That was the day Socialist leader Daniel De Leon was born in Curaçao to Dutch Jewish parents. As a young man, he traveled Europe.

He settled in New York City, and earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1878.

De Leon joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and became the editor of its newspaper, The People. His book, Socialist Landmarks, consisting of a series of lectures, became wildly popular.

These lectures included Reform or Revolution, What Means This Strike?, The Burning Questions of Trade Unionism, and Socialist Reconstruction of Society.

De Leon warned of reforms under capitalism as illusory.

He argued for revolutionary socialism and soon assumed leadership of the SLP. As a former Knights of Labor, he was critical of the American labor movement, often referring to the AFL as the American Separation of Labor for its business unionism and refusal to organize any but the most highly skilled, white craft workers.

De Leon also took a strong stand against racism in the Socialist movement, stating “Why should a truly Socialist organization of whites not take in Negro members, but organize these in separate bodies? On account of outside prejudice?

Then the body is not truly Socialist.” De Leon was among the socialist leaders at the founding 1905 conference of the Industrial Workers of the World.

By 1908, he and others looked to effect social change through the Socialist Party and existing trade union movement.

This put them at odds with the direct action perspective of the IWW.

Many left the IWW at this point, including De Leon and Socialist leader Eugene Debs. When he died in 1914, more than 30,000 turned out for his funeral.

That was the day prominent civil rights activist Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia.

Her parents moved to Littleton, North Carolina when she was young. She often listened to her grandmother’s stories of slave revolts and of the brutality she endured under slavery.

Ella attended the historically black college, Shaw University, graduating in 1927.

After college, she moved to New York City and worked as a journalist.

Ella was profoundly impacted by the Harlem Renaissance and became an educator for the WPA, teaching African and labor history.

She immersed herself in the activism of the period and worked on the Scottsboro Boys defense campaign.

By 1938, she had joined the NAACP, traveling across the country to direct membership recruitment, fundraising and building of local branches.

In 1952, Ella became the president of New York City’s NAACP chapter, working for desegregation and on police brutality cases.

Baker went to Alabama to help found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott to organize voter registration drives throughout the South.

From there, she formed and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ella trained young, committed Civil Rights activists in a collectivist model of organizing and in participatory democracy.

By 1964, she helped to organize the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party and its fight to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

She was involved in the defense of activist and friend Anne Braden, then targeted by HUAC and later, the Free Angela! Movement in defense of then jailed activist, Angela Davis.

She was instrumental in founding the Third World Women’s Alliance and supported various independence movements throughout the world.

She died on her birthday in 1986.

That was the day President Truman appointed a fact-finding panel to investigate the General Motors strike.

As many as 320,000 UAW GM workers had been on strike for nearly three weeks. They had suffered deep wage cuts, deteriorating working conditions and endless contract violations during the war. UAW now demanded 30% wage increases.

But President Truman and GM acted as if it was still wartime.

Truman ordered a 30 day cooling off period to be followed by compulsory arbitration.

Just two days earlier, 10,000 strikers picketed GM, encircling their downtown headquarters for over an hour.

The CIO held an emergency conference, vowing to continue and spread the strike. CIO president Philip Murray took to the radio in defense of the strike.

He noted that corporations had made millions in wartime profits, that wage cuts since V-J Day had been as high as 50% and denounced Congress for burdensome new tax laws.

Murray added that Truman’s proposed “Fact-Finding Act” and other anti-labor laws served “to weaken and ultimately to destroy labor union organizations.”

Bob Carter, chairman of the AC Spark Plug strike committee and chairman of the Greater Flint CIO Council remarked, “I am against arbitration and will oppose the setting up of fact-finding committees.

Anyone acquainted with the labor history of this country knows that those committees are used by political stooges of the corporations to cheat workers out of their just demands.”

The strike ended in partial victory the following March, with strikers winning a 17.5% raise, just over half their original demand.

But UAW members demonstrated their solidarity and their refusal to be cowed into going back to work on the government’s terms.

That was the day streetcar workers in Kansas City walked off the job.

It was the third strike since August 1917. Workers had previously struck for union recognition and joined the city general strike that Spring.

By summer, the city was so desperate for wartime labor, the transit company began hiring women. Though women faced initial opposition, by fall, the union demanded they receive equal pay for equal work.

The company had been paying them $15 dollars less a month than their male coworkers. The Amalgamated filed charges with the National War Labor Board, demanding a general wage increase and equal wages for women.

The Board quickly ruled in the union’s favor. But Kansas City Railway refused to abide by the decision. On this day, 2675 men and 127 women walked off the job, demanding the company honor the board’s ruling. Instead the company hired scabs.

In the rush to restore service, the company failed to properly train the scab drivers and a number of streetcar crashes reduced the transit company’s fleet by 300 cars. According to Maurine Weiner Greenwald, author of Women, War and Work, the company alleged in the press that the strike was an attack against the entire community.

On the Missouri side, state militia guarded the strikebreakers while U.S. Marshals guarded rail tracks on the Kansas side.

By April 1919, “a federal grand jury indicted union leaders for obstructing a vital industry during wartime,” even though the war had been over for six months!

By May, the strike was lost and the union busted. It would take another 20 years before Kansas City Transit would finally be organized.

That was the day the one millionth Model T rolled off the Ford assembly line in Highland Park, near Detroit.

Henry Ford started Model T production seven years earlier. For nearly 20 years, the Tin Lizzie served as the first affordable vehicle, opening up travel and leisure to a new middle class.

Ford refashioned the packing house conveyor to develop the assembly line.

Before production moved to the sprawling modern River Rouge complex, the Highland Park plant was considered the factory that changed the world.

Ford’s ambition to produce cars for the multitudes extended to his workers. As part of his campaign to beat back organizing drives by the Industrial Workers of the World, Ford instituted the $5 day at the Highland Park plant.

For auto workers, buying a Model T even with the $5 day wasn't so easy.

The $5 day actually amounted to $2.34 in wages and an additional $2.66 a day in profit sharing if Ford determined the worker was actually “living right.”

Investigators from his Sociological Department visited workers in their homes.

The routine intrusions into the personal lives of workers away from the job included determining spending and cleanliness habits, whether they drank or smoked, whether they were married or single, the state of workers’ marital relations and family values.

Workers who failed these home inspections were given six months to shape up or be fired.

Ford ruled young single men, women and blacks completely ineligible from the wage program. For a time, employee turnover plummeted and production increased.

But wartime inflation and deteriorating working conditions all but killed the $5 day, which ended in 1921.

That was the day twelve ultra-conservatives, including industrialists Robert Welch, Fred Koch and Harry Lynde Bradley gathered in Indianapolis to found the John Birch Society.

These men saw secret cabals and communist conspiracy everywhere.

They mobilized their vast financial resources to fuel Cold War paranoia.

They opposed New Deal policies, the Civil Rights Movement, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Equal Rights Amendment. They funded Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid

in 1964, denounced Nixon as a fake and warned of his establishment of diplomatic ties with China. The Birchers also opposed water fluoridation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

They pressed for the U.S to withdraw from the United Nations and viewed the U.S. war in Vietnam as a plot to bring Communism to the United States.

Welch, a candy manufacturer, even asserted that President Dwight Eisenhower was a simply a tool for the communists and advocate of a “One-World New Order.”

More recently, many Birchers have also helped to found and fund the National Right to Work Committee, whose legal defense arm has pushed hard for anti-union legislation.

Prominent members like the Koch Brothers have funneled millions into the NWRC in order to bust unions, kill the Employee Free Choice Act and weaken the regulatory authority of the National Labor Relations Board.

Their current headquarters are in Appleton, Wisconsin, hometown of Red Scare warrior, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

That was the day eighteen supporters of the Socialist Workers Party were sentenced in the first Smith Act trial.

Earlier that summer, twenty-nine militants had been targeted and arrested for their leadership of events in Minneapolis during the 30s.

They had led the 1934 Teamsters strikes that made Minneapolis a union town, successfully confronted the fascist Silver Shirts in 1938 and led a WPA strike the following year.

By 1941, federal agents were raiding SWP offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, seizing boxes of documents, books, pamphlets and other material.

The trial began October 27. The prosecution alleged the 29 had conspired to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, were stockpiling weapons and encouraging insubordination among the armed forces.

The defendants insisted that advocating class struggle to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism was not the equivalent of violent overthrow.

They added the trial was a government witch hunt, bent on suppressing their first amendment rights. Six were released, another five were acquitted.

But the remaining 18 were sentenced to between twelve and sixteen months in jail. Dozens of CIO unions including the UAW, USWA, URW and UE all rallied to the defense of the convicted militants.

The ACLU, central in the defense case, now mounted the appeals campaign. They failed to overturn the convictions and the 18 surrendered to authorities two years later to begin serving their sentences.

For historian Donna Haverty-Stacke, the case showed “how far the Roosevelt administration went to prosecute political dissent—even to the point of targeting the labor-liberal left.”

The Act would be repealed in 1952 and hundreds of convictions under the Act would finally be reversed as unconstitutional by 1957.

That was the day eleven steam engineers met in Chicago to found the National Union of Steam Engineers, the forerunner of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

Ten of the eleven came from the stationary field. They often worked 60-90 hours a week in dangerous working conditions.

Constructing and operating steam boilers was highly skilled, labor-intensive and potentially deadly work.

At the time, steam powered railroad and construction shovels, hoists and cranes for high-rise construction and electric power generation.

Many flocked to San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake to help rebuild that city. Others left for Panama to work on the Canal.

By 1912, the union was issuing charters to locals that represented construction steam engineers and locals that represented fixed boiler operators.

It was renamed the International Union of Operating Engineers in 1928. During World War II and after, thousands worked as Navy Seabees, building military bases, airfields and roads.

The Federal Highway Trust Program opened up work for thousands more in the construction of the nation’s highway system.

Today, you can find Operating Engineers on bridge and dam projects, skyscrapers and pipelines. Its logo, the steam gauge was originally set at 80 psi but now points towards 420 psi.

Some think the change came as a result of operating high-pressure boilers for naval ships and steamboats. Others speculate the change came when the 600-psi gauge became the industrial standard.

The International Union of Operating Engineers administers one hundred apprenticeships in state of the art facilities, requiring 6000 hours of on the job training and 400 hours of classroom instruction.

It represents more than 400,000 members in 170 locals throughout the United States and Canada.

That was the day an explosion rocked Fairmont Coal Company’s number 6 and number 8 coal mines in Monongah, West Virginia, killing 367 miners.

Newspaper reports estimated the number of dead to be as high as 500. It is considered the worst mine disaster in the history of the United States.

Most miners were killed instantly as the explosion destroyed the mine entrance and its ventilation system.

Those not killed instantly suffocated from poisonous gas.

Earth tremors were felt eight miles away. The force of the explosion buckled pavement, collapsed buildings and derailed streetcars. More than 3200 miners had died in 1907.

With three more mine disasters before the end of the year, the last month became known as Black December. In January, a coroner’s jury verdict ruled that a blow out shot ignited coal dust and made number of recommendations for safer practices.

But David McAteer tells a different story in his history of the disaster.

He argues that the tipple had a design flaw that led to occasional coal car derailments as they exited the mine.

On this day, there had been a derailment with coal cars crashing to the bottom of the shaft and taking out the electrical and ventilation systems with it, igniting the coal dust in the process.

The disaster generated a surge in demands for greater mine safety, leading to the creation of the Bureau of Mines in 1910.

The Bureau could conduct research and safety training but was powerless to conduct inspections or safety enforcement.

Miners would continue to fight for the better part of the century for safety regulations and enforcement.

That was the day UE local 1110 members at Republic Windows in Chicago began a five–day occupation to protest the imminent closure of their plant.

A month earlier, Republic workers witnessed management moving machinery out of the factory.

They began monitoring where the machinery was going and soon learned it was headed for a new, non-union plant in Iowa.

They planned a possible plant occupation. By December 2, management announced the plant was closing in just three days.

Republic Windows owner Richard Gillman blamed Bank of America for refusing to extend credit, just as the federal government had bailed out the banks in a $700 billion deal.

Workers learned they would receive no severance or vacation pay, despite WARN Act mandates.

The next day they rallied out in front of Bank of America, chanting, “You got bailed out, we got sold out.” Workers were determined to occupy the plant that Friday, when they went to pick up their last paychecks.

Police refused to remove the sit-downers and the occupation quickly made national news.

Local labor leaders and trade unionists, activists and politicians all visited strikers and lent their support. Journalist Kari Lydersen recounts the events in her book, Revolt on Goose Island, noting the “donations of food, blankets, pillows, sleeping bags and other necessities that poured into the factory.”

Protests of Bank of America spread across the country. By the following Wednesday, workers learned that though they could not keep their plant open, they would at least win severance and vacation pay.

In 2012, some of those workers reopened the plant under the name, New Era Windows, as a worker-run cooperative. They specialize in energy efficient vinyl windows.

That was the day Federal Judge T. Alan Goldsborough fined John L. Lewis $10,000 and the United Mine Workers $3.5 million.

In what was characterized as “a roaring courtroom scene,” Lewis rose to challenge the judge to fine him whatever he wanted.

The judge had just found Lewis and the UMW in contempt of court for ignoring his November 18 order to head off a soft-coal strike, then in its fourteenth day.

Judge Goldsborough had replaced his order with a temporary injunction after the government demanded a judgment that the strike was illegal and must end.

Goldsborough ruled the strike was “an evil, demonic, monstrous thing that meant hunger and cold, unemployment and destitution--a threat to democratic government itself.”

He insisted he was a friend of labor, but that Lewis should be sent to prison.

UMW chief counsel, Welly K. Hopkins, snapped back defiantly, stating that the government was seeking to “break the union politically, financially and morally.”

The federal government had seized the mines in May and was now threatening to run them with Army engineers if Lewis didn’t order miners back to work.

AFL, CIO and Railway Brotherhoods all rallied to Lewis’ defense.

The Detroit labor movement vowed a 24-hour general strike in support. But by the 7th, Lewis retreated, ordering miners back to work until March 31st.

Facing the real threat of the Supreme Court action to uphold the $3.5 million fine, Lewis stated he wanted the Court to “be free from public pressure superinduced by the hysteria and frenzy of an economic crisis.”

Lewis and the UMW were tied up in appeals court for months while they attempted to negotiate new contract terms.

Workers, mostly women, had been on strike for a month at two downtown department stores.

Teamsters honored their picket lines and refused to make deliveries. Infuriated owners of Hastings and Kahn’s demanded their merchandise and turned to the city for help.

On this day, police assembled early in the morning to clear the streets of picketers. They attacked strikers, forced them off the streets and set up a perimeter of machine guns to escort scab delivery trucks through.

One striker recalled, “I was black and blue for six months from their clubs.” Outraged truck drivers, bus drivers and streetcar operators all stopped, got out of their vehicles and joined the strikers, quickly filling downtown Oakland.

By the end of the day, the city was completely shut down. 142 AFL unions called for a labor holiday in support of the strikers and now 130,000 workers were on strike in solidarity.

UAW member Stan Weir recalled that it was the bus drivers, many just returned from the war, who led the strike. The streets that night had a carnival like atmosphere. War vets led a march to City Hall to demand the resignation of the Mayor and the City Council for their attempts to break the strike.

The general strike quickly forced the administration to stop the scabhearding. But local labor leaders were divided over what some considered a near insurrection and called the strike off 54 hours later.

The retail workers were left to fight on their own for another five months. But for a few days, workers got a taste of their own power.

That was the day John Brown was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia in what is now West Virginia.

He had been sentenced to death on charges of treason, murder and insurrection for his role in the raid on the United States Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry.

