This collection is organized into two series: 1. Labor and Political Activities, and 2. Unpublished Writings. The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, and minutes, reports, and other internal documents, principally from the Socialist Workers Party, and from the United Automobile Workers union. In addition to Cochran (often as E. R. Frank, or as "Burt" Cochran), notable correspondents and authors include George F. Addes, James Burnham, James Cannon, George Clarke, Farrell Dobbs, Vincent R. Dunne, Jules Geller, Rose Karsner, Homer Martin, Felix Morrow, A.J. Muste, Max Shachtman, Arne Swabeck, and Natalia Trotsky. There are also letters from SWP and UAW activists.

In the first series, the American Workers Party file (1935-36) contains discussion of the political and tactical issues involved in the "French Turn" (the mass entry of individual Trotskyists into the Socialist Party, so called after the tactic used in France). The bulk of the series provides concerns the SWP's activity within the automobile industry and the UAW, and the debates within the SWP on these matters. The documentation is most extensive for the years through 1943. There are lengthy analytical letters, confidential reports, club and auto fraction meeting minutes, leaflets and flyers distributed to the rank and file, and some UAW correspondence, minutes and other internal documents. Issues/events covered include: SWP internal debates on automobile industry and general labor union policy, UAW factionalism, 1937-39, and the SWP's initial support for President Homer Martin's faction, organizing auto workers, the conditions and status of auto industry workers employed under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and responses to labor measures adopted by the U.S. government during World War II.

There are also numerous reports and statements on the international political and military situation during World War II, two letters from/regarding the (Trotskyist) Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands (International Communist Party of Germany), and a copy of a 1944 letter from Natalia Trotsky relating to the nature of the Soviet Union. The post-World War II files contain reports and speeches and focus on national and international politics, notably Poland, Korea, and for Yugoslavia, a report from an SWP member who had visited Belgrade ca.1950. There is detailed discussion from 1945-46 of the political differences between the SWP majority and the Morrison (nee Albert Goldman) / Felix Morrow minority. There are also typescripts of several of Cochran's speeches from the 1950s on U.S. and international affairs.

Series two contains portions of two unpublished (and untitled and undated) manuscripts. The first is a partial manuscript (some 450 pp.), an explicitly Marxist study of warfare in human history that may have been written in the years preceding Cochran's study of post-World War II world politics and military policy, The War System(Macmillan, 1965). The second consists of one chapter, titled "Workers and Intellectuals" (ca.1978), from an untitled work.

Seeries three (unprocessed) contains correspondence, reports, manuscripts and clippings, most from the end of World War II through 1954, with a few earlier items. Major topics are internal debates within the Socialist Workers Party in the 1950s, including in regard to the "Pabloist" tendency, and the post-War labor movement. Among the manuscripts are several chapters from an untitled work by Cochran.