Today's Labor History

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September 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. - 1912
photo by Lewis W. Hine; a young mine worker in 1908 in the Turkey Knob Coal Mine, Macdonald, West Virginia.
 
National Football League Players Association members begin what is to become a 57-day strike, their first regular-season walkout ever - 1982 
 
Members of five unions at the Frontier Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas begin what was to become the longest successful hotel strike in U.S. history. All 550 workers honored the picket line for the entirety of the 6-year, 4-month, 10-day fight against management’s insistence on cutting wages and eliminating pensions - 1991

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September 22
President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary proclamation warning that he will order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that does not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863 – 1862
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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
photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons 
 
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Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va., after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922
 
U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent - 1931
 
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
 
Some 400,000 coal miners strike for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio - 1935
 
The AFL expels the Int’l Longshoremen's Association for racketeering; six years later the AFL-CIO accepted them back into the house of labor – 1953

OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas, plant (right) earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 - 2005
 
Eleven Domino's employees in Pensacola, Fla., form the nation's first union of pizza delivery drivers - 2006
 
San Francisco hotel workers end a 2-year contract fight, ratify a new 5-year pact with their employers - 2006
 
September 23
The Workingman's Advocate of Chicago publishes the first installment of The Other Side, by Martin A. Foran, president of the Coopers' Int’l Union. Believed to be the first novel by a trade union leader and some say the first working-class novel ever published in the U.S. - 1868
 
A coalition of Knights of Labor and trade unionists in Chicago launch the United Labor party, calling for an 8-hour day (below), government ownership of telegraph and telephone companies, and monetary and land reform. The party elects seven state assembly men and one senator - 1886
 
A 42-month strike by Steelworkers at Bayou Steel in Louisiana ends in a new contract and the ousting of scabs - 1996
 
California Gov. Gray Davis (D) signs legislation making the state the first to offer workers paid family leave - 2002
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services

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