Brown and twenty-one abolitionists intended to seize the arsenal there, then build a free settlement in the Appalachian Mountains.

From there, abolitionists and free people of color would wage a guerrilla war against the slave labor system throughout the South.

Convicted on November 2, Brown resisted plans for rescue and prepared to die a martyr.

On this day, John Brown wrote his last statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”

He was marched out of the Jefferson County Jail through a crowd of onlookers that included Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth to the gallows, where he was hanged.

While many abolitionists distanced themselves from his actions, they defended him and memorialized him after his death.

Fredrick Douglass remarked many years later, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine-it was as the burning sun to my taper light-mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

That was the day four leaders of the Carpenters union were shot dead in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the International Union of Timber Workers had embarked on an organizing drive of white and black workers at Great Southern Lumber Company.

Bogalusa functioned as a company town.

Lumber bosses controlled company housing, local politicians and ruled the town with an iron fist.

By 1919, the two unions began organizing among loggers and sawmill workers in the region.

The Carpenters initially organized among white skilled workers, while the Timber workers organized among unskilled, mostly black workers.

They soon stepped up efforts to organize jointly.

Historian Stephen Norwood notes that when Great Southern threatened to forcibly break up a union meeting among black workers, armed white union men arrived to defend the meeting.

By September 95% of the workforce was organized when the company instituted a lockout.

On November 21, a posse of local businessmen fired on the home of leading black organizer, Sol Dacus, who narrowly escaped.

The following day, armed white union carpenter leaders, Stanley O’Rourke and J.P. Bouchillon escorted Dacus to the Central Trades and Labor Council offices.

150 special policemen were immediately dispatched.

They began firing upon union headquarters, killing O’Rourke, Bouchillon and two other union leaders, Thomas Gaines and Lem Williams.

Dacus was nearly lynched and escaped with his life to New Orleans.

Norwood concludes the gun battle “represents probably the most dramatic display of interracial labor solidarity in the Deep South during the first half of the twentieth century.”

For historian William P. Jones, the anti-union violence and racial terror would culminate in 1923 with a massacre in the Florida lumber town of Rosewood.

That was the day the completion of the Alaskan Highway or Alcan, was celebrated at Soldier’s Summit.

There had been proposals for a highway connecting the United States to Alaska since the early 1920s.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly to organize its approval and construction.

By March 1942, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the $138 million project.

More than 10,000 troops were assigned to highway construction.

Over a third were comprised of newly formed black regiments.

Thousands of pieces of construction equipment were moved through the railroads, including steam shovels, blade graders, tractors, trucks, bulldozers, snowplows, cranes and generators.

In a matter of eight months, workers carved out 1700 miles of road between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through the Yukon to Delta Junction in Alaska, under the most treacherous environmental conditions.

Workers arrived in wintery Dawson Creek, pitching their sleeping quarters in snowdrifts.

By spring , workers battled flooding rivers, equipment sinking into thick mud and fears of Japanese bombers.

By summer, mosquitoes, dubbed “bush bombers,” were so bad workers had to eat under netting.

Black workers also battled relentless racism.

The Army was still segregated.

Black troops faced racist presumptions about their capacity to carry out hard labor.

They were determined to break down stereotypes.

By fall, white and black bulldozer drivers coordinating the work together were celebrated in the pages of the Army’s Yank magazine, Time and the New York Times.

Some historians consider the integrated work crews a factor in President Truman’s later move to desegregate the armed forces.

According to The New York Times, the Federal Highway Administration calls the Alcan “the road to civil rights.”

That was the day anarchist and labor activist Rose Pesotta was born.

Her name, Rakhel Peisoty, was changed, like so many others’, at Ellis Island.

She had fled tsarist Russia in 1913 as a teenager and soon found work in New York City’s garment shops.

She readily joined the ILGWU, becoming a national organizer by 1920.

In the late 1920s, Rose went to Los Angeles in an attempt to organize Latina sweatshop workers.

There she helped women workers establish a bilingual labor journal and assisted them in winning a key strike for recognition and higher wages in 1933.

She soon ascended to the position of union vice president and worked closely with the newly formed CIO.

Rose traveled far and wide to organize garment workers.

She led successful strikes throughout the United States and in Montreal and Puerto Rico.

By 1936, she was on the picket lines with striking rubber workers in Akron, Ohio and autoworkers in Flint, Michigan.

She increasingly found herself at odds with ILGWU head, David Dubinsky and other top male union officials over persistent sexism, her radical politics and her opposition to the no-strike pledge during World War II.

Rose resented the fact that though women comprised the overwhelming majority of the union’s membership, she continued to be the only woman union officer.

Frustrated by the chauvinism she experienced, Rose resigned from her post as vice president and later from the ILGWU executive board in 1944.

She continued as a sewing machine operator, remained active at the local level and published two memoirs.

Later in life, she aligned herself with the Civil Rights Movement.

Rose Pesotta died of cancer in 1965.

That was the day President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

It is considered one of Lincoln’s greatest speeches.

Generations of students have been assigned to commit it to memory.

The two-minute speech carries a deep significance in our country’s history.

Lincoln delivered the speech at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Four months earlier, the Union had defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

Casualties on both sides totaled nearly 50,000 over the course of the three-day battle.

This battle, coupled with the fall of Vicksburg, is often considered a turning point in the war to end the slave labor system.

Lincoln’s speech served to redefine the war’s purpose.

Originally, the emphasis had been one of preserving the Union.

Now, Lincoln drew upon the Declaration of Independence to also highlight the national struggle for human equality.

Lincoln began his speech with the acknowledgment that the nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

He ended the Gettysburg Address stating, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Most Republicans praised the speech.

But historian Eric Foner notes in his biography of Lincoln, that “many Democrats denounced Lincoln for unilaterally redefining the war’s purpose, which they insisted, had nothing to do with equality.”

In 2015, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation published an edited volume, Gettysburg Replies.

It features 272-word essays by presidents, historians, poets, actors, scientists and others about the lasting influence of the Gettysburg Address.

That was the day 21,000 attendants, mostly women, caught American Airlines by surprise in their first strike ever against the company.

80% of all fights were cancelled a week before Thanksgiving as solid picket lines formed at forty airports across the country.

CEO Robert Crandell, who commanded a $ million a year salary and preferred the nickname “fang,” was at a loss when flight attendants refused to be bullied by threats of scab replacements.

Hoping to smash seniority and scheduling rights, he cancelled all vacations for months.

Crandall’s claims to company losses could hardly be believed after the company reported third-quarter profits of $118 million.

Attendants were fed up with years of concessionary contracts that reduced their wages by as much as 40%.

One woman picketer summed up the company’s attitude: “We’re just a bunch of skirts.”

The strike was so popular that pilots and Teamsters often joined picketers.

In New York City, 200 members of Local 1199 hospital workers walked the picket line in solidarity.

Fed up machinists at United Airlines in Denver were so inspired, they staged a solidarity sickout the first day of the strike.

Four days later, President Clinton intervened to end the strike and force binding arbitration.

While many saw this as a victory, workers returned to their jobs under the same conditions that forced them to strike while they waited for arbitrators to render a decision.

Two years later, arbitrators finally rendered a decision.

They awarded American the right to reduce staffing on some flights.

But attendants would win a 17% wage increase and retain most work rules.

That was the day the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York was founded.

Twenty-two skilled craftsmen, with the motto, “By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand,” met on Pine Street to form a benevolent organization that could provide cultural, educational and social services to craftsmen and their families.

Two months later, founders met for their annual meeting.

They represented many of the city’s trades including hatters, butchers, sail makers, bolters and comb makers.

In his book, Chants Democratic, historian Sean Wilentz states, the General Society was “intended to be a semi-political umbrella organization for all of the city’s independent mechanics, to help oversee the trades and secure favorable legislation from local and national government. The group captured the ideal of mutuality and craft pride essential to artisan fraternities since the Middle Ages.”

The General Society opened one of the city’s first free schools at a time when there were no public schools.

It established a tuition-free Mechanics Institute, the General Society Library and Lecture Series.

The Mechanics Institute, founded in 1858, continues to provide free evening trades-related instruction.

The Library, established in 1820 is the second oldest library in New York City.

It is also one of the few remaining membership circulating libraries.

Its collections and archives span two centuries.

The General Society continues its tradition of public lectures in the form of The Labor, Literature and Landmarks Series.

More recently, it has added the Artisan Lecture Series that features lectures by master artisans.

The series also promotes the work and art of skilled craftsmen.

The General Society has been at its current location at 20 west 44th Street since 1885.

That was the day mounted police charged 50 janitors and their supporters during a protest in Houston.

SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign had been organizing for years throughout the South and Southwest.

Modeled on success achieved in California, SEIU broadened their campaign to Houston and Miami.

The union called a month long strike against the cities’ largest cleaning companies.

Protests and civil disobedience actions continued throughout the strike.

Hundreds of strikers routinely marched through the streets of Houston, beating drums and hauling bags of garbage into the middle of intersections to highlight the key services they provided to the city.

They were subject to repeated threats of firings and arrests.

When police charged at the janitors, it served to turn public support in favor of the strikers.

By the end of the month, Tom Balanoff and SEIU Local 1 in Chicago claimed victory for 5300 Houston janitors.

The Chicago local had been central to the three-year campaign in Houston.

Incomes doubled and janitors finally had health insurance, paid vacations and holidays.

The Chicago Tribune detailed the campaign in a November 25 article.

The union lobbied building owners and major corporations who held contracts with the cleaning companies.

The union worked to gain a foothold among the janitors, sending in seasoned Latino janitors from Chicago to help with organizing.

The SEIU also committed millions of dollars to the organizing drive, setting aside $1 million alone in strike funds.

At a victory rally, union leader Flor Aguilar proclaimed, “No one thought that a group of poor Latinos form Houston would be able to win anything, but today we can lift our heads up very high.”

That was the day four workers were killed and a fifth injured during a chemical leak at a DuPont insecticide plant near Houston.

The plant used methyl mercaptan in its production of insecticides.

24,000 pounds of the deadly chemical were released through two valves in a poorly ventilated building onsite.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board found numerous flawed safety procedures, design problems and inadequate planning.

Days earlier, liquid methyl mercaptan had solidified in piping, causing a blockage.

Workers attempted to clear it by spraying the pipes with hot water.

They didn’t realize they had cleared the blockage, which then created high-pressure buildup of the chemical in other piping.

When two workers went to drain those pipes in a routine procedure, they were overcome by toxic vapor.

Another two workers answering the subsequent distress call were also killed.

DuPont blamed workers for the release of the toxic gas.

But the CSB found a number of violations.

The building where the release occurred had an inadequate toxic gas detection system, ventilation fans were not working and workers were not required to wear additional breathing protection for tasks they performed there.

Line-clearing procedures were faulty, routinely exposing workers to toxic fumes.

The Board also found that DuPont worked to conceal from environmental regulators, as many as four major releases of methyl mercaptan two days before workers were killed.

The CSB asserted that design flaws prompted months of clogs before the deadly incident.

More generally, they noted the design of the building that housed the pesticide unit inherently increased the threat of exposure to workers and the public.

DuPont opted to close the plant in 2016 rather than meet recommendations of federal regulators.

That was the day OSHA published its lead standard.

The standard reduced permissible exposure by 75% to protect nearly a million workers from damage to nervous, urinary and reproductive systems.

As early as 1908, Alice Hamilton, the mother of occupational medicine, noted that lead had endangered workers as far back as “the first half-century after Christ.”

In their book, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner add that “throughout her distinguished career, Hamilton was deeply involved in uncovering the relationship between lead and disease in the American workforce.”

Hamilton’s groundbreaking research on the effects of lead paved the way for a growing uproar against its continued use.

After the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1970, occupational and public health activists pushed hard for a lead standard.

A new generation of industrial hygienists emphasized how unsound, industry-driven conclusions regarding “safe lead levels” impacted women workers and workers of color.

Industry had long asserted that women and African-Americans were simply more susceptible to lead poison, which served to justify discrimination in hiring.

Some unions accepted these terms, if only to demand a stringent lead standard that included immediate implementation of engineering controls.

But leading hygienists like Jeanne Stellman blasted these arguments.

Stellman insisted such conclusions reflected racial and gender bias rather than any credible scientific evidence.

She added that men, women and children, regardless of race or ethnicity, were all adversely affected by lead exposure.

The final standard adopted was considered a compromise.

Discrimination in hiring has continued and enforcement proves difficult.

But even a watered-down standard was too much for the lead industry.

They have been fighting it ever since.

That was the day Karen Silkwood was killed in a mysterious car crash.

Though her death was ruled a one car accident, some maintain she was forced off the road.

Silkwood was a union activist and representative for Local 5-283 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.

She worked at Kerr McGee’s Cimarron plutonium plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods.

Meryl Streep popularized her life in the 1983 film, Silkwood.

Karen’s union loyalty only grew after the company crushed a strike in 1972.

She was elected to the union bargaining committee just as the company moved to force a decertification election.

She also served as a union health and safety rep.

Silkwood found a number of apparent violations: routine contamination exposure, faulty respiratory equipment, falsified inspection records, and improper storage of radioactive material.

She met with OCAW leader, Tony Mazzocchi to highlight safety issues in a campaign to beat back decertification.

It worked.

Then Karen testified before the Atomic Energy Commission, worried about her own contamination.

It was clear her home was contaminated too.

She worked tirelessly to gather the documentation and the evidence, detailing the company’s life-threatening negligence.

And on this day, Karen Silkwood was headed to Oklahoma City to meet Mazzocchi’s assistant, Steve Wodka and a New York Times reporter to present evidence she collected.

She never made it.

Her car was found with rear end damage, near skid marks, in a ditch along Route 74.

While the company attempted to smear her as a drug addicted lesbian who deliberately contaminated herself, they would eventually settle with her family for nearly $1.4 million.

Karen Silkwood became a model and a hero for women workers and all those who fight for safe workplaces.

That was the day Ellis Island closed its doors.

More than 12 million immigrants had passed through its gates since its opening in 1892.

Those steerage and third-class passengers coming to America were processed at the island between 1892 and 1924.

They were routinely subject to medical inspections to determine they were free of disease.

Legal inspections included questions regarding birth, occupation, destination, finances and criminal record.

Its busiest year was 1907 with more than a million arriving to enter the United States.

During World War I, the Island was used as a detention center for presumed enemies and those considered foreign-born subversives.

After Congress passed the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, arrivals entering the country slowed to a trickle.

Then Ellis Island became primarily a detention and deportation center.

During World War II, thousands of Germans, Italians and Japanese made up the majority of those detained, awaiting deportation.

It also served as a military hospital for returning servicemen and training center for the Coast Guard.

By 1950, Ellis Island served as a holding center for arriving Communists and Fascists, who were prevented entrance under the recently passed Internal Security Act.

A Norwegian seaman who had overstayed his leave was released the day the Island closed and told to catch the next ship back to Norway.

In 1965, President Johnson made Ellis Island part of the National Park Service.

A massive restoration of the Island began in 1984, organized by Lee Iacocca’s Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

It reopened as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in 1990, featuring numerous exhibits, publicly accessible immigration records and the award-winning film documentary, “Island of Hope, Island of Tears.”

That was the day more than a million Canadian workers walked off the job in a Day of Protest.

The Canadian Labour Congress called the general strike.

Workers downed their tools against a three-year wage controls plan implemented by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeau had actually campaigned against wage controls during the 1974 elections.

A year later, the Liberal government introduced the C-73 Anti-Inflation Bill.

It was considered the worst attack on labor since the 1930s, when bargaining rights were first legalized.

