Box 1

The Rockford Building and Construction Trades Council records (1937-1981) are arranged in the four series established by the R.B.C.T.C. office: minutes of meetings, topical correspondence files, wage scales and contracts, and financial records.  With some exceptions this collection is complete in tracing the history of the Council from its founding in 1937: records from 1968 to the present have been retained in the R.B.C.T.C. office and will be added to the collection when no longer needed for current business. The first series contains minutes of regular and executive board meetings and runs from 1937 through 1968 without a break.  The minutes of the first organizational meeting (January 1937?) have been lost and the collection does not contain the original constitution and by-laws.  Topical correspondence files, arranged chronologically by year and alphabetically within each year, begin in 1951 and run through 1968.  Neither the Council nor the Center has been able to locate pre-1951 correspondence.  The third series, financial records, is the most complete and contains both general ledgers and member union account books (1937-1968).  Most of the contracts and agreements found in series four are available for the entire thirty year period. This collection documents not only the history of an important Rockford labor organization but also the local impact of major national events over the past forty years including the Great Depression, World War II, the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, the merger of the AFL and CIO, the increasing role of government in the construction industry, and the building boom of the 1960’s.  Researchers using this collection should search the Center’s Guide for related holdings which complement the R.B.C.T.C. records.