Today's Labor History

Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. Union City's Chris Garlock hosts, with Joe McCartin, Patrick Dixson and Chris Bangert-Drowns. On this week's show: the War Labor Board during World War 1, the 2006 national Day of Action by immigrants and their supporters, the arrests of farm workers for organizing in 1930, and the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1939.
Plus Saul Schneiderman on Florence Reese, Kurt Stand on Gene Debs, and music by Tish Hinojosa and Natalie Merchant.

Birth date of Frances Perkins, named Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet-level office - 1880
 
A total of 133 people, mostly women and girls, are killed when an explosion in the loading room tears apart the Eddystone Ammunition Works in Eddystone, Pa., near Chester. Of the dead, 55 were never identified - 1917
 
Birth of Dolores Huerta, a co-founder, with Cesar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers - 1930
 
Dancers from the Lusty Lady Club in San Francisco’s North Beach ratify their first-ever union contract by a vote of 57-15, having won representation by SEIU Local 790 the previous summer. The club, which later became a worker-owned cooperative, closed in 2013 - 1997
 
Tens of thousands of immigrants demonstrate in 100 U.S. cities in a national day of action billed as a campaign for immigrants’ dignity. Some 200,000 gathered in Washington, D.C. - 2006​
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services 

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