Trudeau’s wage controls suspended collective bargaining rights for all workers and amounted to deep wage cuts.

Public sector workers were hit hardest as many hospital, school and municipal workers teetered on the edge of desperation from already low wages made worse.

But for a day at least, many industries across Canada came to a screeching halt.

Forestry, mining and auto production all completely shut down.

Many towns and cities were one hundred percent on strike, even among the non-union workforce.

Saint John in New Brunswick, Sudbury, Ontario, Sept Iles, Quebec and Thompson in Manitoba were all cities where the strike was most successful.

But elsewhere, the strike was uneven.

Many public sector workers stayed on the job, while in cities like Vancouver, pickets successfully shut down bus service and newspaper deliveries.

Most heralded the Day of Protest as a fierce show of power against a years’ worth of wage controls.

But others argued that a one-day action was not enough.

To combat the attacks on labor, any general strike would have to keep the country shut down until the program of wage controls was finally defeated.

That was the day thirty-three Chilean miners were finally pulled to safety after being trapped for sixty-nine days.

Workers had been mining copper and gold twenty three hundred feet down, at the San Jose mine near the northern city of Copiapo, when the mine caved in, in early August.

The Compania Minera San Esteban Primera waited several hours to notify authorities and rescue efforts only began two days later.

Trapped miners initially tried to escape through ventilation shafts but found required ladders missing.

Each route they attempted was blocked by fallen rock or threatened additional collapse.

A state owned mining y took over rescue efforts and soon they began, as Geologist Sorena Sorensen noted, prospecting for people.

Initial exploratory boreholes failed to locate miners because mineshaft maps had never been updated.

Rescuers had no idea whether miners were even still alive.

Finally, seventeen days later, the eighth borehole reached them.

The miners tapped on the drill and taped notes to it, alerting rescuers above they were indeed alive and well.

Food, medicine and other supplies were lowered down to them as rescue efforts intensified.

Mini cameras were also lowered down and the miners videotaped messages of their continued ordeal.

They told how they continued to search for possible escape routes and agreed to ration their limited food supplies so they could all survive.

The first of three drilling plans to free the miners began.

It was an international effort.

The Chilean Navy consulted with NASA to design and construct the rescue pods.

Throughout the entire process, rescuers worked to prevent additional cave-ins and rock falls.

Finally the extraction process began and in less than 48 hours all emerged as heroes.

That was the day union miners in Mt. Olive, Illinois began commemorating Miners Day.

Every year thousands came into town for a parade, music and speeches.

Mt. Olive was the site of the only union-owned cemetery in the United States, established by UMWA local 728, in the aftermath of the Virden massacre.

A year before to the day, striking miners had been killed in a shoot out with company guards attempting to herd scabs into the mines in Virden, Illinois.

But, as Mother Jones’ biographer, Eliot Gorn notes, the “train never unloaded its cargo and the company was forced to settle.”

The union hoped to erect a gravesite monument commemorating those miners who had been killed at Virden.

But they were refused by those who considered the fallen miners to be murderers, not martyrs.

That’s when the UMW established the Union Miners Cemetery.

On this day, nearly 10,000 turned out for the union’s memorial ceremony.

The UMW unveiled a monument dedicated to fallen Virden miners, E.W. Smith, Joe Gitterle, Ernst Kaemmerer and E.F. Long.

The day was filled with parades, music, laying of wreaths and speeches.

Haymarket widow and radical activist, Lucy Parsons was among the speakers.

In his book Death and Dying in the Working Class, Michael Rosenow notes that her presence drew a direct connection between the fallen miners and the Haymarket martyrs, cut down while advancing the cause of labor.

Thousands traveled to Mt. Olive every year for celebrations, including Eugene Debs, miners’ leader John Mitchell and Mother Jones.

In 1923, Mother Jones asked to be buried with her boys, noting “they are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America.”

That was the day acclaimed photojournalist Dorothea Lange died.

She is celebrated for her work documenting the Great Depression for the Farm Security Bureau.

Lange’s photos captured images of migrant workers, sharecroppers and the rural poor.

Her iconic photo, Migrant Mother, is probably her most well known image.

It depicts a despondent, Dust Bowl mother surrounded by her hungry children.

Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895.

She suffered the effects of polio as a child, which left her with a permanent limp.

She studied photography at Columbia University in New York, and eventually settled in the Bay Area.

When the Great Depression hit, she began photographing labor strikes, breadlines and soup kitchens, the homeless and unemployed.

The Resettlement Administration hired her soon after.

Nowadays, we can access images from around the world at a moment’s notice that broaden our understanding of current events.

But until the 1930s, few Americans could access media that adequately depicted the desperate social conditions engulfing the nation.

Federal programs that funded projects like Lange’s brought Depression-era images into the public eye.

Americans soon realized their suffering wasn’t caused by personal failure; that millions across the country were experiencing destitution brought on by broader economic forces.

During World War II, Lange worked for the War Relocation Authority, where she documented forced evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans.

Her images, especially of Manzanar, were withheld from the public until after the war and were accessible to the public through the National Archives.

After the war, she taught at San Francisco’s Art Institute and cofounded the magazine Aperture.

She has been heralded as an innovator and has influenced generations of documentary photography.

That was the day mill workers began to walk off the job at the Phoenix and Gilbert Knitting Mills in Little Falls, New York.

The strike was sandwiched between the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the 1913 Paterson textile strike.

American, Hungarian, Polish and Italian workers, over 70% of them women, struck against wage reductions.

Their hours had just been cut from 60 hours a week to 54, and their wages adjusted accordingly.

A recent factory inspection commission investigation revealed deplorable working and living conditions, among the worst in the state.

As a result, state legislators passed protective legislation restricting women’s work hours.

Many social reformers pushed for laws like these in the hopes of improving women’s quality of life by minimizing their exploitation on the job.

But the reduction in hours spelled disaster for these mill women, who then faced a loss of income that ranged from 75 cents to $2 a week.

Socialists in nearby Schenectady, including the socialist mayor George Lunn, arrived in town and were promptly arrested for giving open-air speeches in support of the strikers.

IWW organizers soon followed to help organize picketing, daily strike parades and strike committees at each of the factories.

They quickly established IWW Local 801, National Industrial Union of Textile Workers.

By the end of the month, mounted police closed in on the women strikers and began clubbing them, many into unconsciousness.

The police raided strike headquarters and arrested IWW strike committee leaders.

But the women strikers stood strong and were celebrating victory by the beginning of the year.

They won full reinstatement and 60 hours pay for 54 hours work.

That was the day abolitionist and women’s suffragist, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born.

Her parents were free blacks of color in the slave state of Delaware.

They were involved with many prominent abolitionists and active in the Underground Railroad.

The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary and her siblings were educated in Quaker schools.

As a young woman, Mary became a teacher and returned to Wilmington, Delaware where she opened a school for black children.

Once the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, Mary and many other free blacks fled to Canada to safely continue their abolitionist work.

She opened a school for fugitive slaves in Windsor, Ontario just across the river from Detroit.

Mary soon came under fire in the local press for insisting the school be racially integrated.

She responded by starting her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman.

She and her husband, Thomas often traveled to the United States to continue their anti-slavery work.

They were present at John Brown’s 1858 Constitutional Convention.

Mary worked with Osborne Perry Anderson to publish his 1861 memoir, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.

Anderson had participated in Brown’s raid and was the lone African-American survivor.

After her husband’s death, Mary returned to the United States with her children to help recruit black soldiers to the Union Army.

Once the Civil War was over, Mary moved to Washington D.C to teach.

She enrolled in Howard University where she earned a law degree.

There she joined the National Woman Suffrage Association and worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

She continued to advocate for civil rights and women’s equality until her death in 1893.

That was the day garment factory owners locked out dressmakers in several shops throughout Los Angeles.

The women garment workers, overwhelmingly Mexican, had been organizing with the ILGWU for over a month.

They began conducting strikes at selected shops the previous month to press their demands.

The women wanted union recognition, a thirty-five hour workweek, an end to homework, shop floor committees, a guaranteed wage and more.

Historian Douglas Monroy observes that their demands reflected the harsh working conditions they faced.

It was a volatile, competitive, seasonal industry.

Businesses worked tirelessly to undercut each other and job out the work.

Women workers were routinely unemployed or underemployed, subject to widespread wage theft and discrimination.

They were frustrated by promises of the new National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised the right to organize but held no provisions for enforcement.

Employers flaunted the new legislation and continued to discharge workers for union activity.

When the employers forced a lockout, Local 96 looked to the AFL’s Central Labor Council to sanction a general dressmakers strike, which started four days later on October 12.

As many as 3,000 Latina strikers maintained solid picket lines, despite dozens of arrests.

ILGWU organizer Rose Pesotta arrived from New York to help with food distribution and packing the picket lines.

The rank and file leadership produced a bilingual strike bulletin and made daily radio announcements.

The strike ended in arbitration that conceded few gains to the garment workers.

But the women of Local 96 continued to organize throughout the Los Angeles area.

They led a series of strikes that finally won the closed shop in 1936.

That was the day Detroit anarchist labor leader, Joseph Labadie died.

Born in Paw Paw in 1850, Jo was born to descendants of French immigrants and grew up among Native Potawatomi peoples in southwest Michigan.

He became a printer, joined the local Typographical Union No.18 and worked for the Detroit Post and Tribune.

He was an early leader of the Socialist Labor Party.

By 1878, Jo organized the first Knights of Labor Assembly in Detroit.

He served as the first president of the Detroit Trades Council and founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.

He wrote tirelessly for a number of labor and socialist newspapers across the country.

He embraced anarchism and soon produced a popular column titled, “Cranky Notions.”

Labadie enjoyed the company and correspondence with radical labor leaders like Emma Goldman, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Eugene V. Debs, Benjamin Tucker, Terrance Powderly and others of the Progressive Era.

He was often referred to as ‘The Gentle Anarchist’ for his insistence on non-violence and distancing from those Anarchists who advocated the use of violence as an acceptable tactic.

Labadie was also known to never throw out any printed material relevant to labor or radical causes.

His biographer, Carlotta Anderson notes that, “the story of his life, deeds and thoughts is abundantly revealed through the treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings, manuscripts, booklets, photos and circulars once stored in his attic and now housed in the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan. His stockpile of documents of social protest has proved a boon to scholars, enabling them to study the early labor movement in detail.”

When he died at the age of 83, he considered this to be his legacy.

That was the day Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi.

She was the youngest of 20 children.

Her parents were sharecroppers and she began working the fields at the age of six.

At the age of 12, Fannie had to drop out of school to sharecrop to meet the needs of her family.

Marrying in 1944, she and her husband continued to work as sharecroppers on a plantation near Ruleville.

After decades of abject poverty and Southern political repression, Fannie Lou Hamer joined up with voter registration activists in 1962.

When she and seventeen others traveled to Indianola to register, Fannie was fired from her job and driven from the plantation she had worked at for decades.

She began working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and played a central role in organizing Freedom Summer.

In a short time, Fannie was repeatedly arrested, beaten and shot at for her activism.

She suffered kidney damage after police beat her nearly to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail as she traveled home from a literacy workshop.

By 1964, she helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention.

President Lyndon Johnson was so threatened by live testimony she was giving before the Convention’s Credentials Committee, that he orchestrated an emergency press conference to preempt the broadcast.

When the Committee attempted a backroom deal to seat just two MFDP delegates with no voting rights at the convention, Hamer and other delegates left in disgust.

Hamer continued her activism but her life was tragically cut short in 1977 from hypertension and breast cancer.

She was just 59.

That was the day Henry George accepted the nomination to run for mayor of New York on the United Labor Party ticket.

In cities across the country, trade unionists met to found state labor parties and to hammer out political platforms for local and state elections.

In New York City, ULP advocates issued the Clarendon Hall platform and nominated Henry George as the ULP candidate for the mayoral race.

George had gained prominence with the 1879 publishing of his book, Progress & Poverty.

In it, he addressed private land ownership as the basis for inequality and advocated for a single tax system.

At New York’s Cooper Union that evening, where thousands of supporters gathered, George addressed the crowd.

He presented the ULP platform: higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, government ownership of railroads and communications and an end to police repression.

Burrows and Wallace describe the scene that night in their book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

During his speech, George declared that, “this government of New York City—our whole political system is rotten to the core.”

He argued that “politicians had made a trade out of assembling votes and selling them to powerful interests; what business got in return was police protection, lax enforcement of housing and health codes, friendly judges and fat franchises. To purify the political order, working class voters had to sever ties to all the established parties and choose from their own ranks.”

For a party that had just been founded weeks before, George came in second.

But like its sister organization in Chicago, the New York ULP would split over the issue of socialism within a year.

That was the day the State Militia was called into Kincaid, Illinois.

164 high school students had just walked out of the classroom, declaring themselves on strike.

They were protesting the school board’s use of coal from the Peabody Coal Company.

The students walked out in solidarity with their fathers, who were on strike against the Peabody Coal mine in nearby Langleyville over wage concessions.

The father-son strike, as it was referred to, was one more in a series of protest actions that came on the heels of the founding of the Progressive Miners of America a month earlier.

Thousands of Illinois miners had just voted with their feet to repudiate John L. Lewis’ UMWA over wage concessions.

After their founding conference, new PMA leaders began aggressively organizing non-union mines.

They marched into mining towns and ordered non-union diggers out of the mines.

They also struck UMW mines, picketing against the industry standard of $5 a day that had been set by the latest concessionary contract.

At some mines, the PMA was able to win the old $6.10 a day wage.

Throughout the month, the State National Guard had been called out to a number of mining towns to quell armed conflicts between PMA and UMW supporters.

The Peabody Coal mine at Langleyville had been shut down for months by ongoing PMA/UMW conflict.

Now it had reopened under heavy National Guard protection and was the only mine operating in Christian County.

The striking fathers were PMA miners picketing the continued mine operations under the UMW concessionary contract.

The years-long Illinois mine wars had just begun.

That was the day Americans awoke to fears the nationwide steel strike would spread rapidly to include key fabrication plants.

Half a million steel workers had joined 400,000 coal miners on strike the morning before.

The miners’ resolve to defend their $100-a month pensions, instituting what John L. Lewis called the “no-day work week,” emboldened the steel workers to walk out of the mills.

Within 24 hours, 96% of all steel production in the country was completely shut down.

USW contracts were due to expire on the 15^th, But the writing was on the wall.

The mill owners decried anything close to mine pensions as nothing short of socialistic and refused to budge in negotiations.

USW president Phil Murray thundered that those companies that failed to agree to demands for non-contributory pensions and insurance would be shut down.

But militants warned that President Truman’s Fact-Finding Board had already watered down strike demands.

The President’s Board had been established to put off two previous strike deadlines.

The ‘guidelines’ it issued only encouraged steel magnates to stand tough against USW demands.

These included a 30-cent raise plus increased company insurance and pension contributions.

Now it had become a defensive struggle over whether steel workers would have to begin contributing to health and pension plans through wage cuts.

By the time steelworkers ended their strike forty-two days later, they had won the $100 a month pension, minus what they would receive from social security.

And they had to begin contributing to a health insurance plan with no wage increase at all.

Still, workers celebrated that they had successfully defended the USW against the all out union-busting drive.

That was the day workers at the International Harvester plant in Louisville, Kentucky had had enough.

They had just rejected a pay scale lower than that of Harvester workers elsewhere.

In her recent article for Leo Weekly, historian Toni Gilpin refers to the lower pay as the “Southern Differential.”

Harvester workers walked off the job in a 40-day strike.

Black and white Louisville workers were united in a rare form of solidarity.

International Harvester had had a long labor-hating history.

