Norm Diamond

Norm Diamond

Norm Diamond is an Oregon Trustee of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association. He was president of Pacific Northwest Labor College. He is co-author of The Power In Our Hands: A Curriculum On the History of Work and Workers in the United States (Monthly Review Press), which includes a chapter on teaching the Bread and Roses strike.

All Content By This Author

Labor Songs

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 7
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Students explore the power of songs to build solidarity and increase understanding. This is the final activity from Bigelow and Diamond’s labor history book, The Power in Our Hands, and draws on the other lessons.

It’s a Mystery — White Workers Against Black Workers

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 8
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
In this “mystery” activity, students receive clues and discuss some of the factors that contributed to the intensification of racism in the 1920s in the United States.
Factory workers | Zinn Education Project

Free to Think, Talk, Listen, or Sing

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 6
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 6 pages.
Students work with a chapter from Milton Meltzer’s classic book, Bread and Roses, to see the impact of late 19th century factory work on workers’ home lives.

Paper Airplane Simulation

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 4
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 4 pages.
Students make paper airplanes to learn about the origins and effects of “scientific management,” owners’ attempts to capture workers’ skills and knowledge and then to exploit that knowledge to reorganize work and cut costs by deskilling workers.
Suffragist and labor leader Agnes Nestor | Zinn Education Project

Birth of a Rank-and-File Organizer

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 7
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Writing activity for students to complete the narrative of women workers striking at a glove-making factory, exploring possible outcomes.

The 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 20
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 20 pages.
Students “become” several of the social groups who participated in the 1934 Longshore Workers Strike — some of whom had to answer the question, “Which side are you on?”
Fasanella - The Great Strike | Zinn Education Project

One Hundred Years After the Singing Strike

Resource Types: Articles
By Norm Diamond
Today’s Occupy movement is a reminder that throughout U.S. history a major engine of change has been grassroots organizing and solidarity. As an old Industrial Workers of the World song goes:

An injury to one, we say’s an injury to all, United we’re unbeatable, divided we must fall. —“Dublin Dan” Liston, The Portland Revolution

Major history textbooks, however, downplay the role of ordinary people in shaping events, especially those who formed labor unions and used the strike to assert their rights. One of the most significant strikes in U.S. history occurred exactly 100 years ago, in the Lawrence, Mass. textile mills, and yet it merits barely a mention in the most widely used U.S. history textbooks.

Lawrence, 1912: The Singing Strike

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 18
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond.
Role play on the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.