today's labor history

​Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. Union City's Chris Garlock hosts, with Joe McCartin, Leon Fink and Patrick Dixson. On this week's show: Kohler strike, longest in U.S. history, begins; strikes by baseball and hockey players and minor league umpires; 15,000 union janitors strike in LA. PLUS: Saul Schniderman on Rose Schneiderman of the New York Women's Trade Union League. 
Music this week includes “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen, “El Pueblo Unido,” by Inti Illimani, “One People, One Struggle,” by Anti-Flag, and “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Fredric Rzewski.

Some 20,000 textile mill strikers in Paterson, N.J., gather on the green in front of the house of Pietro Botto, the socialist mayor of nearby Haledon, to receive encouragement by novelist Upton Sinclair, journalist John Reed and speakers from the Wobblies. Today, the Botto House is home to the American Labor Museum - 1913

UAW Local 833 strikes the Kohler bathroom fixtures company in Kohler, Wisc. The strike ends six years later after Kohler is found guilty of refusing to bargain, agrees to reinstate 1,400 strikers and pay them $4.5 million in back pay and pension credits - 1954

Martin Luther King Jr. returns to Memphis to stand with striking AFSCME sanitation workers. This evening, he delivers his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech in a church packed with union members and others. He is assassinated the following day - 1968
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services ​