Its forerunner had been the McCormick Reaper Works, the site that sparked the 1886 Haymarket incident in Chicago.

Harvester had been able to keep the unions out until the Farm Equipment Workers/CIO finally organized there in 1941.

And the FE followed Harvester as they attempted to escape to the union-free South.

The FE successfully organized the new Louisville plant, just two months before the strike.

Workers learned quickly that they were paid much less making the same equipment as their brothers in Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere.

Gilpin adds that FE literature forthrightly stated, “Once the Negro and white workers were united, the low-wage system of the South would collapse.”

Workers pressed for their demands, and appealed to area farmers for support.

They stressed that farmers would not pay less for equipment, simply because local workers were paid less.

Black and white workers picketed together, ate together and planned their strike together at their new union hall.

Harvester initially tried to redbait FE leaders.

When that failed, the company was forced to grant steep wage increases.

Gilpin cites FE News, which reported “two smashing victories in hand, one over International Harvester, the other over the Mason-Dixon, low-wage line.”

That was the day oil workers walked off the job.

The strike soon spread to 20 states and involved more than 43,000 workers at 22 oil companies.

After years of wartime wage freezes, the union’s demand was 52 for 40—fifty-two hours pay for 40 hours work.

Workers demanded a 30% pay increase, shift differentials and an eventual return to the 36-hour workweek.

The strike began in Michigan at the Socony-Vacuum refinery in Trenton.

From there it spread to Gulf, Sinclair and Shell.

By October 4, President Truman signed executive order 9639, allowing the Secretary of the Navy to seize petroleum operations.

The Oil Workers International Union/CIO immediately called off the strike and ordered its members back to work.

A month later, the Navy had still not relinquished control of operations.

The union considered Truman’s seizure a betrayal.

There was no mechanism put in place to settle the dispute or consider workers demands.

By January 1946, the Oil Panel, created by the Secretary of Labor, finally awarded oil workers an 18% wage increase.

Though disappointed, the union considered it a victory.

They asserted the strike action was significant on a number of levels.

The first nationwide industry strike had just forced the oil companies to meet with the union for the first time.

The OWI believed the groundwork for industry-wide bargaining had finally been established.

It had been the first post-war strike and had forced the government to begin moving away from wartime wage controls.

Of the post-war strikes, it won the largest pay increase.

And importantly, it broke the power of Standard Oil to dictate wages to the industry through its dealings with its “independent union.”

That was the day 350,000 GM workers kicked off a 67-day strike.

It was the largest auto strike since the end of World War II.

According to historian Jefferson Cowie, it was likely the costliest.

In his book, Stayin’ Alive, Cowie notes that the strike cost GM a billion dollars in profits and nearly bankrupted the union.

But he adds it “lacked the proletarian drama that fired journalists’ hearts.”

For Cowie, it was an example of labor-management cooperation, “a civilized affair.”

But historian Jeremy Brecher points out that The Wall Street Journal drew different conclusions about the strike at the time.

In a series of articles, the paper noted that labor-management cooperation during the strike served ironically, to get workers back to work.

A long and costly strike served a number of functions.

It wore down strikers’ expectations.

After eight or ten weeks, workers would be amenable to terms they initially rejected.

It also provided an escape valve for built up frustration over working conditions.

And a long strike served to coalesce internal union factions around a common enemy, strengthening the union’s leadership in the process.

For management, a long and costly strike leant hope that workers would be reluctant to strike in the future.

But Brecher notes, these ideas about workers motives nearly backfired.

Strikers simply wouldn’t budge on their demands.

They made gains in wages, pensions and cost of living allowances.

And they were finally able to retire after 30 years.

But critics argued the agreement fell short of initial demands.

And workers lacked more say in the workplace.

This would be a key issue in the many strikes and wildcats in the years to come.

That was the day Illinois Governor Frank Lowden hoped to meet with striking streetcar men in an effort to end their strike.

Transit workers in Springfield, the state’s capitol, had been off the job since July 25^th.

But the strike had gained so much support that Springfield had now erupted into a full blown general strike.

According to the Sangamon County Historical Society, thousands of “union members shut down mines, railroads, bakeries, restaurants, laundries and construction sites… following the violent crackdown of a pro-labor march by state police and militia.”

That march had been scheduled for September 9.

The unions hoped to show support for the striking streetcar men after a number of clashes between strikers and state militia.

After they were denied a permit, many of the 50 or so unions decided to march anyway, and were attacked.

Some were shot, more than 40 suffered bayonet-inflicted injuries.

By the 11^th, most everyone in Springfield had walked off the job.

Striking women shoe factory workers stopped a streetcar, pulling the scab drivers off by force.

By the end of the week, as many as 12,000 members of 34 unions in the city were on strike.

When telephone operators walked off the job, they paralyzed communications of the scab streetcar drivers and the State National Guardsmen.

The streetcar strikers refused to meet with the governor until troops were withdrawn from the city.

The governor insisted disloyal, pro-German forces were at fault for the “labor troubles.”

By the 16^th, the streetcar men agreed to negotiate and the general strike was called off.

But the company refused to meet striker demands for recognition and higher wages or even to take them back.

That was the day Rhode Island Governor Theodore Green demanded that federal troops be sent to crush a textile strike in his state.

The General Textile Strike, then in its second week, stretched across the Piedmont from New England to Georgia.

Green declared, “We are face to face, not with a textile strike but with a communist uprising.”

His demands came after days of pitched battles between thousands of strikers and the Rhode Island National Guard in Saylesville and Woonsocket.

Secretary of War George Dern assured the governor and the press that 3,000 combat troops were ready and available for immediate duty in Rhode Island.

President Roosevelt declined to send federal troops.

But the state assembly authorized the governor to close the mills and appropriated $100,000 in funds to beef up state police forces.

The governor then directed Rhode Island’s police chiefs to round up all communists on charges of inciting riots in textile centers across the state.

It gave local authorities the pretext to round up and arrest over 200 alleged agitators, strike leaders, militants and radicals.

Over the course of four days, three strikers had been killed, including Charles Gorcynski at Saylesville and Jude Courtemanche, at Woonsocket.

Hundreds had been seriously injured in the two cities.

Seven of the sixteen strikers who had been shot by state troops were near death.

State National Guardsmen had been given “shoot to kill” orders to protect textile mills and scabs.

Once the Governor shut down the mills, police forces easily arrested dozens of flying squadron picketers and established martial law like conditions, though it was never officially established.

Within days, the strike would be quelled in Rhode Island.

That was the day the United Rubber Workers was founded in Akron, Ohio.

Akron was the rubber capital of the world.

All the major companies were there—Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich and General Tire.

In Akron alone, there were more than 40,000 rubber workers and thousands more throughout the country.

After 30 years of struggling to build the union, hopes of organizing the industry were finally made real.

The founding of the international came after a successful strike the year before.

But the union was born amid growing tensions within the AFL.

These were years of industrial organizing that rivaled the exclusive skilled craft unions.

Growing demands to organize the mass industries would explode the next month at the historic AFL convention in Atlantic City.

The tensions between AFL leaders and rubber workers delegates gave a taste of things to come.

At the founding convention, rubber workers delegates opposed a number of AFL leaders’ demands.

The AFL insisted on appointing officers.

They threatened to withdraw financial assistance when the delegates demanded democratic elections.

But AFL leaders backed off when unionists from across the city protested.

Then, delegates voted down an AFL constitutional clause proposal to bar “communists” from the union.

They also refused AFL orders to organize on anything less than a total industrial basis.

Organizing skilled workers into the URW became a contentious issue at the October AFL convention.

It led to the fight between Carpenters leader Bill Hutcheson and UMW president John Lewis, which precipitated the AFL split.

By the following spring, the new URW would lead another successful strike that put it firmly among the industrial unions of the CIO.

We pause to remember those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Of those killed, nearly a quarter were union people.

Hundreds of firefighters were lost.

Dozens of building trades people, including carpenters and electricians were also killed.

And many other unions lost members as well, including the AFT, SEIU, UNITE-HERE, CWA, and AFSCME.

Those lost that day will remains firmly forever in our memories.

What is less well known is the number of those first responders who are suffering from chronic and fatal diseases related to 9/11 or those who have already died.

It is estimated that over 400,000 people were exposed to World Trade Center contaminants.

These include more than 70 carcinogens and other hazardous substances.

Of those exposed, over 91,000 were first responders.

As of June 2017, over 67,000 first responders and over 12,000 survivors had registered in the World Trade Center Health Program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The program provides medical monitoring, health evaluations and treatment for those who qualify.

Of those registered responders still alive, more than 45,000 suffer from certified conditions as defined by the Zadroga Act of 2010.

And for registered survivors, nearly 10,000 suffer from certified conditions.

Close to 700 registered first responders have already died from certified conditions.

However, this number is considered a low estimate, given there were many who died before the program was established.

There are also a number of illnesses believed related to the attacks but not yet certified.

If you are a survivor or were a 9/11 First Responder and would like to enroll in the World Trade Center Health Program, please visit www.cdc.gov/wtc or call toll free 1-888-982-4748.

That was the day the Chicago Teachers Union walked off the job for the first time in 25 years.

The historic weeklong strike resonated nationwide among trade unionists and served to reinvigorate the labor movement.

Certainly higher wages and better benefits were among the teachers’ demands.

The city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel had canceled the union’s wage increase, laid off close to 1000 teachers and went on the attack against seniority rights and working conditions.

The strike enjoyed wide public support among parents and the public.

Teachers emphasized broader educational problems they faced, namely the attacks fueled by corporate privatization.

They wanted a return to more traditional forms of education rather than simply preparing students for endless rounds of testing.

They wanted more art, music and gym classes.

And they demanded stable funding for social support services for the most vulnerable, at risk youth.

Union teachers understood that the Board of Education was using standardized testing to get rid of teachers and schools in order to privatize education, all in the name of turning around failing schools and “helping the kids.”

Though the contract was far from perfect, it showed the power working people have to hold the line against continued assaults on their standards of living, especially in the public sector.

The CTU was able to beat back attempts at merit pay and increased use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

They won first time recall rights, supply reimbursements and liberal arts classes.

There were concessions made on seniority rights, pay for laid off teachers and longer work days.

But the CTU demonstrated that strikes can win in a period of extended anti-union onslaughts.

That was the day a mistrial was declared in the case of sixteen textile mill unionists in North Carolina.

The mistrial sparked five days of anti-union vigilante violence.

Textile workers at Gastonia’s Loray Mill had been on strike since April 1.

They demanded higher wages and shorter work hours, union recognition and an end to the hated stretch out system.

Soon, textile workers at Bessemer City’s American Mill walked off the job in solidarity and joined the National Textile Workers Union.

Ella Mae Wiggins was one of the strike leaders at American Mill.

She was known for her militancy but also for organizing black workers into the union.

As the strike wore on, mill owners evicted dozens of families from company housing.

Wiggins helped set up a tent city.

On June 7, sheriff’s deputies attacked strikers who marched to Loray Mill to call out remaining workers.

The police arrived at the tent colony later that evening to disarm them and Gastonia’s police chief wound up dead.

Immediately more than seventy textile union members and leaders were rounded up and arrested.

Sixteen stood trial for the murder of Chief Aderholt.

The anti-union Committee of One Hundred smashed up NTWU headquarters in Gastonia and Bessemer City.

They kidnapped, beat and threatened to kill several union members.

The rampage continued as scab forces moved onto Charlotte to raid the offices of the International Labor Defense, who had handled the strikers’ case.

Five days into the terror, Wiggins was killed on her way to a union solidarity rally.

Outrage over her murder forced mill owners to improve conditions and wages.

But the fight to organize would continue for years.

That was the day the Delano Grape Strike began in California.

The strike came a year after activists had forced Congress to end the Bracero contract labor program.

The Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and others called the strike against the Delano Growers and the Coachella Valley Grape Growers.

It had been a record harvest.

Farmworkers demanded higher wages, humane working conditions and union recognition.

When the growers refused, thousands walked out of the fields.

A week later, the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, joined the strike.

It was a historic moment.

Within a year the two unions would merge to form the United Farm Workers.

The union sent strikers to the Oakland docks to persuade Longshoremen not to load non-union grapes.

Many of the Filipino workers in the San Joaquin Valley worked in the Alaska fish canneries organized by the ILWU in the off season.

And so the ILWU honored their union brothers request.

Thousands of cases of grapes were left to rot on the docks.

This initial victory led Chavez to organize a grape boycott against heavy weights, DiGiorgio and Schenley Industries.

Six months into the strike, union leaders marched 300 miles from Delano to Sacramento to bring attention to their struggle.

They hoped to pressure growers to the negotiating table and legislators to act on their behalf.

For five years, the strike and boycott continued, with marches, organizing and picket line arrests.

Gradually, the UFW began winning higher wages, union recognition and hiring halls.

Finally in 1970, a collective bargaining agreement covering 10,000 workers was reached.

That was the day hundreds of ILWU strikers blocked railroad tracks near Longview, Washington.

They hoped to stop grain shipments from moving in and out of the EGT Grain Terminal.

Longshoremen had been sitting down on the tracks throughout the summer resulting in over a hundred arrests.

No trains had moved in or out of the terminal since July.

But then a federal judge issued an injunction against ILWU pickets.

BNSF railroad tried to move grain once again.

ILWU picketers in Vancouver were able to hold off the train until police forcibly dispersed the crowd.

Then hundreds gathered at Longview to block the train from coming in.

That’s when police went on the offensive.

They used clubs and pepper spray against the longshoremen, arresting 19.

They threw ILWU president Bob McEllrath to the ground.

Rumors spread that police had broken his arm.

Hundreds of regional longshoremen rushed to Longview.

The Seattle and Tacoma ports shut down in protest.

The next morning, 10,000 tons of grain were opened onto the railroad tracks.

The grain export terminal was the first to be built in the Pacific Northwest in almost 30 years.

EGT hoped to undercut the powerful ILWU, who controlled operations at the port since its founding in the 1930s.

The union refused to agree to work 12-hour shifts at straight time.

The EGT hoped to break the hiring hall by refusing to recognize maintenance and inside workers at the terminal.

Then they attempted to fill jobs with workers from the Operating Engineers.

But the ILWU persevered.

By the end of January, EGT backed off many of its demands, negotiations resumed and days later the contract was signed.

That was the day that became known as “Bloody Thursday.”

Seven striking workers were shot dead and another 30 wounded at the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina.

The Great Textile Strike of 1934 had started September 1.

The twenty-two day strike spanned the eastern United States, from New England to Georgia and involved close to half a million workers.

The main issue was the dreaded “stretch out,” increased workloads at the same or even reduced pay rates.

Striking textile workers implemented the flying picket squad tactic employed by Minneapolis Teamsters earlier that summer.

Hundreds drove from mill to mill to prevent scabbing.

Mill executives across the Piedmont were stunned and terrified at the strike’s effectiveness and the workers’ militancy.

Strikers at the Chiquola Mill had formed solid picket lines at the gate when scabs and special deputies armed by the mill’s owner, opened fire.

All seven were shot in the back as they tried to escape the hail of bullets.

According to a New York Times article the following day, the killings marked “the beginning of the second bloody phase of the strike as one town after another reported completion of preparations to resist the flying squads and the picketing activity of the strikers.”

Frank Beacham, the grandson of Chiquola Mill owner and mayor of Honea Path, Dan Beacham, has worked to unearth the history of the massacre and apologize for his grandfather’s cruelty.

He notes that, as in many southern mill towns, after the strike went down to defeat, those who struck were fired and blacklisted.

Those who retained their jobs essentially took a vow of silence never to discuss the strike or massacre again.

