​Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. “Teachers strikes, the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matters movement, all of those are collective actions that for years you never saw; people didn’t believe in themselves. Now they know that if they’re gonna make progress, they can’t look to anyone but themselves.” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka talks with Labor History Today’s Joe McCartin about the current state – and the future -- of the American labor movement. Plus, Mark Potashnick on Jim Pohle, the founder of the American Union of Pizza Delivery Drivers, class action law suits, and the app-based revolution in food delivery services.

Striking textile workers in Fall River, Mass. demand bread for their starving children - 1875

The International Typographical Union renews a strike against the Los Angeles Times and begins a boycott that runs intermittently from 1896 to 1908. A local anti-Times committee in 1903 persuades William Randolph Hearst to start a rival paper, the Los Angeles Examiner. Although the ITU kept up the fight into the 1920s, the Times remains nonunion to this day - 1893

International Ladies' Garment Workers Union begins strike against Triangle Shirtwaist Co. This would become the "Uprising of the 20,000," (photo) resulting in 339 of 352 struck firms—but not Triangle—signing agreements with the union. The Triangle fire that killed 246 would occur less than two years later - 1909

Twenty-nine west coast ports lock out 10,500 workers in response to what management says is a worker slowdown in the midst of negotiations on a new contract. The ports are closed for 10 days, reopen when Pres. George W. Bush invokes the Taft-Hartley Act - 2002

165 Wobblies indicted for protesting World War 1 -1917

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

Labor history courtesy David Prosten

WASHINGTON (PAI)—By a party-line 26-21 vote after an all-day work session, the Democratic-run House Education and Labor Committee passed the Protect the Right to Organize (Pro) Act, the most-comprehensive pro-worker rewrite of U.S. labor law in decades. All the Democrats voted for it and all the Republicans voted against it. 
 
The measure, co-written by top lawmakers and union legislative representatives, would restore many of the freedoms and protections workers gained under the original National Labor Relations Act of 1935. 
      
The Pro Act, HR 2474, is also expected to pass the Democratic-run House, though the exact date for debate has not been set. The Republican-run Senate is another matter. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., lumps it with other House-approved measures – including federal elections reform – as “socialism.”
      
And the crooked corporate contributors to congressional Republicans can be expected to mount a large and expensive lobbying campaign against it, just as they spent millions of dollars a decade ago to stall the last labor law rewrite try, the Employee Free Choice Act. 
      
That eventually fell victim to Democratic President Barack Obama’s inattention, lack of public commitment and concentration on the Affordable Care Act. 
 
The Pro Act would undo much of the damage the GOP-passed Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and later court decisions, NLRB rulings and other Republican-crafted legislation did to worker rights while tilting the playing field for bosses.
 
It would also counter a key assumption of the NLRA: That bosses break labor law unintentionally, so penalties should be light – unlike other civil rights laws. 
 
Eighty-four years of experience shows that’s wrong. The Pro Act recognizes that with high fines for labor law-breaking – including fines directed at CEOs and boards of directors, immediate restoration of illegally fired workers to their jobs, and swift court injunctions.
 
And the Pro Act would, among other moves, outlaw two big holes in the NLRA. The GOP inserted one via Taft-Hartley: Legalizing state so-called “right to work” laws. 
      
“The Pro Act would stonewall employers” from constant anti-union harangues in mandatory “captive audience meetings” and “would ban what I would call ‘right to freeload’ laws,” Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a former AFL-CIO deputy organizing director, said. 
      
Another change would drastically curb employer misclassification of workers as “independent contractors,” depriving them of worker rights, including the right to organize. 
 
“What is keeping” workers from unionizing “are toothless labor laws, aggressive employer opposition to unions, and relentless political attacks that have dismantled workers’ right to organize,” Committee Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., said.
 
- Mark Gruenberg

Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative agreement with its workers on a new four-year contract, averting planned strikes across the country. The contract agreement affects 83,000 workers in seven states – including Virginia and Maryland -- as well as the District of Columbia. The agreement includes across-the-board raises of 3% a year, protects healthcare benefits, including fully-paid family coverage, makes no changes to pensions or retiree medical coverage and insures no two-tier wage or benefits for new hires; all future Kaiser workers get the same wage rates and benefits as existing workers. The deal also includes strong protections against subcontracting and outsourcing jobs. Roughly 57,000 of the coalition’s membership are represented by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West. Other unions in the coalition are the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Office & Professional Employees International Union. If ratified by coalition members, the contract will take effect Oct. 1.