Today's Labor History

​Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. On this week’s show: labor archivist Ben Blake talks about efforts to “document the now” during the recent government shutdown, and political science professor Marissa Martino Golden reveals that even with a president attempting to turn agency policy 180 degrees, most career civil servants are focused on doing their jobs. Interviews by Alan Wierdak and Patrick Dixon.


Legendary labor leader and socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs becomes charter member and secretary of the Vigo Lodge, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Five years later he is leading the national union and in 1893
helps found the nation’s first industrial union, the American Railway Union - 1875

Birth of John Steinbeck in Salinas, Calif. Steinbeck is best known for writing The Grapes of Wrath, which exposed the mistreatment of migrant farm workers during the Depression and led to some reforms - 1902

Thirty-eight miners die in a coal mine explosion in Boissevain, Va. - 1932
 
Four hundred fifty Woolworth’s workers and customers occupy store for eight days in support of Waiters and Waitresses Union, Detroit - 1937

The Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes, a major organizing tool for industrial unions, are illegal - 1939

Mine disaster kills 75 at Red Lodge, Mont. - 1943
 
Labor history courtesy Union Communication Services.  

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