That was the day the first Labor Day Parade took place in New York City.

But whose idea was it?

According to the late Jonathan Grossman, former historian at the Department of Labor, the first Labor Day occurred during a general uptick in working class organizing, strike activity and militancy that year.

Peter McGuire, Carpenters Union General Secretary is often credited as the father of Labor Day.

But others assert that Knights of Labor machinist and New York City’s Central Labor Union leader Matthew Maguire was the force behind the holiday.

The machinist Maguire had been active in the eight-hour movement and later as a Socialist Labor Party politician.

By the end of the decade, 400 cities nationwide celebrated the first Monday of September as “a general holiday for the workingman.”

It was already an official holiday in most states when the labor movement started campaigning for a day of recognition at the federal level.

Labor militants contend that by 1894, the holiday was promoted for its respectability against the more radical May Day.

Another unanswered question remains regarding President Cleveland’s motives for signing the federal legislation.

The widely accepted view is that Cleveland hoped to win back Labor’s vote after federal troops crushed the 1894 Pullman Strike in early August.

But the President signed legislation much earlier, on June 28^th. The nationwide boycott against Pullman cars, called by Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union, had just begun two days earlier.

Did he hope to deflate the boycott?

What do you think?

For many in the Chicago labor movement, the fact that both Labor Day and May Day are linked to the city’s history is a source of pride.

That was the day anti-black violence erupted into a two-day massacre in Clinton, Mississippi.

As many as 2500 Black Republicans and their families met at Moss Hill, a former plantation destroyed during the Civil War.

The day was one of festivities and political speeches ahead of the fall elections.

The County Republican Party invited local Democrats to debate.

The Democratic State Senatorial candidate did address the crowd.

The editor of a local Republican newspaper and Union officer, Captain H.T. Fisher, followed him.

Soon a group of white Democrats began to heckle Fisher as he spoke.

Republican politicians attempted to quell the growing tensions.

Almost immediately the heckling whites opened fire on the crowd.

Women and children fled in all directions as black Republican forces rushed to defend themselves and their families.

By the end of the day three whites and five blacks were killed.

Clinton’s mayor fed off rumors of black retaliation.

He called upon white paramilitary forces, the White Liners, from surrounding areas for assistance.

Several hundred answered the call and filled the town’s streets.

Historian Melissa Janczewski Jones notes that though heavily armed, the White Liners accompanied white locals as they rampaged door to door, looking for black Republicans to murder.

After two days, as many as fifty black Clintonians were killed by white Democrats looking to end Reconstruction and regain political control of Mississippi.

A Senate Committee would later conclude, “The riots at Clinton were the result of a special purpose on the part of the Democrats to break up the meetings of Republicans and to inaugurate an era of terror, not only in those communities but throughout the state.”

That was the day the Progressive Miners of America wrapped up their founding convention in Gillespie, Illinois.

Fed up with concessions and what they viewed as a heavy-handed, anti-democratic rule by UMW president John L. Lewis, Illinois miners met to break decisively.

Area miners were active in radical politics and many supported currents within the Socialist and Communist movements.

That July, Lewis opened the contract and agreed to a 20% pay cut.

Tens of thousands of miners were furious and threw up picket lines at mines throughout central and southern Illinois.

In Franklin County, striking miners were assaulted, shot and beaten by special deputies and strike breaking thugs.

Many miners thought Lewis had a hand in the violence against them.

Two miners were killed and hundreds more injured.

By September 1, 273 delegates representing 40,000 miners resolved to break from the UMWA, form a new union, and plan immediate negotiations with coal operators.

They drafted a constitution emphasizing rank and file industrial democracy.

A women’s auxiliary was established, with Agnes Burnes Wieck at its head.

It imbued union solidarity and leadership qualities among non-mining women.

An enraged Lewis charged dual unionism but the new PMA alleged they represented ninety percent of Illinois miners.

The split gave rise to the Illinois Mine Wars.

Years of shootings, bombings, and assaults became almost commonplace as both unions struggled for power.

The PMA soon faced internal fighting as conservatives attempted to wrest leadership from many of the founders.

By 1937 racketeering charges were engineered against PMA leaders and close to forty were tried and convicted.

Though the union never dominated the industry, it continued to represent thousands of Illinois miners throughout the 20^th century.

That was the day the ‘Protocol of Peace’ brought an end to the cloak makers strike in New York City.

The garment industry had been rocked by the ‘Uprising of the 20,000’ months earlier.

Young women had struck hundreds of small shops over pay, recognition and working conditions.

They won ILGWU recognition in all but a handful of shops.

60,000 cloak makers in the city were inspired to walkout of the sweatshops that July.

The mostly male strike force demanded shorter hours and increased pay, the closed shop and more.

Union membership soared and most of the smaller shops caved.

The larger manufacturers would not however, and by the end of summer, the Protocol of Peace was negotiated.

Future Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis figured prominently in the negotiations.

The Protocol established higher wages, shorter hours and overtime pay.

It also guaranteed the union shop, elimination of contracting and monitoring of piecework rates.

Even more significant, workers won a Union Health Center, a Board of Sanitary Control, a Board of Grievances and a Board of Arbitration.

For the first time, garment workers had access to health care, a way to eliminate sweatshop conditions and a way to mediate and resolve shop floor complaints.

The price to be paid however was that workers would give up their most powerful leveraging tool, the right to strike.

The agreement was lauded as a step forward for industrial democracy.

But soon many workers complained that the Protocol failed to answer a number of shop floor issues.

Grievances piled up and workers were penalized when they attempted to strike to resolve their problems.

The Protocol would be scrapped for a return to militant strikes during the 1920s.

That was the day nearly half a million textile workers, from Maine to Alabama, walked off the job in a general strike.

The United Textile Workers had launched an organizing campaign the year before.

Within months their membership had grown from 15,000 to well over 250,000.

Working conditions and pay were abysmal.

The normal workweek averaged 55 hours.

Child labor was widespread and workers were always in fear of mill closings, pay cuts and firings for suspected union activity.

In the South, the industry had essentially been in a depression since the early 20s.

The key issue was the ‘stretch-out”.

Workers were routinely expected to complete an increasing amount of work at the same rate and wage.

For a brief moment, workers hoped their conditions would change when President Roosevelt signed the Code of Fair Competition the previous summer.

It raised wages, limited hours, and prohibited child labor.

It also allowed for union organizing.

But the mill owners maneuvered around the code effectively and the Textile Relations Board refused most workers complaints.

Fed up, workers walked out of the mills by the hundreds of thousands.

They used the flying squadron tactic employed by Minneapolis Teamsters earlier that year, traveling from town to town, from mill to mill, calling workers out on strike.

Mill owners were shocked.

Within days, strikers confronted thousands of police and scabs.

More than 40,000 National Guardsmen were called out in 16 states.

Over the course of the strike, sixteen were killed and hundreds injured.

After 22 days, union leaders called off the strike when President Roosevelt promised a government survey of industry conditions.

It was an outrage, a betrayal and a defeat felt for decades.

That was the day the final battle of the Atlanta Campaign began with the Battle of Jonesborough.

The Union had been embroiled in a civil war with Confederate forces to end the slave labor system for three and a half years.

It had been a difficult summer.

Battles were increasingly bloody, with casualties on both sides numbering in the tens of thousands.

Criticisms intensified against key Union generals like Sherman and Grant.

Pressure mounted against President Lincoln to end the war and withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation if necessary.

General William T. Sherman mounted the Atlanta Campaign earlier that year, in May.

His forces scored a number of victories throughout the summer, but could not decisively defeat Confederate forces.

By August, Northern morale was so low that the Republican National Committee deemed Lincoln unelectable.

The Democratic National Convention, convening in Chicago, had declared the war a failure and planned to ride to victory over Lincoln in the November elections.

But Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation was unwavering.

And Sherman did not disappoint.

He understood that Atlanta was, as historian Eric Foner describes it, “a key railroad hub and the communications and transportation center for the entire Southeast.”

Sherman’s forces had been marching down from Chattanooga for most of the summer.

Finally, they marched to the south of Atlanta to cut the last key rail line.

On this day, Union forces positioned themselves at the Flint River and at the Macon and Western Railroad.

Over the next two days, they would successfully beat back multiple Confederate assaults, destroy the rail line and force Confederate forces to abandon Atlanta.

The city was now fully under Union occupation.

That was the day labor leader Luisa Moreno was born in Guatemala City.

As a young woman, she fought for the admission of women into Guatemalan universities.

After attending journalism school in Mexico City, Luisa moved to New York with her husband and worked as a seamstress.

Outraged by low pay, racial discrimination and poor working conditions, she led organizing efforts on the job.

During the Depression she worked as a full-time union organizer, first with the AFL organizing black and Latina cigar rollers in Florida.

But she also became active with the Communist Party and joined CIO efforts to organize cannery workers.

Luisa led unionizing efforts of pecan shelling women workers in San Antonio, Texas and then of cannery workers in Los Angeles.

In 1938, Luisa helped organize the Spanish-speaking Peoples Congress.

During World War II, she fought against discrimination in hiring of Mexicans in oil and war-related industries.

In the 1940s she became centrally involved in high profile legal defense cases of Mexican-American youth prosecuted on frame-up charges.

These included work around the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon case and then of victims of the Zoot Suit riots a year later.

She continued union work in California, helping to organize and represent walnut pickers.

By 1950 she was caught in the cross hairs of the McCarthy-era witch-hunts.

Luisa was targeted by Operation Wetback, and offered citizenship status in return for testimony against radical labor leader, Harry Bridges.

When she refused, she faced deportation on the accusation that she had once been a member of the Communist Party.

She returned to Guatemala and continued organizing workers throughout Central America.

Luisa Moreno died in Guatemala in 1992.

That was the day 2500 steel workers at the Pressed Steel Car Company near McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania walked off the job.

It was the second walkout in two weeks.

Workers effectively shut down production of armor plate for the Navy, shell forgings for the Army and railroad cars used to transport military materiel.

The company had gone back on promises of holding a collective bargaining election.

Steelworkers Organizing Committee sub-regional director, Abe Martin told The Pittsburgh Press that while the union had not called the strike, workers had “walked out themselves because they are fed up with the company’s discrimination against them.”

SWOC had been trying to organize the plant for years.

But the company had engineered an election for a so-called, independent union 18 months earlier, when the complex was only operating at half capacity.

Workers walked out at the beginning of the month and ended their strike on the guarantee that negotiations for a new election would begin.

But when they returned, they found that some were stripped of seniority while others were forcibly transferred to new departments.

The day before, machine shop workers on the afternoon shift were fed up and dropped their tools.

Word spread throughout the evening and by early morning, picket lines were solid and production had come to a complete standstill.

When the company tried to force reopening of the plant after Labor Day, 1500 workers formed picket lines at the gates to stop scabbing.

They returned to work 10 days later in compliance with a request by the National Defense Mediation Board.

The NLRB rejected SWOC’s election petition two months later, but SWOC persisted and won exclusive bargaining rights the following June.

That was the day 7,000 white and Filipino lettuce workers in California’s Salinas Valley walked out on strike.

Salinas was the lettuce capital of the world.

The division of labor in the Valley was largely ethnically based.

Filipinos did much of the field labor, while whites worked in the packing sheds.

At the time, Filipinos made up 40% of the total agricultural workforce in the Salinas Valley.

They had founded the Filipino Labor Union a year earlier.

White packing shed workers had organized into the AFL’s Vegetable Packers Association.

While the VPA had been reluctant to work with the FLU, they now sought to join forces in strike action.

Both unions agreed neither would return to work until both had achieved victory.

Together, they demanded wage increases, union recognition and better working conditions.

Losing $100,000 a day, the growers soon imported scabs of all races.

They enlisted California Highway Patrols to arrest striking Filipinos on incitement and vagrancy charges.

Soon the VPA agreed to arbitration, leaving the FLU to continue the strike alone.

Some speculated the members were threatened with the loss of their charter if they refused to return to work.

The striking Filipino workers continued to organize job actions and experienced increased retaliation as a result.

VPA leaders publicly distanced themselves from the Filipino strikers and racially charged vigilante violence intensified.

It culminated in the burning down of the labor camp where hundreds of Filipino workers lived a month after the strike began.

Vigilantes then drove as many as 800 Filipinos from the Valley at gunpoint.

The strike was officially called off and those that remained returned to work.

By October, both unions had won wage increases.

That was the day miners in Tracy City, Tennessee rebelled against the state’s convict lease system.

Miners had been forced to work side by side with convict labor.

The convicts, overwhelmingly African-American, were forced to live in deplorable stockade conditions.

Their presence in the mines served to minimize paid labor, keep wages low and stunt union organizing throughout the state.

Miners demanded that Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad give them the same hours of work as the convicts.

When they refused, the miners marched on the stockades where convicts were housed.

They released the convicts and marched them onto trains bound for Nashville, burning the stockades to the ground.

The revolt at Tracy City followed armed uprisings of thousands of miners the previous year in nearby Briceville and Coal Creek.

Here it is thought that Knights of Labor leaders led miners to surround stockades, disarm guards, and release convicts onto Knoxville bound trains over the course of several days.

By August 1892, hundreds of miners would confront state forces in armed shootouts across Grundy, Marion and Anderson counties, releasing convicts when they could onto trains bound for Nashville.

Miners were eventually arrested and convicted.

But these revolts would lead the Tennessee General Assembly to end its convict lease system four years later, making it one of the first Southern states to do so.

That was the day Teamsters organizer, 28-year old William Grami was kidnapped and beaten.

Grami had arrived in Sebastopol, California to help organize about 350 workers in local canneries, drying plants and fruit sheds.

The Teamsters had been on campaign footing for months, in an attempt to win union recognition, higher wages and benefits.

They had lost a union representation election the previous fall, after Sebastapol Apple Growers moved quickly to lay off union supporters.

By January, cannery workers at Oscar Hall and Sons voted for union representation, though workers at Barlow Company would vote against the union just two months later.

But by early August, the strike wave hit.

Workers walked off the job at the Sebastopol Cooperative Cannery.

More at seven other area canneries joined them on strike in the days that followed.

Grami would later testify that he had heard reports weeks earlier of a grower threatening to have him killed within three hours, should any strike actually take place.

During the strike that would ultimately prove victorious, three men kidnapped Grami outside the union hall.

He was driven along a rural road, tied to a pole, gagged and beaten with a bicycle chain.

Left for dead, he was found the next day and hospitalized immediately.

But the union and the strikers remained undeterred.

Before the strike was over, scab trucks attempting to haul apples to market were vandalized or burned, and scab drivers were beaten.

Eight months later, the apple industry finally came to the negotiating table.

By May 1956, area apple growers signed with the Teamsters.

That was the day the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union was founded.

After the victorious strike of 1934 that established the union hiring hall,

West Coast union leaders embarked on an inland campaign to organize the thousands of warehouse workers who handled shipped goods.

But West Coast dockworkers overwhelmingly chose to join the CIO after it was expelled from the AFL earlier that year.

They found the ILA planned to abandon the warehouse workers they had worked so hard to organize.

They also opposed dues assessments to fight the CIO and disagreed with the ILA’s hostility to minimum wage laws, social security and unemployment insurance.

Radicals like Harry Bridges and others had established themselves not only as workers leaders but also led attacks on Jim Crow racism in the ranks and in the industry.

The success of the 1934 strike was due in part to the welcoming of blacks into the ranks of the union.

In his Workers on the Waterfront, historian Bruce Nelson notes that, “the ILWU’s well-known opposition to racial discrimination was an important factor in the union’s expansion into Hawaii, not only on the waterfront but among sugar and pineapple plantation workers. The triumph of the ILWU in Hawaiian agriculture brought about a degree of fraternization across racial lines that few had thought possible.”

