American Rights at Work
U.S. nonprofit organization

American Rights at Work (ARAW) was a U.S. self-described nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for workers and their right to form unions without interference.
ARAW received funding from unions affiliated with both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition, but its board of directors and day-to-day activities are not controlled by either labor group.
American Rights at Work merged with Jobs With Justice in 2012.
Leadership
The chair of the organization's board, David Bonior, took a leave of absence in December 2006 to chair the presidential election campaign of former U.S. Senator John Edwards. Other board members include Julian Bond and Bradley Whitford.
The executive director of ARAW is Kimberly Freeman Brown. The founding executive director was Mary Beth Maxwell.
See also
Labor movement
Labor history of the United States
Notes
References
"American Rights At Work: Labor laws not strong enough." Workers Independent News. July 7, 2005.
Castillo, Juan.
“American Rights at Work” enters the record as u.S. nonprofit organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, Rights and Work can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“American Rights at Work” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, American, Rights and Work provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4744836. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2006 and 2005.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “American Rights at Work”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow American Rights at Work primary sources, American Rights at Work archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “American Rights at Work”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “American Rights at Work” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.