This Month in Labor History

July 11
Striking coal miners in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho dynamite barracks housing Pinkerton management thugs - 1892

A nine-year strike, the longest in the history of the United Auto Workers, began at the Ohio Crankshaft Division of Park-Ohio Industries Inc. in Cuyahoga Heights, Ohio.  Despite scabs, arrests and firings, UAW Local 91 members hung tough and in 1992 won a fair contract - 1983
   
July 12
Bisbee, Ariz. deports Wobblies; 1,186 miners sent into desert in manure-laden boxcars. They had been fighting for improved safety and working conditions - 1917 (A Job and a Life: Organizing & Bargaining on Family Issues is a step-by-step guide for union leaders, activists, negotiating teams and organizers, providing the tools needed to advance a successful work and family agenda. Want to negotiate for child care at work? Need to find out how other unionists have confronted family leave issues? Want to learn the best way to rally your members and your community around your work/family concerns? This is your book. In the UCS bookstore now.)

The Screen Actors Guild holds its first meeting. Among those attending: future horror movie star (Frankenstein’s Monster) and union activist Boris Karloff - 1933

July 13
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union organized in Tyronza, Ark. - 1934

Detroit newspaper workers begin 19-month strike against Gannett, Knight-Ridder - 1995

July 14
The Great Uprising nationwide railway strike begins in Martinsburg, W.Va. after railroad workers are hit with their second pay cut in a year. In the following days, strike riots spread through 17 states. The next week, federal troops were called out to force an end to the strike - 1877

Woody Guthrie, writer of "This Land is Your Land" and "Union Maid," born in Okemah, Okla. - 1912 (For more on Woody’s amazing life, check out Woody Guthrie: A Life, by Joe Klein. This is an easy-to-read, honest description of Guthrie’s life, from a childhood of poverty to a youth spent "bummin’ around" to an adulthood of music and organizing -- and a life cut short by incurable disease. Guthrie’s life and work inspired millions while he lived and continues to do so through musicians such as his son Arlo, Bob Dylan -- who as a teenager visited and sang for Guthrie as death approached -- friend and contemporary Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few. In the UCS bookstore now.)Italian immigrants and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Massachusetts of murder and payroll robbery – unfairly, most historians agree – after a two-month trial, and are eventually executed. Fifty years after their deaths the state's governor issued a proclamation saying they had been treated unfairly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." - 1921

July 15
50,000 lumberjacks strike for eight-hour day - 1917

Robert Gray, an African-American sharecropper and leader of the Share Croppers Union, is murdered in Cap Hill, Alabama - 1931

A half-million steelworkers begin what is to become a 116-day strike that shutters nearly every steel mill in the country. Management wanted to dump contract language limiting its ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery that would result in reduced hours or fewer employees - 1959

July 16
Ten thousand workers strike Chicago's International Harvester operations - 1919

Martial law declared in strike by longshoremen in Galveston, Texas - 1920

San Francisco Longshoreman's strike spreads, becomes four-day general strike - 1934

July 17
Two ammunition ships explode at Port Chicago, Calif., killing 322, including 202 African-Americans assigned by the Navy to handle explosives. It was the worst home-front disaster of World War II. The resulting refusal of 258 African-Americans to return to the dangerous work underpinned the trial and conviction of 50 of the men in what is called the Port Chicago Mutiny - 1944

This Week In Labor History
June 06
The U.S. Employment Service was created - 1933

A general strike by some 12,000 autoworkers and others in Lansing, Mich. shuts down the city for a month in what was to become known as the city’s “Labor Holiday.” The strike was precipitated by the arrest of nine workers, including the wife of the auto workers local union president: the arrest left three children in the couple’s home unattended - 1937

Labor Party founding convention opens in Cleveland, Ohio – 1996

June 07
Militia sent to Cripple Creek, Colo., to suppressWestern Federation of Miners strike – 1904

Sole performance of Pageant of the Paterson (NJ) Strike, created and performed by 1,000 mill workers from the silk industry strike, New York City – 1913

Striking textile workers battle police in Gastonia, N.C.  Police Chief O.F. Aderholt is accidentally killed by one of his own officers. Six strike leaders are convicted of “conspiracy to murder” and are sentenced to jail for from 5 to 20 years - 1929 (For more on the history of the textile workers, check out There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, a sympathetic, thoughtful and highly readable history of the American labor movement traces unionism from the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820s to organized labor’s decline in the 1980s and struggle for survival and growth today. In the UCS bookstore now.)

The Steel Workers Organizing Committee, later to become the United Steel Workers of America, is formed in Pittsburgh - 1936

Founding convention of the United Food and Commercial Workers. The merger brought together the Retail Clerks International Unionand the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen of North America - 1979

The United Steelworkersand the Sierra Club announce the formation of a strategic alliance to pursue a joint public policy agenda under the banner of Good Jobs, A Clean Environment, and A Safer World - 2006

June 08
A battle between the Militia and striking miners at Dunnville, Colo. ended with six union members dead and 15 taken prisoner.  Seventy-nine of the strikers were deported to Kansas two days later – 1904

Spectator mine disaster kills 168, Butte, Mont. – 1917

Some 35,000 members of the Machinists union begin what is to become a 43-day strike – the largest in airline history – against five carriers. The mechanics and other ground service workers wanted to share in the airlines’ substantial profits - 1966

The earliest recorded strike by Chinese immigrants to the U.S. occurred when stonemasons brought to San Francisco to build the three-story Parrott granite building - made from Chinese prefabricated blocks - struck for higher pay - 1852 (for an updated look at immigrants and organizing, check out The New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Organizing Innovations, a ground-breaking look at immigrant labor organizing and mobilization today, providing real evidence of immigrants’ eagerness for collective action and organizing. In the UCS bookstore now.)

New York City drawbridge tenders, in a dispute with the state over pension issues, leave a dozen bridges open, snarling traffic in what the Daily News described as "the biggest traffic snafu in the city's history" - 1971

June 09
Helen Marot is born in Philadelphia to a wealthy family.  She went on to organize the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union in New York, and organized and led the city's 1909-1910 Shirtwaist Strike.  In 1912, she was a member of a commission investigating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - 1865

June 10
Unions legalized in Canada - 1872

U.S. Supreme Court rules in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. that preliminary work activities, where controlled by the employer and performed entirely for the employer's benefit, are properly included as working time. The decision is known as the "portal to portal case" - 1946

President Kennedy signs a law mandating equal pay to women who are performing the same jobs as men (Equal Pay Act) – 1963 (Blue-Collar Women at Work with Men: Negotiating the Hostile Environment shows that women have made a lot of progress in the workplace since Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act specifically prohibited gender-based discrimination -- but there’s a long way to go. In the UCS bookstore now.)

June 11
Representatives from the AFL, Knights of Labor, populists, railroad brotherhoods and other trade unions hold a unity conference in St. Louis but fail to overcome their differences - 1894

Police shoot at maritime workers striking United Fruit Co. in New Orleans; 1 killed, 2 wounded – 1913

John L. Lewis dies. A legendary figure, he was president of the United Mine Workersfrom 1920 to 1960 and a driving force behind the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations - 1969

June 12
Fifty thousand members of theAmalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen employed in meatpacking plants walk off their jobs; demands include equalization of wages and conditions throughout U.S. plants - 1904

The U.S. Supreme Court invalidates two sections of a Florida law: one required state licensing of paid union business agents, the other required registration with the state of all unions and their officers - 1945

Major League Baseball strike begins, forces cancellation of 713 games. Most observers blamed team owners for the strike: they were trying to recover from a court decision favoring the players on free agency - 1981