Today in Labor History: Weekend Edition
September 21
Militia sent to Leadville, Colo., to break miners strike – 1896
Mother Jones leads a march of miners’ children through the streets of Charleston, W. Va. – 1913
[The Worst Children’s Jobs in History: The next time your children complain about having to help with the dishes or mow the lawn, put this book in front of them. The Worst Children’s Jobs in History takes you back to the days when being a kid was no excuse for getting out of hard labor. From chimney sweep to cesspool cleaner, from tooth-donor(!) to turnip-picker, from manure-shoveler to matchbox maker -- and much more, this book will tell you things you probably didn’t want to know about the back-breaking realities of being a child in the past. In the UCS bookstore now.]
National Football League Players Assn. members begin what is to become a 57-day strike, their first regular-season walkout ever – 1982
Members of five unions at the Frontier Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas begin what was to become the longest successful hotel strike in U.S. history. All 550 workers honored the picket line for the entirety of the six year, four month, ten day fight against management’s insistence on cutting wages and eliminating pensions – 1991
September 22
Emancipation Proclamation signed – 1862
Eighteen-year-old Hannah (Annie) Shapiro leads a spontaneous walkout of 17 women at a Hart Schaffner & Marx garment factory in Chicago. It grows into a months-long mass strike involving 40,000 garment workers across the city, protesting 10-hour days, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages – 1910
Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later – 1919
Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va. after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners’ strike – 1922
U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent – 1931
United Textile Workers strike committee orders strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South – 1934
Some 400,000 coal miners strike for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio – 1935
The AFL expels the International Longshoremen’s Association for racketeering; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later – 1953
OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP’s Texas City, Texas plant earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 – 2005
Eleven Domino’s employees in Pensacola, Fla. form the nation’s first union of pizza delivery drivers – 2006
San Francisco hotel workers end a two-year contract fight, ratify a new five-year pact with their employers – 2006
September 23
The Workingman’s Advocate of Chicago publishes the first installment of The Other Side, by Martin A. Foran, president of the Coopers’ International Union. Believed to be the first novel by a trade union leader and some say the first working-class novel ever published in the U.S. – 1868
A coalition of Knights of Labor and trade unionists in Chicago launch the United Labor party, calling for an 8-hour day, government ownership of telegraph and telephone companies, and monetary and land reform. The party elects seven state assembly men and one senator – 1886
A 42-month strike by Steelworkers at Bayou Steel in Louisiana ends in a new contract and the ousting of scabs – 1996
California Gov. Gray Davis (D) signs legislation making the state the first to offer workers paid family leave – 2002
… click here for complete posting.
Cool Labor Site: Political MoneyLine
A place to discover who (your boss, perhaps?) gave what to which Federal candidates.
http://moneyline.cq.com/pml/home.do
Labor Video: Fired for Having Fun
Workers not represented by a union can be fired on the whim of the employer, for any excuse at all: that’s what happened in early September to 14 lifeguards working for the city of El Monte, Calif. Their “crime”? Making a great video in which they have fun and make the city look like a cool place. Click here to watch the video.
