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.

April 06
The first slave revolt in the U.S. occurs at a slave market in New York City’s Wall Street area. Twenty-one Blacks were executed for killing nine Whites. The city responded by strengthening its slave codes - 1712
 
Birth of Rose Schneiderman, prominent member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the Int’l Ladies Garment Workers' Union in 1909, and famous for an angry speech about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. - 1882
 
A sympathy strike by Chicago Teamsters in support of clothing workers leads to daily clashes between strikebreakers and armed police against hundreds and sometimes thousands of striking workers and their supporters. By the time the fight ended after 103 days, 21 people had been killed and 416 injured - 1905
 
What was to become a two-month strike by minor league umpires begins, largely over money: $5,500 to $15,000 for a season running 142 games. The strike ended with a slight improvement in pay - 2006
 
April 07
National Labor Relations Board attorney tells ILWU members to “lie down like good dogs,” Juneau, Alaska - 1947
 
Some 300,000 members of the National Federation of Telephone Workers, soon to become CWA, strike AT&T and the Bell System. Within five weeks all but two of the 39 federation unions had won new contracts - 1947
 
Fifteen thousand union janitors strike, Los Angeles - 2000
 
April 08
A total of 128 convict miners, leased to a coal company under the state’s shameful convict lease system, are killed in an explosion at the Banner coal mine outside Birmingham, Ala. The miners were mostly African-Americans jailed for minor offenses - 1911
 
President Wilson establishes the War Labor Board, composed of representatives from business and labor, to arbitrate disputes between workers and employers during World War I - 1918
 
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is approved by Congress. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s when almost 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. It created low-paying federal jobs providing immediate relief, putting 8.5 million jobless to work on projects ranging from construction of bridges, highways and public buildings to arts programs like the Federal Writers' Project - 1935
(Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters: WPA artists’ depictions of workers can be seen in labor posters of that era. In Agitate! Educate! Organize!, Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher share their vast knowledge about the rich graphic tradition of labor posters. Here you will find lavish full-color reproductions of more than 250 of the best posters that have emerged from the American labor movement on topics ranging from core issues such as wages and working conditions to discrimination to international solidarity.)
 
President Harry S. Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize the nation’s steel mills to avert a strike. The Supreme Court ruled the act illegal three weeks later - 1952
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services

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