This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver; Last week's show: Union women heroes, past and present. March 25 First “Poor People’s March” on Washington, in which jobless workers demanded creation of a public works program. Led by populist Jacob Coxey, the 500 to 1,000 unemployed protesters became known as “Coxey’s Army” - 1894 146 workers are killed in a fire at New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a disaster that would launch a national movement for safer working conditions - 1911 (see poem) An explosion at a coal mine in Centralia, Ill. kills 111 miners. Mineworkers President John L. Lewis calls a six day work stoppage by the nation’s 400,000 soft coal miners to demand safer working conditions - 1947 March 26 San Francisco brewery workers begin a 9 month strike as local employers follow the union-busting lead of the National Brewer’s Assn. and fire their unionized workers, replacing them with scabs. Two unionized brewers refused to go along, kept producing beer, prospered wildly and induced the Association to capitulate. A contract benefit since having unionized two years earlier, certainly worth defending: free beer - 1868 March 27 Mother Jones is ordered to leave Colorado, where state authorities accuse her of “stirring up” striking coal miners - 1904 U.S. Supreme Court rules that undocumented workers do not have the same rights as Americans when they are wrongly fired - 2002 - David Prosten Comments are closed.
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