Monday, September 22, 2014

Today in Labor History

Emancipation Proclamation signed - 1862
Eighteen-year-old Hannah (Annie) Shapiro leads a spontaneous walkout of 17 women at a Hart Schaffner & Marx garment factory in Chicago. It grows into a months-long mass strike involving 40,000 garment workers across the city, protesting 10-hour days, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages - 1910
2014.09.22history-reviving.the.strike.bookcover(Reviving the Strike: How Working People can Regain Power and Transform America: If the American labor movement is to rise again, the author says, it will not be as a result of electing Democrats, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt—the kind employed up until the 1960s.)
Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919
Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va., after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922
U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent - 1931
United Textile Workers strike committee orders strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South - 1934
Some 400,000 coal miners strike for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio - 1935
The AFL expels the Int’l Longshoremen's Association for racketeering; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later - 19532014.09.22history-pizza.delivery.drivers
OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas, plant earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 - 2005
Eleven Domino's employees in Pensacola, Fla., form the nation's first union of pizza delivery drivers - 2006
San Francisco hotel workers end a 2-year contract fight, ratify a new 5-year pact with their employers - 2006

No comments: