AFL and AFL-CIO Office of the President, Jurisdiction Books
Collection
0020-LBR-RG1-041
This is a collection of jurisdiction books arranged by national and international union. The collection contains brief national and international union histories and chronologies compiled from various sources. Documents include: correspondence, memoranda, and telegrams between unions and federations (AFL, CIO, AFL-CIO) pertaining to jurisdictional issues, including charter applications, merger and amalgamation applications and notifications, and jurisdictional extension requests; minutes and resolutions from federation convention proceedings and executive council meetings regarding jurisdictional matters; no-raiding and other jurisdictional agreements between unions; and some press releases, newspaper clippings, and reports.
This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.
Theses volumes are spring bound and will need to be reviewed by the curator before photocopy or digitization requests are completed.
Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.
Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.
Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the reading room staff.
15.00 Linear Feet
This collection is significant not for the uniqueness of its contents (there are very few original documents; almost all are actual or indirect copies), but rather because the material in it is arranged chronologically by union. This arrangement facilitates research into a particular union's jurisdictional history. A volume on a particular union may also contain jurisdictional records pertaining to other unions prior to a merger or amalgamation with that union (e.g., the volume on Railway Clerks also contains material on Railway Patrolmen, Railroad Telegraphers, Sleeping Car Porters, etc.). This collection seems to have been originally created in the late 1950s, perhaps to document for constitutional compliance purposes the no-raiding agreements at the time of the merger between the AFL and CIO. Researchers will readily note additions made to particular volumes in the 1960s and 1970s.
These records are arranged alphabetically by national and international union and then chronologically. Union names embossed on the volumes' spines may not always correspond with the box listing since names in the latter are listed according to the most current name on record in an individual union's volume.
The George Meany Memorial Archives received these records in 1983. 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.
Archives staff at the George Meany Memorial Archives initially processed these records sometime between 1983 and 2013. The University of Maryland Libraries received the records and the finding aid in 2013. In 2017, Bria Parker migrated the information contained in this finding aid from the George Meany Memorial Archives' Eloquent system. All migrated finding aids have been cleaned using OpenRefine software and ingested into ArchivesSpace using programmatic scripts created in Python. Upon ingest, Rebecca Thayer reviewed and minor revisions to this finding aid. Revisions include changes to biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and the creation of new collection numbers. Rebecca Thayer also enhanced custodial histories and re-wrote collection titles to better conform to archival standards.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives