Today's Labor History

Click here to check out this week's Today in Labor History, a new podcast produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. On this week's show, hosted by Chris Garlock, labor historians Joe McCartin and Leon Fink on: Dr. Martin Luther King and organized labor; John F. Kennedy guarantees federal workers the right to join unions; and how Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” and Bruce Springsteen’s  “My Hometown” frame a turbulent era for American workers. Plus Saul Schniderman on the origins of labor’s anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” and Chris BD on the Filipino plantation workers strike in Hawaii. 

January 15
Wobbly Ralph Chaplin, in Chicago for a demonstration against hunger, completes the writing of the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever” on this date in 1915. He’d begun writing it in 1914 during a miners’ strike in Huntington, W. Va. The first verse:
When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong! – 1915

Seventeen workers in the area die when a large molasses storage tank in Boston’s North End neighborhood bursts, sending a 40-foot wave of molasses surging through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour.  In all, 21 people died and 150 were injured.  The incident is variously known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, the Great Molasses Flood and the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy.  Some residents claim that on hot summer days, the area still smells of molasses - 1919
 
Martin Luther King Jr. born - 1929
 
The CIO miners' union in the Grass Valley area of California strikes for higher wages, union recognition, and the 8-hour day. The strike was defeated when vigilantes and law enforcement officials expelled 400 miners and their families from the area - 1938

The Pentagon, to this day the largest office building in the world, is dedicated just 16 months after groundbreaking. At times of peak employment 13,000 workers labored on the project – 1943

Some 174,000 members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union (UE) struck General Electric and Westinghouse after the power companies, with record-setting profits, offered just a half-cent per hour increase. After nine weeks, the strike was settled with an 18.5 cents hourly wage improvement - 1946

January 16
The United States Civil Service Commission was established as the Pendleton Act went into effect - 1883
 
Thousands of Palmer Raids detainees win right to meet with lawyers and attorney representation at deportation hearings. "Palmer" was Alexander Mitchell Palmer, U.S. attorney general under Woodrow Wilson. Palmer believed Communism was "eating its way into the homes of the American workman," and Socialists were causing most of the country's social problems - 1920
 
Former UAW President Leonard Woodcock dies in Ann Arbor, Mich., at age 89. He had succeeded Walter Reuther and led the union from 1970 to 1977 - 2001
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services