Today's Labor History

​Labor History Today (11/3): Precarious work in the movies
Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. Tom Zaniello talks with Sherry Linkon about his next book, an exploration of media accounts of precarious work, ranging from Edward R. Murrow's famous 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame to the storytelling of modern video games.
Kalmanovitz Associate Director Lane Windham on “The Uprising of the 20,000” in 1909.
October was LGBTQ History Month, and for this week’s Cool Things from the Meany Archive, Chloe Danyo digs into the archive’s Pride At Work collection and comes up with a historic pamphlet on organizing for lesbian and gay rights in unions.
Last week's show: (10/27/19): Cannabis organizing; 2007 Writers Guild Strike

November 8
20,000 workers, black and white, stage general strike in New Orleans, demanding union recognition and hour and wage gains - 1892

In one of the U.S. auto industry’s more embarrassing missteps over the last half-century, the Ford Motor Co. decides to name their new model the Edsel, after Henry Ford’s only son. Ford executives rejected 18,000 other potential names - 1956

November 9
Committee for Industrial Organization founded by eight unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The eight want more focus on organizing mass production industry workers - 1935

Philip Murray, first president of the United Steelworkers Organizing Committee, first president of the United Steelworkers of America, and president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations for 12 years following the death of John L. Lewis, dies at age 66 - 1952

November 10
Sit-down strike begins at Austin, Minn. Hormel plant with the help of a Wobbly organizer, leading to the creation of the Independent Union of All Workers. Labor historians believe this may have been the first sit-down strike of the 1930s. Workers held the plant for three days, demanding a wage increase. The governor mediated a settlement - 1933

The ship Edmund Fitzgerald – the biggest carrier on the Great Lakes – and crew of 29 are lost in a storm on Lake Superior while carrying ore from Superior, Wisc. to Detroit. The cause of the sinking was never established - 1975

November 11
Haymarket martyrs hanged, convicted in the bombing deaths of eight police during a Chicago labor rally - 1887


A confrontation between American Legionnaires and Wobblies during an Armistice Day Parade in Centralia, Wash. results in six deaths. One Wobbly reportedly was beaten, his teeth bashed in with a rifle butt, castrated and hanged: local officials listed his death as a suicide - 1919

57 crewmen on three freighters die over a three-day period when their ships sink during a huge storm over Lake Michigan - 1940

Labor history courtesy David Prosten. photo: Pennsylvania members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in front of their office, from THE BIRTH OF THE CIO

---