Since then, the union has beat back numerous Taft–Hartley and McCarthy era attacks.

More recently, the ILWU has been in the forefront of broader social justice struggles, leading walkouts and work stoppages for various political causes.

Today it represents close to 60,000 workers, including those locals that initially refused to affiliate.

That was the day 1300 workers from the four railroad brotherhoods walked off the job in Joliet, near Chicago.

The walkout threatened to paralyze freight service for steel mills in nearby Gary and other regional industries.

Four hundred thousand railroad shopmen had been on strike across the country for nearly seven weeks.

Newspaper headlines that day warned a general strike of two million trainmen loomed on the horizon.

Brotherhood leaders promised sympathy strikes in response to threats made against their members by troops on duty at railroad centers and yards.

There were also real concerns about the health and safety of trainmen, given rolling stock was no longer being maintained.

In Joliet, workers stayed away under threats from troops.

Additionally, Illinois Central trainmen faced threats from striking miners throughout Kentucky and Illinois, who warned:

“Stop transporting non-union coal or suffer the consequences.”

Resentment had been building against state guard troops stationed in Illinois yards.

Earlier in the week, striking shopmen had engaged in a fatal confrontation with Joliet sheriffs that left a striker and railroad detective dead and scores injured.

Riot orders were called when authorities sought to arrest striking shopmen who had stormed the home of a scab.

Brotherhood workers refused to return to work unless troops were removed.

Warren Stone, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers stated: “We are not going to have our men shot up or beaten up or threatened by armed guards at railroad shops and yards.

When the men cannot go to work without having irresponsible armed guards endangering their lives, they may go home and stay there.

There will be 100 more cases soon if conditions are not changed.”

That was the day fifty-three construction tradesmen were killed in a fire at the Titan II ICBM launch complex near Searcy, Arkansas.

It is considered one of the worst industrial accidents at a U.S. nuclear weapons facility.

The complex was one of four sites containing Titan II missiles.

Each missile weighed 340,000 pounds, measuring 103 feet in length and 10 feet in diameter.

President Johnson had just committed more troops to the Vietnam War.

The Air Force hoped to strengthen the silo against a possible Soviet attack.

They had contracted with Peter Kiewit and Son of Colorado to bring in electricians, carpenters, millwrights, painters and pipefitters for a number of tasks.

Crews worked to shore up the silo, improve the blast doors, adjust hydraulics and install emergency lighting.

52 of 55 workers on all nine levels of the silo were almost immediately asphyxiated when it suddenly filled with smoke and heat.

The Air Force determined a welder on level 2 accidentally pierced a high-pressure hydraulic line, igniting the fire.

Investigators also concluded the silo lacked adequate ventilation, alternative exits and independent power sources.

The contractor was held responsible for numerous safety violations, contributing to unsafe working conditions.

The welder was found drowned in hydraulic fluid.

Two survivors suffered burns and smoke inhalation.

They contested the Air Force’s findings.

One worker insisted no one had been welding on level 2.

The other survivor stated he saw flames burst from the diesel engine just before the power went out.

Both men insisted the fire started from below.

By 1981, two more deadly accidents involving Titan II missiles would prompt President Reagan to order their deactivation.

That was the day more than 100 trade union delegates representing thousands of working people in St. Paul, Minnesota elected Charles James to be the president of the city’s Trades and Labor Assembly.

Virtually forgotten by history, James is considered to be the first African American elected to a city labor council anywhere in America.

He was born in 1866 in St. Paul and began working as a leather cutter for local shoe manufacturers at age 15.

This was at a time when most African Americans were excluded from skilled trades.

His biographer, Dave Riehle, asserts that it is unclear when James became involved in union politics and organizing.

Shoe making was the largest mass production industry in St. Paul, employing thousands.

Riehle notes the Knights of Labor had been active in the city during the 1880s and shoe workers were among the first to organize.

By 1899, James had become the first president of a newly formed shoe workers union in Minneapolis and helped to found three more locals in St. Paul.

By 1902, James was well known and well respected throughout the Twin Cities as a strong union leader.

He served three terms as president of the Trades Assembly and then as secretary for seven more years.

Riehle states that James continued as full time organizer and district business agent, traveling to cities across the Midwest to organize shoe workers.

When he died in 1923, the Boot and Shoe Workers Union eulogized him in their national journal.

Though James had been obscured from local labor history for decades, Riehle and others have worked to write Charles James back into the history books.

­­­­­­­­­­­­That was the day President Jimmy Carter declared a federal health emergency at Love Canal, in the city of Niagara Falls, New York.

Premier spokeswoman, housewife Lois Gibbs became the poster child for the citizen environmental justice movement virtually overnight.

Niagara Falls Gazette journalists broke the story two years earlier.

Their sump pump testings and health surveys found a number of toxic chemicals and unusually high rates of cancers, birth defects, miscarriages and other serious health concerns.

Initially planned as a canal, the site remained abandoned until the 1940s.

That’s when Hooker Electrochemical Plant and the City began using the site to dispose of toxic chemical and municipal waste.

More than 20,000 tons of toxic sludge containing more than 21,000 chemicals were buried there.

Then, in 1953, the City School Board bought the site and built two schools on the property.

Soon, about 1,000 families settled nearby.

By the early 70s, residents complained of foul odors, health issues, substances filling their basements and leaky waste disposal drums popping up in back yards, killing all plant life.

Class and racial tensions soon emerged among working class white homeowners and black renters, both of whom sought compensation and relocation.

Carter’s initial declaration provided limited funding.

But the disaster led to the passage of the Superfund Act.

The neighborhood was demolished and residents were compensated and relocated.

The new owner of Hooker Chemical, Occidental Petroleum settled with the EPA for $129 million.

Despite 21 years of remediation and residential redevelopment, new residents complained in 2011 of foul odors and ruptured sewage lines oozing toxic sludge.

By 2014, 1,000 new complaints had been filed contending the area had never been properly remediated.

That was the day release of flammable vapor led to a fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California.

A Level 3 Community Warning System Alert was issued for the cities of Richmond, San Pablo and North Richmond.

Toxic black smoke could be seen for miles while the fire burned for hours.

Nineteen workers were nearly incinerated trying to escape the fire.

More than 15,000 area residents sought medical treatment for chest pain, breathing problems, headaches and sore throats.

The Chemical Safety Board found that the release was caused by a leaking pipe that eventually ruptured.

The pipe, made of carbon steel, suffered sulfidic corrosion.

The CSB noted that for 40 years, the refinery industry had known that carbon steel corrodes at a much faster rate than higher chromium content steel pipe.

The pipe in question had no shut off valve to isolate the leak. In its final report, the CSB issued a number of findings.

They found that Chevron knew of the corrosion but did nothing to prevent it.

As well, Chevron not only failed to perform 100 percent component inspections, but also rejected earlier recommendations to inspect and replace the pipe that would eventually fail.

When it came to Emergency Response, Chevron failed to identify and communicate process controls or damage mechanisms in the incident command structure.

They also had no leak response guidance or formal protocol to determine how to handle a process leak.

The CSB found the Safety Culture lacking. Workers were reluctant to use their Stop Work Authority and were often encouraged to continue operations despite hazardous conditions.

The CSB issued a number of recommendations, including more stringent regulatory enforcement.

That was the day IWW leader Frank Little was buried in Butte, Montana.

Little had been lynched on August 1, by police agents thought to be working for the despised Anaconda Copper Company.

He had arrived in town to help organize 14,000 striking copper miners.

Devastated by the deaths of 168 miners in the June fire at Granite Mountain & Speculator Mines, mine workers formed the Metal Mine Workers’ Union and walked off the job.

Frank Little had previously worked as a hard rock miner and organizer for the Western Federation of Miners. He also took part in the free speech campaigns on the West Coast.

Little was involved in early drives to industrially organize oil workers and lumberjacks.

He voiced his opposition to the First World War and sought to stop workers from enlisting.

When Little arrived in Butte in July, he worked to build strike support, picket lines and spread the strike to other trades across the city.

Early on August 1, six masked men broke into the boardinghouse where he was staying. He was beaten and taken from his room.

His assailants tied him to the bumper of their car and dragged him through the granite streets of Butte to Milwaukee Bridge, where he was hanged.

An ominous note was pinned to his bullet-ridden body, with the words “Others Take Notice.

First and Last Warning.” It included the numbers 3-7-77 as well as the initials of other union organizers in the area.

As many as 10,000 marched in the funeral procession.

Days after his lynching, martial law was declared.

Labor radicals were rounded up and charged with espionage. The miners strike and union were crushed.

That was the day Michael Siegel, Business Agent for New York City’s Local 3, IBEW announced the lights would be going out on Broadway for an half an hour.

Electricians had been on strike for nearly a week to protest Consolidated Edison’s refusal to employ union electricians for work on its new Waterside plant.

The company claimed it could only use members of the Brotherhood of Edison Employees, an ‘independent union.’

The walkout also affected electricians at area construction sites and at 25 defense contractors across the city.

The union had just agreed to exempt electricians at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where the strike held up work on four battleships.

And the IBEW allowed electricians at Ford Instrument to return to work, given they had orders for $100,000,000 in defense instruments.

Siegel announced that at 9 p.m. the following evening, maintenance men not on strike, would pull the switches on all signs in Times Square in sympathy, to bring attention to their plight.

After the half-hour blackout, the IBEW continued to fight injunctions brought by the New York Electrical Contractors Association.

Harry Van Arsdale Jr., business manager for Local 3, declared the blackout had been more successful than they had hoped.

He characterized the switch-off as a “blackout for enlightenment.”

Naval officials complained however that the strike held up vital defense projects.

Newspapers noted that Broadwayites suddenly noticed the moon when an estimated 10 million watts of super-lighting was turned off.

A Times Square veteran noted it was darkest since 1918, when a Zeppelin raid alarm caused a blackout.

The strike was called off a week later when ConEd acknowledged its previous agreement with IBEW.

That was the day 13,000 workers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, went on strike.

Highly stressed workers had been driven to nervous exhaustion by long hours, problematic technology and brutal management.

They wanted better pay and working conditions, and a 32 hour work week.

PATCO workers had proven that militancy bred victories throughout the early 1970s.

But public sector employers went on the offensive as the decade drew to a close.

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected to office, automation, deregulation and inflation had taken its toll.

As Joseph McCartin details in his book, Collision Course, controllers found new technology unreliable.

They experienced on average, a computer outage a day, in critical moments of take offs and landings.

As well, the Airline Deregulation Act and the Civil Service Reform Act became laws in October 1978, serving to restrict union rights and worsen working conditions.

By the late 1970s, inflation had tripled.

Federal workers, unlike those in the private sector, lacked any COLA protections.

Emboldened by their skill level, solidarity and previous victories, the controllers walked.

Invoking Taft-Hartley, President Reagan issued a 48 hour back-to-work ultimatum.

In a historic move, he fired the strikers, jailed their leaders and forced costly injunctions that spelled doom for the union and the labor movement.

Many labor activists hoped the Teamsters and Machinists would walk out in support.

Instead the strike was a pivotal moment for labor.

It ushered in an era of unprecedented attacks not seen since the 1930s.

As Robert Weir notes, PATCO’s defeat “touched off a new wave of downsizing, decertification and concessions strikes.”

The labor movement continues to suffer its impact today.

That was the day striking Teamsters in Minneapolis defied martial law.

They stopped scab trucks, forcing the release of their strike leaders.

Armed with bayonets and machine guns, the National Guard had patrolled the streets for nearly a week.

They seized scores of strikers and union leaders and threw them into military stockades.

Drivers were outraged.

They defied Governor Olson and Major General Walsh who, on behalf of the Citizens Alliance and trucking bosses, were determined to break the strike.

Soon after strikers were imprisoned, drivers began chasing scab trucks across the city.

Multiple reports poured in of pickets forcing trucks to stop.

Some unloaded their cargo onto bridges.

Others chased, captured and damaged trucks.

Strikers ripped ignition wiring out, forced scabs from the wheel and then disappeared before police and the National Guard could arrive to retaliate.

In just three hours, strikers had overturned nearly 70 trucks.

Unable to stop the superior force of striking drivers, Bill Brown, Vincent and Miles Dunne were ordered unconditionally released from the military stockades.

Now employers, the governor, and other strike breaking agencies were eager to propose peace to federal mediators.

But they proposed to scrap the terms of their early May agreement.

In response, the leaders of Local 574 issued a General Strike call.

In it they asked, “Is there one man so blind as not to see that if 574 is allowed to go down to defeat, under the brutal hammering of military despotism, the whole labor movement of the city will have been dealt a mortal blow?

Union men, brothers, sisters, fellow workers!

What are you going to do about it?

We appeal to you for solidarity!”

That was the day National Guard troops in Minneapolis raided Teamsters local 574 headquarters.

Over 150 were arrested, including top strike leaders Bill Brown and the Dunne Brothers, who were imprisoned in military stockades.

Troops also seized union records and files.

Then they raided the Central Labor Union, seizing records and forcing out dozens of area labor leaders.

Teamsters had been battling the trucking bosses and the Citizens Alliance throughout the spring and summer in what would be a turning point for industrial organizing.

Finally, drivers agreed to a tentative settlement on the 25th, but the bosses rejected any deal, refusing to negotiate with ‘Reds.’

Farmer-Labor Party Governor Floyd Olson declared martial law the next day.

4,000 troops arrived, issuing unlimited military permits to scab drivers.

By month’s end, over 7,500 scab trucks were rolling throughout the city!

Local 574 challenged the martial law: they demanded that peaceful picketing and open-air meetings be reinstated; they wanted troops withdrawn from the city; and they wanted all truck movement halted for 48 hours.

When Olson rejected these demands, a mass rally was called for the 31st to mobilize strike support.

25,000 turned out to the Parade Grounds, cheering strike leader Bill Brown, who declared, “the Farmer-Labor Party is the best strikebreaking force our union has ever gone up against!”

Historian Bryan Palmer notes the loudest and longest applause was reserved for Albert Goldman, who thundered, “If we submit without a struggle, then we deserve the fate of submissive slaves. We cannot, we dare not, submit. We call upon the workers, organized and unorganized, to clench their fists, shout defiance of the bosses, and struggle until victory or death.”

That was the day striking autoworkers in Cleveland, Ohio defended their picket lines in what is known as “The Battle of East 140th Street.”

Members of UAW Local 45 at GM’s Fisher Body plant had been on strike for three weeks.

They had joined striking GM workers at 12 plants throughout Michigan.

They demanded a supplemental agreement granting skilled workers wage increases, overtime adjustments and seniority, and apprentice provisions.

In Cleveland, strikers vowed to stop the scabbing and were mostly successful.

Now, at the start of the morning shift, a scab attempted to plow through picket lines at high speed.

Strikers flooded the gates and brought the scab car to a virtual stop.

As they attempted to convince him not to cross through, mounted police viciously charged and attacked the strikers.

Police continued to shoot tear gas guns from behind plant gates.

Soon, there were more than 5000 picketers fighting with police, as workers poured out from half a dozen nearby plants to support the strikers.

For over two hours, workers showered strikebreaking forces with bricks, rocks and paving blocks.

They overturned scab cars and drove the police off the streets and into the plant.

Fighting broke out again in the afternoon when police tried to bring in more tear gas supplies.

Strike leaders directed activities from an amplifier on the roof of a nearby restaurant.

The next day, famed prohibition crusader, Eliot Ness, now Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety, enforced a 500 yard “”riot zone,” banning all gatherings near the gates and limited picketers to seven at each gate.

