I’ll have to go back to the oral history and tell you… It’s been a while since I read it originally. I do remember it was somewhere in NC, but not sure what city off the top of my head. That might give you an idea of where to look, as far as newspaper archives. At some point, many of these oral histories will go up online and be accessible to the public and searchable. I think the archivist I’m working for wants this stuff to be up in the next year or two. But you can always go to the website and see what she already has up and digitized with regards to the labor collection:
http://library.gsu.edu/search-collections/special-collections-archives/southern-labor-archives/
[ETA] I’d guess that the shift to ignoring labor unrest really came after the PATCO strike fiasco in 1980. Pretty much from there on out, people felt they could come down harder on organized labor… the president did it to the one union which backed his candidacy, so why not… But yeah, there is very little news on organized labor anymore. The last big stories I remember was the big port strike out west and the attempt by Boeing to move to SC, which the Labor Board nixed…
It’s just too bad it’s only for the semester and not a full time gig!
Oh, the link was found in some search engines to say a racial slur (not a problem in Google, but Bing, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go all had it). @jerwin has a screen shot, but the link doesn’t go anywhere. I think @funruly probably has the best explanation for why some of us were getting that result in our searches…