This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Industrial murder at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Last week's episode: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver. March 30 Chicago stockyard workers win 8-hour day - 1918 At the height of the Great Depression, 35,000 unemployed march in New York’s Union Square. Police beat many demonstrators, injuring 100 - 1930 Harry Bridges, Australian-born dock union leader, dies at age 88. He helped form and lead the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) for 40 years. A Bridges quote: “The most important word in the language of the working class is ‘solidarity’” - 1990. March 31 President Martin Van Buren issues a broadly-applicable executive order granting the 10 hour day to all government employees engaged in manual labor - 1840 Cesar Chavez born in Yuma, AZ.- 1927 Wisconsin state troopers fail to get scabs across the picket line to break a 76-day Allis-Chalmers strike in Milwaukee led by UAW Local 248. The plant remained closed until the government negotiated a compromise - 1941 - David Prosten. This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Industrial murder at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; Last week's show: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver. March 28 Members of Gas House Workers’ Union Local 18799 begin what is to become a four-month recognition strike against the Laclede Gas Light Co. in St. Louis. The union later said the strike was the first ever against a public utility in the U.S. - 1935 Martin Luther King, Jr., leads a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. Violence during the march persuades him to return the following week to Memphis, where he was assassinated - 1968 March 29 Ohio makes it illegal for children under 18 and women to work more than 10 hours a day - 1852 “Battle of Wall Street,” police charge strikers lying down in front of stock exchange doors, 43 arrested - 1948 - David Prosten This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver; Last week's show: Union women heroes, past and present. March 25 First “Poor People’s March” on Washington, in which jobless workers demanded creation of a public works program. Led by populist Jacob Coxey, the 500 to 1,000 unemployed protesters became known as “Coxey’s Army” - 1894 146 workers are killed in a fire at New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a disaster that would launch a national movement for safer working conditions - 1911 (see poem) An explosion at a coal mine in Centralia, Ill. kills 111 miners. Mineworkers President John L. Lewis calls a six day work stoppage by the nation’s 400,000 soft coal miners to demand safer working conditions - 1947 March 26 San Francisco brewery workers begin a 9 month strike as local employers follow the union-busting lead of the National Brewer’s Assn. and fire their unionized workers, replacing them with scabs. Two unionized brewers refused to go along, kept producing beer, prospered wildly and induced the Association to capitulate. A contract benefit since having unionized two years earlier, certainly worth defending: free beer - 1868 March 27 Mother Jones is ordered to leave Colorado, where state authorities accuse her of “stirring up” striking coal miners - 1904 U.S. Supreme Court rules that undocumented workers do not have the same rights as Americans when they are wrongly fired - 2002 - David Prosten This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver. Last week's episode: Union women heroes, past and present.
March 23 Norris-La Guardia Act restricts injunctions against unions and bans yellow dog contracts, which require newly-hired workers to declare they are not union members and will not join one - 1932 Five days into the Post Office’s first mass work stoppage in 195 years, President Nixon declares a national emergency and orders 30,000 troops to New York City to break the strike. The troops didn’t have a clue how to sort and deliver mail: a settlement came a few days later - 1970 Coalition of Labor Union Women founded in Chicago by some 3,000 delegates from 58 unions and other organizations - 1974 March 24 Groundbreaking on the first section of the New York City subway system, from City Hall to the Bronx. According to the New York Times, this was a worker’s review of the digging style of the well-dressed Subway Commissioners: "I wouldn't give th' Commish'ners foive cents a day fer a digging job. They're too shtiff" - 1900 - David Prosten. |