Trades Union Congress papers
Collection
0005-LBR-RG95-004
The Trades Union Congress is a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, representing the majority of trade unions there. This collection consists of materials from a group visit by representatives of British shipbuilding unions to United States and Canadian shipyards. These papers include itineraries, reports on the shipyards visited, the draft and final reports to the British Minister of Labour, articles and clippings about the tour, and a lecture on the British Shipbuilding program.
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0.5 Linear Feet
The Trade Union Congress papers consist of materials from a group visit by representatives of British shipbuilding unions to United States and Canadian shipyards. The group of eight men represented electrical workers, boilermakers, shipwrights, machinists, sheetmetal workers, carpenters, engineers, plumbers, and pipefitters. They made the trip to study American methods of ship construction which could be of assistance to Great Britain's wartime shipbuilding industry. Contained in these papers are itineraries, reports on the shipyards visited, the draft and final reports to the British Minister of Labour, articles and clippings about the tour, and a lecture on the British Shipbuilding program.
The papers were donated to the George Meany Memorial Archives in 1989 by John Lloyd, the National Officer in the Education Department of the Electrical Electronic Telecommunication and Plumbing Union in Kent, England. They were removed from the papers of Robert M. Praine, a member of the delegation who represented the Electrical Trades Union.
The George Meany Memorial Archives transferred these records as part of a major transfer of their archive and library holdings to the University of Maryland Libraries in 2013.
Nineteen photographs were removed and added to the photographic collection (probably RG96-001 but this cannot be confirmed due to lack of further information). These images portrayed the delegation and the shipyards mainly in Marinship in Sausalito, California.
Archives staff at the George Meany Memorial Archives initially processed these records in 1989. The University of Maryland Libraries received the records and the finding aid in 2013. In 2017, Bria Parker exported and cleaned the finding aid contents from the Eloquent Systems database using OpenRefine, and finally transformed the finding aids into Encoded Archival Description (EAD) using a series of programmatic scripts. The finding aid was ingested into ArchivesSpace in 2017, at which point Jennifer Eidson updated the descriptive content for accuracy. Revisions include changes to biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and the creation of new collection numbers. Jennifer Eidson also enhanced custodial histories and re-wrote collection titles to better conform to archival standards.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives