Staffers at a communications firm that assists nonprofit organizations with strategic visibility events and social media campaigns voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to join the Washington-Baltimore News Guild. While a majority of the nearly 100 eligible workers at M+R had signed union cards and asked M+R to recognize the union, management opted to have the NLRB conduct an election. In addition to its office in Washington, M+R has staff in New York City and in Oakland, Calif. The firm works primarily with labor unions and other non-profits.
 "Isn’t it weird that someone who could contend for the title of America’s Greatest Union Buster will be inducted into the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor?" So opines Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson in his September 19 column headlined "Induction of union-busting Reagan into Labor’s Hall of Honor shocks union," referencing AFGE 12's letter to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta urging him to reconsider adding Reagan to the Hall of Honor (reported previously in Union City). "Bayard Rustin, Dolores Huerta, the pioneers of the farmworker movement and the workers of the Memphis sanitation strike also are the list of labor heroes and heroines," says Davidson. "As a labor leader, Reagan was not in their league."
 “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
This quote appears at the very beginning of Martin Foran’s novel, “The Other Side.” (see Today's Labor History) September 22
Emancipation Proclamation signed - 1862 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 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 The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919 Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va., after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922 U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of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 committeeorders 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 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, 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 September 24 Canada declares the Wobblies illegal - 1918 Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services |
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