HeinOnline’s Labor and Employment: The American Worker

HeinOnline offers a core digital library package that contains nearly 3,000 legal journals published in more than 60 different countries, including thousands of Australian, Canadian, and European legal materials and multiple international government publications. This vendor also has several other databases can be attached to this core collection, and “Labor and Employment: The American Worker” is one of them.

It contains thousands of books, published from the early twentieth century to the present; hundreds of scholarly articles, ranging from 1904 to the present (with new articles added each month), on various topics, including labor contracts, collective bargaining, employment protections, and the history of the labor movement; and more than 10,000 subject-coded titles. Also available here are current reports on working conditions, legislative histories, Supreme Court case briefs, and a chart of landmark court cases in labor and employment (including the synopsis and full text of each case and an explanation of its significance in both jurisprudence and history), ranging between 1842 and 2018. When these and all the other categories of materials in this database are combined, it contains 10,984 titles, 14,659 volumes, and 5,244,894 pages.

As with all databases that provide images of original documents, the readability of the materials here can vary, but thankfully none appear to be illegible. Navigating, rotating, enlarging, and reducing these documents can usually be done without difficulty. Database content can be browsed and/or searched for in numerous ways, all of which are understandable and which generally produce useful results. However, searches by title or description are often the least productive, while those in the full text are far more so. Pricing for this resource is vague, as it is determined by an institution’s location (i.e., in the United States or not), whether it has a law library, and other factors not specified by the vendor. Consortia discounts are also available. The content available here is impressive and will prove valuable to students and researchers of US labor history, especially those looking for case law, legislation, and other government publications on this topic. The licensing agreement for this database is too long, but is not unusual in its provisions, and should provide little cause for concern.