Today in Labor History

July 15
Some 50,000 lumberjacks strike for 8-hour day - 1917
 
Ralph Gray, an African-American sharecropper and leader of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, is murdered in Camp Hill, Ala. - 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
(There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America: This 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.)
 
July 16
Ten thousand workers strike Chicago's Int’l Harvester operations - 1919
 
Martial law declared in strike by longshoremen in Galveston, Texas - 1920
 
San Francisco Longshoremen's strike spreads, becomes 4-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
- compiled/edited by David Prosten at Union Communication Services.