Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. Union City's Chris Garlock hosts, with Joe McCartin, Leon Fink and Patrick Dixson. On this week's show: U.S. Supreme Court rules that undocumented workers don’t have the same rights as Americans; Sam Walton’s anti-union legacy; remembering Harry Bridges; Texas cowboys strike. PLUS: Saul Schniderman on Martin Luther King and striking sanitation workers in Memphis. Music this week includes “Glory,” with Common and John Legend, from the motion picture "Selma” and “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. Ohio makes it illegal for children under 18 and women to work more than 10 hours a day - 1852 Sam Walton, founder of the huge and bitterly anti-union Walmart empire, born in Kingfisher, Okla. He once said that his priority was to “Buy American,” but Walmart is now the largest U.S. importer of foreign-made goods—often produced under sweatshop conditions - 1918 “Battle of Wall Street,” police charge members of the United Financial Employees’ Union, striking against the New York Stock Exchange and New York Curb Exchange (now known as the American Stock Exchange). Forty-three workers are arrested in what was to be the first and only strike in the history of either exchange - 1948 National Maritime Union of America merges with National Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association - 1988 Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services
Two union activists were murdered in Guatemala and one in Honduras, while dozens of others were targets of violence—including threats of murder, kidnapping and stalking—over the past year, according to two reports recent reports. Since 2004, 87 union leaders and activists have been killed in Guatemala, one of the most dangerous nations in the world for union rights activists. In Honduras, many of those targeted in the 39 documented instances of violence were organizing unions or seeking collective bargaining agreements in the agro-industrial palm oil sector in Colón. Read more at the Solidarity Center. Photo: Isela Juárez is among Honduran union activists targeted with death threats. Credit: Anti-Union Violence Network of Honduras “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
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