Today's Labor History

This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Why America’s most radical union shut down ports on Juneteenth. Plus, Arlo Guthrie sings “The Ballad of Harry Bridges” and Elise Bryant reads “Ready To Kill,” Carl Sandburg’s poem about who should be memorialized in our statues.
Last week’s show: SCOTUS bans LGBTQ workplace discrimination; Queer history of the UAW.

Steel workers in Cleveland begin what was to be an 88-week strike against wage cuts - 1885
Homestead, Pennsylvania steel strike. Seven strikers and three Pinkertons killed as Andrew Carnegie hires armed thugs to protect strikebreakers - 1892

The Amalgamated Assn. of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers stages what is to become an unsuccessful three-month strike against U.S. Steel Corp. Subsidiaries - 1901

One million railway shopmen strike - 1922

Some 1,100 streetcar workers strike in New Orleans, spurring the creation of the po’ boy sandwich by a local sandwich shop owner and one-time streetcar man. "Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming," Bennie Martin later recalled, "one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy.’" Martin and his wife fed any striker who showed up - 1929

Copper miners begin a years-long long, bitter strike against Phelps-Dodge in Clifton, Ariz. Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt repeatedly deployed state police and National Guardsmen to assist the company over the course of the strike, which broke the union - 1983

- David Prosten

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