Strikers began picketing the homes of known scabs and would ratify a new contract just days later.

Black and white republicans in New Orleans called a constitutional convention to consider voting rights for African-Americans.

It would be another three and a half years before the ratification of the 15^th amendment.

Freedmen, many of them Civil War veterans gathered in the Fauburg-Marigny and proceeded to march to the convention, held at the Mechanics Institute on Canal Street.

Just before they reached the Institute, Black Republicans were confronted by a mob of white democrats, ex-Confederate soldiers and police, determined to prevent blacks from attaining any semblance of civil or political rights.

The delegates were able to momentarily beat back the mob and reach the Mechanics Institute.

But the racist mob charged again and started shooting.

By the time it was over, at least 50, mostly black Republicans were shot dead in the street. More than 200 were seriously injured.

Historian Justin Nystrom notes that it was an absolute massacre.

But he adds it was “actually very useful to the Republican Party because it gave them a concrete example of the kinds of problems former Confederates were causing in the South.”

He adds that events such as these helped influence voters to bring more Radical Republicans into Congress.

These politicians would be key to passing the Reconstruction Acts.

Nystrom points to a poem written by Camille Naudin, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the massacre.

Titled “Ode to the Martyrs,” the poem mourns the massacred while bitterly observing that Jefferson Davis remains alive: “But for the Mulattos, blacks and whites, this fact I must tell: Victor Lacroix is dead. Jeff Davis lives still.

That was the day AFSCME sanitation workers in Charlotte, North Carolina walked off the job.

More than 85% of the sanitation workers were black in this predominantly white Southern city. It was their third garbage strike in a year.

State statutes prohibited union contracts in municipal agencies.

But AFSCME was determined to win union recognition and establish an agreement with the city.

Southern Director for AFSCME, James Pierce thundered, “We’ll bring in whatever help we can get if the city tries to break the strike.

We can turn this place into a Memphis or a Charleston in a few days.”

Of course, Pierce was referring to two victorious strikes by black workers that had rocked the South within the past year.

Black sanitation workers in Memphis walked out in a historic strike in the spring of 1968.

Hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina had just won their strike days earlier.

Pierce outlined the issues at stake.

According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, the Charlotte City Council had adopted its final budget without providing dues checkoff, without adhering to established grievance procedures or seniority rights and without adding important safety precautions for garbage collection.

At first, Charlotte’s mayor asserted claims that the strike was about dues checkoff.

But Pierce shot back about broken promises regarding the establishment of safety committees and non-discrimination enforcement.

By the end of the month, a tentative agreement was in place. Strikers won all demands, except the dues check off.

But as hospital workers soon found in Charleston, South Carolina, the city council refused to carry out its agreement with the union.

Sanitation workers in Charlotte would strike twice unsuccessfully over the next year and a half.

That was the day more than 10,000 African-Americans marched down New York City’s 5^th Avenue in what is known as the Silent Parade.

The protest came in the aftermath of the July 2, East St. Louis race riot and a number of lynchings in Texas.

Organized by black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP, the Silent Parade protested lynching and anti-black violence.

Children led the march, dressed in white.

Women, who were also dressed in white, followed them. Men dressed in dark suits, marched behind. It was considered the first major public protest of racial violence in the United States.

Alexis Newman describes the scene as the parade proceeded to Madison Square.

“The marchers carried banners and posters stating their reasons for the march. Both participants and onlookers remarked that this protest was unlike any other seen in the city and the nation. There were no chants, no songs, just silence.”

Some signs read, “Mother, Do Lynchers Go To Heaven?” and “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe For Democracy?”

Protesters hoped President Woodrow Wilson would make good on his election promises to promote rights for blacks.

But Wilson took no action. In fact, he opposed anti-lynching legislation and continued segregationist policies in federal offices.

In an editorial for The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson pointed out, “that their brothers and sisters, people just like them, were “Jim-Crowed” and segregated and disfranchised and oppressed and lynched and burned alive in this the greatest republic in the world, the great leader in the fight for democracy and humanity.”

That was the day miner’s president Ginger Goodwin was shot dead in British Columbia.

His murder sparked Canada’s first general strike, in Vancouver the following week.

Goodwin had arrived in British Columbia 8 years earlier and found work in the Cumberland Mines on Vancouver Island.

He considered working conditions in the mines absolutely appalling and began advocating for safety and organizing miners. He was soon blacklisted after participating in a two-year coal miner’s strike for recognition on the island.

He moved to Trail, British Columbia, where he emerged as a Socialist Party candidate in the 1916 elections.

He was also elected president of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, District 6, the vice-president of British Columbia’s Federation of Labor and the head of the local Trades and Labor Council.

He openly expressed his opposition to Canada’s entry into the war, stating that workers were now employed in killing each other.

He was found unfit for military duty after a medical exam.

That was, until he led a strike for the eight-hour day at Consolidated Mining & Smelting.

It was the world’s largest lead and zinc smelter and a key munitions producer during the war.

His status was quickly changed to make him eligible for conscription.

He fled to the Cumberland Hills, where he hid out for months to avoid the draft.

On this day, Goodwin was shot dead by a Dominion Police Special Constable.

He was brought back to Cumberland, where thousands turned out for his funeral in a mile long procession.

The Vancouver labor movement was outraged by Goodwin’s murder and called a one-day general strike on August 2 to protest his killing.

That was the day striking railroad workers in Chicago clashed with police in the “Battle of the Halsted Street Viaduct.”

The Great Railroad Strike had reached the nation’s railroad hub, and began there three days earlier.

Switchmen from the Michigan Central traveled to freight shops in yards across the city, calling workers out to strike.

Soon lumbershovers, butchers and industrial workers joined the strike.

By the time the Battle began, police had already clashed with unarmed strikers twice. Historian Richard Schneirov describes the scene leading up to the Battle: “The city was now preparing itself for a full-scale insurrection, even though violent confrontations were rooted in police attacks on non-violent crowds.”

Previous confrontations centered in the railroad yards. Now, strikers’ actions spilled over into the neighborhood of Pilsen, where they lived.

Thousands gathered along Halsted Street between 12^th and 16^th streets.

The police arrived, attempting to disperse the crowd.

They chased strikers south and as Schneirov describes, “emptied their revolvers into the masses of humanity.”

The crowd pelted the police with stones in defense and chased them over the viaduct.

As word spread of the pitched battle, stockyard workers from nearby Bridgeport walked off the job.

They marched along Halsted Street, with butcher knives in hand, to support the strikers under attack.

The crowd on Halsted swelled to more than 10,000 as workers continued to battle police.

By evening, 30 workers had been shot dead, hundreds more were seriously wounded.

But the strike continued to spread more fiercely.

Streetcar stockmen, stonecutters, gas workers, glasscutters and others joined the strike.

The city was shut down for another week until railroad bosses finally rescinded wage cuts.

Briggs was directly involved in war production. 3000 workers, on two shifts, made ball turrets for heavy bombers.

Workers on both shifts walked off the job when management at the Outer Drive plant carried out a series of transfers and layoffs, while expecting the same level of production.

It had been the second walkout in a week. Management set a precedent of refusing to settle grievances of any kind.

They routinely snubbed the union, insisting they take any and all grievances to the War Labor Board.

Local 212 president, Jess Ferrazza noted it would take anywhere from 12-18 months to get a grievance processed.

Workers were fed up with waiting. He added “it was like a fireman with a water bucket running around trying to put fires out.

Management never cooperated.

If the grievance were a justifiable one, they would not settle it.

They would tell you to get the workers back to work.”

The strike came on the heels of a contentious State CIO convention earlier in the month.

There, delegates debated the merits of the no-strike pledge. Local 212 delegates were among a full third of total delegates, who made known their opposition to the pledge. Ferrazza argued that, “the no-strike pledge has tied labor’s hands and as long as our hands are tied, the corporations will continue their attacks on labor.”

Briggs workers agreed to return to their jobs on the promise of direct settlement of grievances.

They also geared up for the national CIO convention, intent on overturning the wartime, no-strike pledge.

That was the day Louisville sewer workers walked off the job.

The Daily American reported that, “hundreds of black sewer-men stopped work, and began marching through the streets, armed with picks and shovels.”

They went from one sewer construction site to the next, calling workers out to strike for higher wages.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 had clearly impacted workers in Mid-Southern cities like Memphis, Nashville and Louisville.

Historian Steven J. Hoffman observes these workers were able to capitalize on strike threats to advance their demands. Railroad bosses for the Louisville, Nashville & Great Southern had rescinded pay cuts for mechanics and engineers.

But they had not raised wages for the lowest paid laborers.

Those laborers joined sewer workers in their march through the city.

By nightfall, the mass of integrated strikers marched to the L&N depot, clashing with police.

Some broke off to march to the Short-Line Depot, smashing windows of the mayor’s house on their way.

Though the crowd was largely dispersed by early morning, Louisville was now in the midst of a general strike.

Hoffman describes the scene: “workers at the metal shops and foundries downtown struck for higher wages.

There were reported strikes at the Kentucky lead and oil works, all the downtown furniture factories, woolen mills, horse collar makers, and tobacco factories as well as by many of the city’s coopers, brick makers and African-American levee workers.

Many of the demands of these workers, which tended to focus on wages and hours, were met and they returned to work quickly.”

Though Southern cites avoided railroad strikes, for the most part, they could not evade the Great Strike’s impact on other sectors of the workforce.

That was the day 9,000 copper miners in the Keweenaw region of Upper Peninsula, Michigan went on strike.

Organized by the Western Federation of Miners, the strike raged on for over eight months, witnessed devastating tragedy in a Christmas Day fire and ended in bitter defeat.

The strike was waged over basic issues like the eight-hour day, higher wages, mine safety and union recognition.

But strikers were also fed up with the company’s paternalism and intrusion into their personal lives.

They also worried for their jobs with the introduction of labor saving machinery. The WFM succeeded early on in shutting down the mines. But the copper barons wouldn’t budge.

By August, many mines reopened with scab labor.

Later that month, deputies shot two strikers dead and wounded two others, as they returned home from attempting to collect strike benefits.

The incident became known as the Seeberville massacre.

Striking miners were absolutely devastated when on Christmas Day, 73 people, mostly children, were trampled to death during a Christmas party and benefit at the Italian Hall in Calumet.

Witnesses remembered seeing a man with a Citizens Alliance button just moments before someone yelled ‘Fire!’ that caused the stampede.

Soon after the Italian Hall disaster, WFM president Charles Moyer was shot by a Citizens alliance mob, then loaded, bleeding, onto a train bound for Chicago.

By April, the union was broke, the strike was broken and miners resolved to return to work. Bosses would only rehire strikers once they had turned in their union cards.

The copper mines in the region would finally be organized some 30 years later in a campaign led by Mine Mill during the years 1939 to 1943.

That was the day a bomb rocked the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, killing 10 and injuring at least 40.

The Chamber of Commerce and the newly formed Law and Order Committee organized the parade to shore up support for war production and eventual entry into World War I.

But isolationist sentiment in San Francisco remained strong. Anti-war activists prepared pamphlets and protests for the march.

Many trade unionists were opposed to entry into the war.

Some considered the parade a response to the combative longshoreman’s strike raging on the docks for weeks.

San Francisco had been a strong union town for years, known for strikes and labor disputes.

1916 was an election year and already, the city had been rocked by a number of strikes.

Business interests launched an open shop campaign and began targeting labor radicals.

They found their scapegoats in labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who were framed and convicted for the bombings.

Journalist Carl Nolte points out that Mooney and his assistant had been trying to organize workers at the city’s largest streetcar company, United Railroads.

He notes their convictions were based on perjured testimony and doctored evidence. Incredibly, one of the prosecution’s star witnesses wasn’t even in town that day!

But the convictions served to vilify labor militants as terrorists.

Fremont Older, editor of two local newspapers, discovered the frame-up evidence.

He and many others, including Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrow campaigned for years to free the two men. They were finally released after 22 years, in 1939.

The actual bombers were never found, though some have speculated that Anarchists of the Galleanist movement were likely responsible.

That was the day that some of the worst violence of the Great Railroad Strike erupted in Pittsburgh.

The strike started days earlier. It is contested as to whether it began in Martinsburg, West Virginia or Baltimore.

The strike spread rapidly along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to New York State, Pennsylvania and throughout the Midwest.

At its height, the Great Railroad Strike involved well over 100,000 workers.

The strike began on the Pennsylvania Railroad on the 19^th.

Management repeatedly tried to move trains through the yards and was confronted by angry strikers. Pennsylvania Guardsmen were called out.

The strikers presented the railroad with their demands: they wanted an end to double engine trains that required fewer workers, wages reinstated, reinstatement for their fired coworkers and an end to pay grades.

Local militia sided with the strikers and refused to show for duty.

When thousands of strikers gathered at the depot, the Pennsylvania National Guard moved unsuccessfully to disperse them.

Then they fired on strikers, killing 20 and wounding 29.

The strikers were infuriated by the deadly aggression and drove guardsmen into a nearby railroad roundhouse.

Word spread quickly throughout the city of the massacre, launching a virtual general strike. Workers began seizing arms wherever they could find them.

They set fires to dozens of railroad buildings, burned down the Union Depot, destroyed over 100 locomotives and more than 1000 freight and passenger cars.

The next day, guardsmen shot their way out of the roundhouse, killing 20 more as they were chased from the city.

A total of 3000 federal troops would be necessary to quell strikers’ fury by month’s end.

That was the day that came to be known as Bloody Friday.

Minneapolis Teamsters had been on strike for three days in their third strike of the year.

The trucking bosses had reneged on their May settlement.

They refused to recognize union organization of inside workers.

In the period between strikes, the union had documented hundreds of cases of discrimination.

Now, 7,000 Teamsters effectively shut down trucking throughout the city. Local 574 leaders established a daily strike bulletin.

The Organizer, as it was called, would serve to guide strikers to victory.

In his book, Revolutionary Teamsters, historian Bryan Palmer notes that the first few days of the strike had been quiet.

Then on this day, police attempted to break the picket lines by running what seemed to be a lone scab truck through the lines.

It was later discovered the truck was moving no merchandise, but was used to draw strikers into a confrontation.

When flying pickets moved to stop the truck, they were ambushed. Police opened fire on unarmed pickets and then sprayed those who attempted to escape with buckshot.

At least 48 were wounded. Striker Henry Ness and Unemployed Council supporter John Belor were killed.

Palmer notes that Ness had been shot point blank in the chest. Doctors pulled 38 slugs from his body.

“His death bed injunction repeated word of mouth among the strikers: “Tell the boys not to fail me now.”

More than 40,000 turned out to pay their respects to the World War I veteran and father of four. Palmer adds that, “Bloody Friday had lasted a matter of minutes.

But its’ meaning would leave a mark on the very fabric of Minneapolis socio-economic relations…”

That was the day San Francisco’s Central Labor Council voted narrowly to end the general strike, then in its fourth day.

It had been one of three historic strikes that turned the tide towards industrial organizing in the 1930s.

It emerged as part of the ongoing longshoreman’s strike, which started in May.

The decision was controversial.

Longshoremen and seamen raged that leadership of the strike had been torn from them by more conservative elements.

As author of Workers on the Waterfront, Bruce Nelson puts it, “after two and a half months on strike, literally thousands of arrests, at least six deaths and hundreds of serious injuries, the men and their families were holding the line.

But their allies were gradually cutting the ties of solidarity that had been the strike’s lifeblood.”

The shipping bosses forced a vote for arbitration from the longshoremen, and without the seamen.

As Nelson notes, this served to drive a wedge between the two unions, creating a rift that would only deepen.

