Ramble through archived issues of the Valley News from three-quarters of a century ago and you’ll find five, six or more mentions of local labor disputes every week. The 1950s were a time when the Upper Valley still had an extensive assortment of what today are dismissively called “Rust Belt” industries — textiles, shoe products, machine tool factories, railroads.

And along with these there were labor unions. Those old news stories regularly spoke of contract talks, bargaining issues, offers and counteroffers, threats of strikes, actual walkouts and then settlements. Those hard-nosed struggles would eventually fade as those old-line employers disappeared, taken down by the forces of globalization, changes in markets, weak management and new technologies.

During that era the Upper Valley had hundreds of union members who carried the cards of the CIO United Steelworkers, United Rubber Workers, United Textile Workers, International Fur and Leather Workers, Independent United Electrical Workers, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers or the International Garment Workers.

Yes, there are still unions around the Upper Valley today, but their complexion is vastly different from the industrial unions of the 1950s. Now education is easily the most unionized sector of the workforce, led by the numerous local bargaining units of the New Hampshire and Vermont Education Associations for teachers, accompanied by units for support staff, maintenance workers and, occasionally, administrators.

Virtually all civil service state employees in both New Hampshire and Vermont are covered by collective bargaining agreements, with subunits functioning for workers as diverse as snowplow drivers, prison guards, welfare office clerks and state troopers. Unionization of state, county and local government employees was cleared by enabling legislation in both states in the late 1960s and 1970s, perhaps the biggest breakthrough for organized labor nationally, as state after state lifted prohibitions on collective bargaining for public employees. This opened the way for the New Hampshire and Vermont Education Associations to become powerful forces raising teacher pay and benefits in local school districts. Several Upper Valley municipalities have unions for police, firefighters and public works employees.

Similarly, federal workers gained bargaining rights and currently many federal employees, such as postal workers, are covered by union-management agreements.

Beyond public service, the Upper Valley’s biggest union is the Service Employees International Union chapter composed of a range of support staff at Dartmouth College. This SEIU unit has attracted some national attention after the college’s men’s varsity basketball team recently voted to join up and begin bargaining over participation conditions. And there are other unions in the worker mix in the Upper Valley, notably for linemen, installers and other utility hands, transportation workers and parcel delivery personnel.

But none of these can match the footprint left by the CIO United Steel Workers in the Joy Manufacturing Co. operation in Claremont in the 1950s, when there were 1,500 union members turning out machinery for the then-booming American coal mining industry. Joy had its own foundry, rail car sidings and vast shop floors where skilled machinists fabricated complicated machines that bored into coal seams feeding the nation’s ravenous demand for heating and power generation.

The union won wages that were well ahead of prevailing pay scales in the region, and they accounted for Claremont’s era of prosperity and influence in the 1950s. But Joy would slowly wither and cease to operate by the 1990s. The company used threats of closure to get the City of Claremont to grant large tax concessions for a new plant but still it gradually pulled key manufacturing activity away from Claremont to other plants in Pennsylvania. That huge new factory lay idle until a Canadian fabricator of steel beams for bridges came along and put it to use.

Goodyear Tire and Rubber’s Windsor plant played a similar dominant economic role in Windsor in the 1950s. Actually the plant didn’t make much of anything out of rubber — its primary product was soles and heels for footwear made of a synthetic called Neolite. Yet the plant was always colloquially known as the “rubber shop” and employed hundreds of workers. It ran round-the-clock shifts who were summoned to work stations at 7 a.m., 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. by a factory whistle that could be heard as far away as six miles.

That legion of Goodyear Windsor workers were represented by the United Rubber Workers via a master contract negotiated by the United Rubber Workers and management at the firm’s base in Akron, Ohio. There were brief work stoppages from time to time and in 1957 when both sides had dug in for a long strike they abruptly settled. The shoe products line would shrink after shoe manufacturing left New England and Goodyear moved much of Windsor’s activity to Madisonville, Ky., and in 1987 Goodyear closed the “rubber shop” for good.

To the north along the Mascoma River, the textile industry had chronic labor unrest. There were almost continuous negotiations and occasional strikes involving Enfield’s Baltic Mill and, in Lebanon, the Mascoma Mill owned by American Woolen, Lebanon Woolen and Lebandale.

Mill owners squared off frequently with an old-school labor union man, Thomas Williams of Lebanon, who was the United Textile Workers chief agent for New Hampshire and Vermont. At one point in the 1950s, he represented close to 1,000 mill workers in the Mascoma Valley.

Williams was always on the firing line, and a typical struggle occurred in 1956. Owners of the Baltic Mill demanded the workers there take a pay cut. They had been working five years with no raise, and base pay was $1.22 an hour. The Baltic’s owner, Ameritron, had several other mills scattered around New England where the base pay was $1.51 hourly. Baltic was running three shifts a day, but Ameritron argued that its productivity lagged behind its other mills and workers had better cut wage costs or the mill would likely close.

Despite all of Williams’ best efforts, Baltic workers eventually settled for a reduction of 15 cents an hour. Two decades later the mill closed and today it sits as a vacant wooden hulk near Enfield Village.

In Lebanon, nothing can compare to the drama surrounding the antics of Boston financier-hustler Bernard Goldfine in 1957. He came to town seeming to be a savior for the community’s woolen industry, which had been teetering on the brink of collapse for a year. Workers were averaging $1.60 an hour and had been negotiating for better pay for months with no progress. Goldfine promised happy days ahead but soon there were doubts and in a twinkling the Lebanon mills were bankrupt, never to operate again — with 300 workers left jobless.

A few other items from those old Valley News files:

■In 1948 a strike at the E. Cummings tannery in Lebanon was averted at the last minute when the company agreed to a five-cent hourly pay hike. The tannery was demolished and the site is now apartment buildings.

■Train crews ended a one-week strike against the Boston & Maine Railroad in 1956. The last passenger service to Boston ceased 10 years later.

■The International Garment Workers union in 1953 won what was called a “Welfare Plan” that included health insurance for employees at the Carter & Churchill workwear shop in Lebanon.

■Larry Converse, for many years a union representative and negotiator for workers at the former Bemis Bag (now CPM) plant in Claremont as well as head of the Sullivan County Labor Council, marvels at how the unions today represent a vastly different community of workers.

“The work has changed, but workers still have concerns for fair wages and working conditions,” he wisely observed.

Meriden resident Steve Taylor is an occasional contributor to the Valley News.