Today's Labor History

​This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Sisters, rebels and social justice in the Jim Crow South
On today’s show, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall discusses her new book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of the South in an excerpt from the Working History podcast.
Also this week, Karen Nussbaum on Iris Rivera’s historic refusal to serve coffee, Jessica Pauszek reads poetry by a striking British miner’s wife and Tom Zaniello remembers Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
Last week's show: Voices from the Lansing Auto Town Gallery
 
February 5
The movie Modern Times premieres. The tale of the tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and his paramour (Paulette Goddard) mixed slapstick comedy and social satire, as the couple struggled to overcome the difficulties of the machine age, including, unemployment and nerve-wracking factory work, and get along in modern times - 1937 Check out the famous factory scene in the video below.

In what turns out to be a bad business decision, Circuit City fires 3,900 experienced sales people because they're making too much in commissions. Sales plummet. Six years later it declares bankruptcy. Duh. - 2003

February 6
It took 1,231 firefighters 30 hours to put down The Great Baltimore Fire, which started on this day and destroyed 1,500 buildings over an area of some 140 acres - 1904

Philadelphia shirtwaist makers vote to accept arbitration offer and end walkout as Triangle Shirtwaist strike winds down. One year later 146 workers, mostly young girls aged 13 to 23, were to die in a devastating fire at the New York City sweatshop - 1910

Seattle General Strike begins. The city was run by a General Strike Committee for six days as tens of thousands of union members stopped work in support of 32,000 striking longshoremen - 1919
 
- David Prosten