The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives in Cornell University’s ILR School is pleased to announce the digitization of over 2800 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) which are freely available via Catherwood Library’s open access institutional repository DigitalCommons@ilr. CBAs reveal the relative negotiating strengths of employers and unions, documenting elements of emerging, accepted, declining, and discarded business models and social standards. With funding from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, contracts covering 100 years of education and retail work join 2000 US Department of Labor CBAs and 8500 contracts from the New York State Public Employment Relations Board already available on the document portal.
Digitization of these resources not only permits wider access, it facilitates broadly comparative and computational research that is functionally prohibited by page locked documents. In addition to the descriptions of jobs, hours, wages, and terms of employment, agreements shed light on questions related to the family, gendered labor, changing technologies, minorities and immigrants, religious participation, health and safety issues, employer and employee obligations to their wider communities, trade and international relations, and social and environmental crises.
Further online sources of CBAs can be found in the Catherwood Library Guide to Labor Unions and the Internet, and an additional 120,000 agreements are available in the Kheel Center’s print and microfilm contract collections. We welcome your research inquiries and use of the collections.
