to Bill Murphy, director of the UMaine Bureau of Labor Education.

The records, which also include newsletters, memos and labor contracts, among other documents, chronicle the unvarnished history of labor contracts, pickets, strikes – and progress – in the effort to improve working conditions in Maine’s textile and paper mills, the construction and transportation industries and even newspaper guilds.

The new material “helps to light up the shadows of area labor history by expanding the coverage and value of the existing collection,” said Charles Scontras, a research associate with the UMaine Bureau of Labor Education and author of six books or booklets on labor history in Maine.

The records being preserved on the Orono campus are reminders of how working conditions have improved over time.

“Everything has a history,” Scontras explained. “The world we know didn’t just fall out of the sky ready made. Once you start seeing the past in terms of those earlier working conditions, you inevitably have a new appreciation for the present. If people had an understanding about what went on in the past, they would have a different view of labor unions.”

The records provide researchers with an opportunity to view the history of communities “through the prism of labor organizations and labor struggles,” he added. They also offer fragments of information that shed light on the legal and ideological climate in which labor struggles occurred.

The archives “will serve all those who have forgotten, and those who never knew,” said Scontras, who worries that history not recorded is history forgotten.

Scontras believes the donated material also can help explain ethnicity as a component of local history, offer glimpses of workers and political activity, and reveal links between workers, their organizations and religious and charitable organizations. He maintains that the records will provide the basis for exploring the effects of changing technology and markets on workers and their communities, and help to explain the “de-industrialization” of the communities and the state.

Labor union officers responsible for making available more than 10 boxes of records pertaining to the textile industry included Perley Hodgkin, president of Local 406 at General Dynamics in Saco, George Lamontagne, president of Local 305 at Westpoint Holmes in Biddeford, and Ernie Loring, director of the New England Joint Board office of the United Needle and Industrial Textile Employees in Biddeford.

The Bureau of Labor Education, created by the state legislature and trustees of the University of Maine System in 1966, provides educational programs and conducts research on labor and labor-related issues of interest to workers, students, educators, members and officers of union organizations, and public policy makers.

The bureau’s collection includes records of the Maine AFL-CIO from the early years of the 20th century to the present, which provide a rich archival legacy of the story of Maine’s working men, women and children, Scontras said. They reveal labor’s struggle in the workplace, in the legislative halls, in the courts and in the streets, providing a glimpse of the advance of industrialism from the age of unbridled economic activity to calls for reform and regulation of the marketplace.

Additional information about the donated documents may be obtained by calling the Bureau of Labor Education at 581-4124, or Richard Hollinger, head of the Fogler Library Special Collections Department at 581-1688. Visit http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/ to learn more.