The two would continue to strike until the end of July.

But the strike left longshoremen emboldened.

They pushed back on the job, driving off scabs and establishing work rules and conditions ahead of the arbitrator’s ruling, which came in October.

The hiring hall was finally established.

While it was decided that the union and the shipping bosses would rule the hall jointly, the union controlled the position of dispatcher.

This meant the union determined hiring, which put an end to the despised ‘shape-up.’

The award also mandated wage raises and a coast-wide contract.

It would serve as a catalyst for the founding of the ILWU three years later.

That was the day hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina won union recognition.

The 113-day strike reflected all the broader social issues of the day.

Led primarily by black women, the strike at the Medical College, Charleston County and several other hospitals intersected civil rights and racial and gender discrimination on the job.

Jewel Charmaine Debnam notes that women like Local 1199B president Mary Moultrie, Naomi White and others were “essential to the strike not only as daily participants on the picket line but also as leaders of the local movement establishment.”

For months, strikers marched, walked picket lines, clashed with police and held vigils demanding their right to organize.

They defied injunctions and endured hundreds of arrests, nightly curfews and confrontation with the State National Guard.

Governor McNair and the hospital boards had initially refused to concede to the workers’ demands for union recognition.

They claimed workers paid with public funds could not engage in collective bargaining. But the women were steadfast.

They pointed to the wage disparities between black and white workers and between male and female workers.

They also protested the blatant disrespect and discrimination meted out daily by management.

Local longshoremen solidarized with the strikers and threatened a walkout in support if their demands were not met.

Coretta Scott King and many other Civil Rights leaders also played a supportive role.

Finally, the new union won reinstatement of fired workers, which had touched off the strike, a solid grievance procedure, a minimum wage raise and access to the credit union.

Victory would be short lived however when the State almost immediately refused to hold up its end of the agreement.

That was the day 50,000 lumber workers across the Pacific Northwest participated in an industry-wide strike, called by the Industrial Workers of the World.

The IWW had been organizing loggers for years around wages, hours, working conditions and camp sanitation.

The IWW began building for the strike in the aftermath of the Everett Massacre the previous fall.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn started touring camps in Idaho.

By March, the Wobblies established Local 500 of the Lumber Workers Industrial Union in Spokane to organize actions across the region.

In his book, Empire of Timber, historian Erik Loomis details the chronology of events that led to the momentous walkout.

In Idaho, loggers began walking off the job in April, when demands for improved bunkhouses and food, higher wages and the eight-hour day were refused.

The strike spread to Washington State, the rest of Idaho and into Montana and Oregon.

Loomis notes that by August, “they made employers feel their wrath.” The strike cut production by over 80% and threatened war materiel.

Infuriated timber bosses demanded federal troops be sent in to crush the strike and IWW leaders be prosecuted for treason and sabotage.

Raids and arrests were orchestrated throughout the Pacific Northwest and the strike began to stall.

After 10 weeks, the IWW called off the strike but instructed workers to quit work after eight hours.

They continued to lead sanitation-related job actions that would substantially change conditions for the better.

That was the day half a million steel workers walked off the job in a historic, 116-day strike to defend work rules.

It was the largest industry-wide strike and also the last.

The strike affected 12 steel companies and shut down more than 85% of steel production. Mill owners refused to grant wage increases unless the union agreed to changes in the contract.

Specifically, they were looking to eliminate Section 2 (b), titled “Local Working Conditions.”

The bosses wanted the ability to change the number of workers assigned to any given task.

They also wanted to introduce machinery and rules that would reduce labor hours and cut the work force.

USWA members understood this as an assault on workplace safety and a move to break the union.

Mill bosses hoped that a long strike would provoke the membership to abandon their union.

But, according to Jack Metzgar, author of Striking Steel, members had grown used to walkouts every 3 years and planned accordingly.

As well, the USW had a “well-oiled machinery including an internal welfare system for hardship cases and also reached out to merchants, banks, charitable agencies, and local and state governments” to organize relief.

By the end of August, the Defense Department stoked anxieties that national security was at risk.

Three months into the strike, union funds dwindled. Strikers felt the pinch.

President Eisenhower invoked a Taft-Hartley injunction, hoping to force strikers back to work.

As the union rose to challenge Taft-Hartley’s constitutionality, solidarity among the mill owners crumbled.

Kaiser Steel broke ranks and settled separately.

Their contract granted wage increases and preserved section 2(b).

It set the precedent for the contract that was eventually signed industry-wide.

That was the day municipal workers in Cleveland, Louisville and Philadelphia walked off the job.

That summer was rocked with public sector strikes, starting with a firefighters strike in Memphis.

In Cleveland, municipal services came to a virtual halt as city workers honored a police work stoppage.

In Louisville, firefighters walked off the job, after the Kentucky Labor Relations Board found the city guilty of unfair labor practices.

And in Philadelphia, 20,000 AFSCME members, including sanitation, highway and health department workers rejected a last minute contract offer.

They demanded wage increases.

But they were also furious when the city announced it would have to lay off city workers to pay an arbitration award to the police.

Sanitation strikes soon followed in New Orleans, San Antonio, Detroit and Tuscaloosa.

By the third week of July, transit workers in Washington DC staged a wildcat strike, as did postal workers in California and New Jersey.

Labor historian Joseph McCartin notes that public sector strikes peaked in 1975 and again in 1978.

By the late 70s, “the volatile recipe of rising public sector union militancy, inflation and anti-tax
reform made public sector unions more vulnerable than at any other time.

Suddenly the union became a convenient scapegoat for public officials dealing with declining relative
tax revenues, demands for improved public services and taxpayer unrest.”

McCartin adds that by 1978 public employers came out swinging in labor disputes.

Public sector unions would struggle to “hold their own in an increasingly hostile environment…as their ability
to strike was being severely eroded.”

The backlash against public sector militancy set the stage for President Reagan’s smashing of PATCO just 3 years later.

That was the day 2500 pressmen, reporters, drivers and clerks went on strike against the Detroit News and the Free Press.

Both newspapers had created a virtual monopoly in 1988 by merging their advertising and circulation departments into the Detroit Newspaper Association.

Even as the DNA raked in record profits, they forced years of concessions, including wage freezes and lay offs.

When the Association implemented a merit raise system, the Newspaper Guild voted to strike.

Five other unions, including CWA and Teamsters soon followed.

The newspapers were ready. Just before the strike, they cut off the dues check-off.

They also contracted with the company, Alternative Work Force, to provide scabs.

And they hired private security guards from Huffmaster and Vance International to enforce the scab herding.

A solid union boycott cut revenues for both newspapers.

On August 19, hundreds of strikers stopped scabbing until police attacked the picket lines, breaking arms and arresting at least four.

Then, on Labor Day weekend, thousands of strikers and supporters successfully repulsed police forces amassed from across the state to break up picket lines.

By mid-September, both newspapers were forced to airlift the Sunday edition until strikebreaking injunctions limited pickets.

Over a hundred had been arrested over the course of several weeks.

Unable to stop production, strikers gradually returned to work until the strike was finally called off in February 1997.

In his two volume set, Workers in America, Robert Weir notes that many labor activists criticized strike tactics.

They argued direct action to stop production should have been the priority rather than boycotts and political pressure.

Once the strike ended, the DNA claimed all but a few had forfeited their jobs.

That was the day newspapers throughout the South announced the return of Ida Sledge to Tupelo, Mississippi.

The ILGWU organizer had been leading unionization efforts at three area mills.

Twice she was driven out.

Prominent businessmen “invited” her to leave town just days earlier, warning her not to return under threat of violence.

Earlier that spring, workers held a sit-down strike at the Tupelo Cotton Mill.

They demanded higher wages and shorter hours in the town’s first labor action ever.

The mill’s stockholders responded by voting to liquidate.

Sledge immediately filed charges with the NLRB against the mills for violating the Wagner Act.

Now, newspapers reported a tense atmosphere in Tupelo with Sledge’s return.

She stated, “I don’t mean to cause any trouble.

I intend to organize the garment workers and don’t propose to be scared away.”

The citizens committee soon declared victory, claiming they had organized 1000 workers at five plants into ‘independent,’ ‘home’ unions.

Sledge condemned these as company unions.

By the end of the month, Democratic Representative of Mississippi, John Rankin thundered, “these representatives of the so-called Labor Relations Board boasted they were going to close every factory in the city before they quit and that when they got through with it, there would be no Tupelo left.”

The following spring, local organizer Jimmy Cox was taken outside of town and flogged by 15 men. Sledge was again threatened and driven away permanently.

The mill owners finally relented in August as the NLRB trial loomed.

They disbanded their company unions, reinstated fired workers with back pay and posted notices they would not interfere with organizing efforts.

But the ILGWU never gained much from their organizing efforts.

The Little Steel Strike was beginning to collapse.

Strikers in Massillon, Ohio had gathered that Sunday night at union headquarters across from Republic Steel’s Massillon Works.

As Ahmed White describes in his book, The Last Great Strike, the union had organized weekly festivities on Sunday nights, including food, live music and dancing.

For weeks, the Law and Order League had repeatedly demanded special police be deputized and armed to crush the strike.

By early July, Ohio National Guardsmen ensured the forcible reopening of the mill.

One self-appointed special deputy leader, Major Curley decided tonight would be the night he was going to “clean out that God Damned hall.”

He provocatively positioned his deputies in front of union headquarters.

First he ordered his deputies to fire on picketers attempting to block the gate at shift change.

When strikers hurled bottles and rocks in response, the deputies unleashed massive rounds of gunfire and tear gas for more than half an hour.

Guardsmen, railroad and company police joined in the anti-SWOC siege.

Two strikers were dead.

Nick Valdos was shot in the hip as he attempted to aid wounded strikers.

Fulgencio Calzara was shot in the back of the head in front of union headquarters.

Another seven strikers were shot and seriously wounded.

At least four more were hospitalized with injuries.

Police forces ransacked the hall, seizing union records and membership lists.

They continued their rampage through the neighborhood, ransacking homes and arresting anyone suspected of ties to the union.

As many as 165 were arrested and held for several days.

As White notes, the NLRB and the LaFollette Commission both concluded that blame for the evening’s violence lay with Republic.

That was the day machinist John Connolly was fired from General Electric’s sprawling River Works in West Lynn, Massachusetts.

Firings of several more labor activists prompted 14,000 workers, 40% of them women, to walk off the job and flood the ranks of the IAM and the IBEW.

The newly established War Labor Board emboldened GE workers.

They looked to the board for help in beating back yellow dog contracts and to organize bonafide unions.

A Metal Trades Council had finally been established at the GE plant in Schenectady, NY.

Workers hoped to do the same at Lynn.

After Connolly’s discharge, GE managers fired another fourteen activists three days later.

As Joseph McCartin describes in his book, Labor’s Great War, thousands of outraged workers met the evening of the firings and determined there was nothing left to do but strike.

The walkout began the following Monday.

David Montgomery describes the scene in The Fall of the House of Labor: “Early in the afternoon, union sound trucks outside the building blared fighting songs and calls to down tools. Within an hour, the GE river works were empty.”

The strike lasted three weeks.

In that time, strikers defeated attempts at arbitration, demanding the Board rule on their behalf as it had done for GE workers in Schenectady.

In October, the board adjusted wages, ordered reinstatement of all but two of the fired workers and established minimum pay for women.

It also ordered the election of shop committees.

Lynn River Works was now 95% organized.

Victory was short-lived however.

In the post-war period, unions at GE and elsewhere were summarily defeated by vigorous open shop drives across the country.

That was the day transit workers in the Bronx walked off the job in what is referred to as the Squeegee Strike.

These were the days when New York City public transit was barely organized.

Two of the three transit companies in New York City were privately owned, with entrenched company unions.

Up to this point, transit bosses had successful crushed every previous strike.

Now, six car cleaners at the Jerome Avenue barn had just been fired for refusing a management imposed speed-up.

Supervisors had replaced their 10-inch squeegees with those that measured 14 inches.

They expected workers to clean more in a shorter period of time.

According to historian Joshua Freeman, author of In Transit, when word spread that the six cleaners had been fired, others downed their tools in protest.

They demanded unsuccessfully to meet with the shop foreman.

After several hours of waiting, they discovered that management had removed their time cards.

That’s when the two-day walkout began.

As many as seventy workers stormed off the job.

Pickets went up at the barn and at Interborough Rapid Transit Headquarters.

The regional NLRB office quickly mediated a settlement that forced the IRT to reinstate the discharged workers and strikers, and answer their grievances.

Freeman notes this first strike, though small in scale and brief, was significant.

The victory of the Squeegee Strike immediately built the TWU’s authority citywide.

It quickly brought several hundred new members into the union.

New dues paying members provided a financial base for full-time organizers needed to organize New York City transit.

The union would grow rapidly and soon enjoy a number of organizing victories.

That was the day AFL president, William Green called all affiliates to meet in Chicago.

Green sought to mobilize union leaders in a fight to restore prevailing wages on federal relief projects.

Building tradesmen on WPA construction sites had started walking off the job in spontaneous strikes across the country three days earlier.

The strike spread rapidly to 36 states, quickly turning into a nationwide walkout of over 150,000.

Workers were outraged by provisions in the latest federal relief bill, titled the Woodrum Act.

New terms established the 130-hour rule, essentially slashing wages by more than half.

It also called for a 30-day dismissal of all workers who had been on WPA rolls for 18 months.

The AFL Building Trades Department stated the act would “destroy national wage standards established through 50 years of collective bargaining.”

IBEW leader Daniel Tracy added that forcing a lower wage on federal relief workers would only aid building contractors in private industry to do the same.

From St. Louis to Rochester, from Minneapolis to Akron, picket lines were solid.

Organizers worked to build solidarity among unskilled WPA workers affected by the new starvation bill.

Tens of thousands of strikers were fired in WPA-ordered dismissals.

President Roosevelt declared there could be no strikes against the federal government.

Attorney General Frank Murphy, former Michigan governor during the Flint sit-down strike, declared that striking against the government would build a fascist psychology.

WPA administrators also threatened organizers with federal prosecution, fines and jail time.

But New York’s Building and Construction Trades Council leader, Thomas Murray authorized a strike of 32,000.

He avowed, “This will be a strike to the finish.”

That was the day thousands of Pullman strikers confronted state militia forces at the Grand Trunk Railroad Crossing in Chicago.

The strike began May 11 after George Pullman slashed wages but refused to lower rents in his company town.

In late June, Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union called for a national boycott of all Pullman trains.

The boycott spread to 27 states, involving more than 150,000 workers.

Attorney General Richard Olney issued an injunction, declaring the strike illegal on July 2.

The injunction failed to break the strike.

But it did prevent union leaders from communicating with strikers.

The next day, President Cleveland ordered troops into Chicago rail yards to crush the strike.

Workers were furious.

They flooded the yards, stopping trains, smashing switches and barricading themselves with baggage cars.

Fighting continued for several days as angry strikers stormed rail yards and overturned empty freight cars.

Thousands of workers impacted by the Depression joined in, including those stranded in the city after the Columbian Exposition.

Two strikers were shot dead on the Illinois Central railroad July 6.

Workers responded by setting fire to hundreds of rail cars.

Now, on this day, the militia attempted to run a work train, to clear the rail yard at 49^th and Loomis.

Thousands followed the train, showering it with bricks and stones.

The troops returned gunfire, killing at least four and injuring dozens.

Chicago unions soon voted in favor of a citywide sympathy strike, but the railroads quickly hired replacement labor.

Federal troops and state militia cleared the railways for business.

Main strike leaders were arrested.

By the beginning of August, Pullman rehired only those strikers who agreed never to join a union.