 Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. On this week's show: Long-time activist for working women Ellen Bravo talks about the history – and future -- of paid family leave, and we visit with Hardball Press publisher Tim Sheard about why working class culture matters. Plus the late great Aretha Franklin! September 28 The International Workingmen’s Association is founded in London. It was an international organization trying to unite a variety of different left-wing, socialist, communist and anarchist political groups and unions. It functioned for about 12 years, growing to a membership declared to be eight million, before being disbanded at its Philadelphia conference in 1876, victim of infighting brought on by the wide variety of members’ philosophies - 1864 September 29 A report by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the average weekly take-home pay of a factory worker with three dependents is now $94.87 – 1962 Tens of thousands of protesters take to the streets of Europe, striking against government austerity measures. Workers in more than a dozen countries participate, including Spain, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia, and Lithuania, protesting job losses, retirement deferments, pension reductions, and cuts to schools, hospitals, and welfare services - 2010 September 30 A total of 29 strike leaders are charged with treason—plotting "to incite insurrection, rebellion & war against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania"—for daring to strike the Carnegie Steel Co. in Homestead, Pa. Jurors refuse to convict them - 1892 Seventy-year-old Mother Jones (left) organizes the wives of striking miners in Arnot, Pa., to descend on the mine with brooms, mops and clanging pots and pans. They frighten away the mules and their scab drivers. The miners eventually won their strike - 1899 Railroad shopmen in 28 cities strike the Illinois Central Railroad and the Harriman lines for an 8-hour day, improved conditions and union recognition, but railroad officials obtain sweeping injunctions against them and rely on police and armed guards to protect strikebreakers - 1915 Black farmers meet in Elaine, Ark., to establish the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union to fight for better pay and higher cotton prices. They are shot at by a group of Whites, and return the fire. News of the confrontation spread and a riot ensued, leaving at least 100, perhaps several hundred, Blacks dead and 67 indicted for inciting violence - 1919 Cesar Chavez (below right), with Dolores Huerta (left), co-founds the National Farm Workers Association, which later was to become the United Farm Workers of America - 1962 Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services   The Montgomery County Professional Drivers Union Coop is launching a new taxi cooperative -- Anytime Taxi -- this Saturday. The coop's first vehicles are all brand-new union-made, wheelchair accessible taxis. The drivers lobbied for – and won -- a successful reform of Montgomery County's taxi code that levels the regulatory playing field for drivers, provides vehicle licenses for the driver cooperative, mandates dramatic increases in the number of accessible taxis, and earmarks county revenue from a tax on Uber rides for accessible transit. “After many years of organizing and planning, they are getting on the road,” says the AFL-CIO’s Christian Sweeney. The Montgomery County Professional Drivers Union is an affiliate of the National Taxi Workers Alliance, AFL-CIO.
 Questionnaires for At-Large DC City Council candidates Ralph Chittams, Rustin Lewis, Dionne Reeder and Elissa Silverman have been posted on the Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO’s COPE page. Also just updated on the COPE page: Important Dates on the 2018 Political Calendar, including voter registration deadlines in DC, Maryland and Virginia.
photo: at the Sept. 12 At-Large COPE interviews; photo by Korey Hartwich  “My father's mother had a copy of Vernon Dalhart's recording of ‘The Wreck of the Old 97,’ (9/26 UC Labor Quote)" writes Mark Pattison. “Of course, it was a 78 rpm disc. Fortunately, in the summer of 1982 I transferred my parents old 78s onto cassette tape. The B-side was ‘The Prisoner's Song’: ‘If I had me the wings of an angel, then over these walls I would fly.’”
|
