This week’s Labor History Today podcast: We Were There; Pins and Needles; Dust for Blood. Last week’s show: Bootlegged Aliens; UPPER CASE WOMAN. 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 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 Comments are closed.
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