Today's Labor History

​Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. “Teachers strikes, the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matters movement, all of those are collective actions that for years you never saw; people didn’t believe in themselves. Now they know that if they’re gonna make progress, they can’t look to anyone but themselves.” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka talks with Labor History Today’s Joe McCartin about the current state – and the future -- of the American labor movement. Plus, Mark Potashnick on Jim Pohle, the founder of the American Union of Pizza Delivery Drivers, class action law suits, and the app-based revolution in food delivery services.

Striking textile workers in Fall River, Mass. demand bread for their starving children - 1875

The International Typographical Union renews a strike against the Los Angeles Times and begins a boycott that runs intermittently from 1896 to 1908. A local anti-Times committee in 1903 persuades William Randolph Hearst to start a rival paper, the Los Angeles Examiner. Although the ITU kept up the fight into the 1920s, the Times remains nonunion to this day - 1893

International Ladies' Garment Workers Union begins strike against Triangle Shirtwaist Co. This would become the "Uprising of the 20,000," (photo) resulting in 339 of 352 struck firms—but not Triangle—signing agreements with the union. The Triangle fire that killed 246 would occur less than two years later - 1909

Twenty-nine west coast ports lock out 10,500 workers in response to what management says is a worker slowdown in the midst of negotiations on a new contract. The ports are closed for 10 days, reopen when Pres. George W. Bush invokes the Taft-Hartley Act - 2002

165 Wobblies indicted for protesting World War 1 -1917

A report by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the average weekly take home pay of a factory worker with three dependents is now $94.87 - 1962

Labor history courtesy David Prosten

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