Today's Labor History

​This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Sisters, rebels and social justice in the Jim Crow South
On today’s show, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall discusses her new book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of the South in an excerpt from the Working History podcast.
Also this week, Karen Nussbaum on Iris Rivera’s historic refusal to serve coffee, Jessica Pauszek reads poetry by a striking British miner’s wife and Tom Zaniello remembers Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
Last week's show: Voices from the Lansing Auto Town Gallery
 
February 7
Union miners in Cripple Creek, CO begin what is to become a five-month strike that started when mineowners cut wages to $2.50 a day, from $3. The state militia was called out in support of the strikers – the only time in U.S. history that a militia was directed to side with the workers. The strike ended in victory for the union - 1894

February 8
Players formed The NHL Players Association in New York City (photo) after owners refuse to release pension plan financial information. The union was busted when owners transferred key activists, but it successfully re-formed ten years later - 1957

Vigilantes beat IWW organizers for exercising free-speech rights, San Diego - 1912

February 9
Wobblie activist Tom Mooney convicted in bombing frame-up orchestrated by Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was pardoned and released 22 years later - 1917

U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy falsely charged that the State Department was riddled with Communists. It seems that just about everyone else the Wisconsin senator didn’t like was a Communist as well, including scores of unionists. This was the beginning of "McCarthyism." He ultimately was officially condemned by the senate and died of alcoholism - 1950

Some 19,000 Boeing engineers and technical workers in Washington state and Oregon begin what is to become a 40-day strike over economic issues - 2000
 
- David Prosten

---