Today's Labor History

​Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. “You can't know where you are going if you don't understand where you came from.” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka sits down with Labor History Today’s Joe McCartin to discuss the historic Pittston strike, which began on September 17, 1989, when ninety-eight members of the United Mine Workers of America and a minister occupied the Pittston Coal Company's Moss 3 preparation plant in Carbon, Virginia. Plus Cool Things from the Meany Labor Archives: the AFL-CIO’s attempts to persuade union voters not to support George Wallace during the 1972 presidential campaign.

Sept 20
Upton Sinclair, socialist and author of "The Jungle"—published on this day in 1906—born in Baltimore, MD - 1878

According to folklorist John Garst, steel-drivin’ man John Henry, born a slave, outperformed a steam hammer on this date at the Coosa Mountain Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western Railway (now part of the Norfolk Southern) near Leeds, Ala. Other researchers place the contest near Talcott, W. Va. - 1887

International Hod Carriers, Building & Common Laborers Union of America changes name to Laborers' International Union - 1965

Sept 21
Militia sent to Leadville, Colo., to break miners strike - 1896

Mother Jones leads a march of miners' children through the streets of Charleston, W. Va. - 1913

National Football League Players Assn. members begin what is to become a 57-day strike, their first regular-season walkout ever - 1982

Sept 22
Emancipation Proclamation signed - 1862

Eighteen-year-old Hannah (Annie) Shapiro leads a spontaneous walkout of 17 women at a Hart Schaffner & Marx garment factory in Chicago. It grows into a months-long mass strike involving 40,000 garment workers across the city, protesting 10-hour days, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages - 1910

Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919

Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va. after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922

United Textile Workers strike committee orders strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South - 1934

San Francisco hotel workers end a two-year contract fight, ratify a new five-year pact with their employers - 2006

Labor history courtesy David Prosten

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