Documenting Labor Inside and Out
Internal Documents
Meeting Minutes
Usually, the constitution or the by-laws of a union (or its local) will
designate one of the union's officers, most commonly the secretary, to keep minutes of
meetings of the union's leadership. These minutes are some of the most valuable resources
available to a researcher looking to learn more about a labor organization.
Minutes may come in either handwritten or typewritten form and can vary in the amount of detail given (and also the legibility of the penmanship), in part because the officers of labor unions are usually elected officials and the position of secretary may be held by many different individuals over the years. Even the briefest minutes, however, provide information about who the officers of the union were at any given time, the kind of governing body that the union had (such as a board of directors or an executive board of some sort), and a brief overview of the union's activities.
Depending on the amount of detail included (sometimes verbatim
transcripts are kept), meeting minutes covering only a few years may take up hundreds or even
thousands of pages. Microfilming these records can reduce the amount of storage space they
require, as well as ensure that their content will be preserved for hundreds of years.
Currently archival microfilm has a life expectancy of five hundred years. While it is
sometimes difficult to imagine scholars being interested in a union's records only three
or four years after they were created, imagine the value of those records in three or four
hundred years to a scholar interested in labor conditions in the late twentieth and
early twenty first centuries. In addition, microfilming records, or even photocopying
them onto acid-free paper, ensures their longevity while allowing the union or local
donating the records to the archives to keep a copy of the materials for its own use.
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