This Week in Labor History (September 22nd) Posted On: Sep 22, 2014 This Week in 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 (Reviving the Strike: How Working People can Regain Power and Transform America: If the American labor movement is to rise again, the author says, it will not be as a result of electing Democrats, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt—the kind employed up until the 1960s.) 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 The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919 Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va., after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922 U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of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 committee orders 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; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later - 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 September 25 American photographer Lewis Hine born in Oshkosh, Wisc. – 1874 (Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor: Your heart will be broken by this exceptional book’s photographs of children at backbreaking, often life-threatening work, and the accompanying commentary by author Russell Freedman. Photographer Lewis Hine–who himself died in poverty in 1940–did as much, and perhaps more, than any social critic in the early part of the 20th century to expose the abuse of children, as young as three and four, by American capitalism.) Two African-American sharecroppers are killed during an ultimately unsuccessful cotton-pickers’ strike in Lee County, Ark.  By the time the strike had been suppressed, 15 African-Americans had died and another six had been imprisoned.  A white plantation manager was killed as well - 1891 September 26 The Old 97, a Southern Railway train officially known as the Fast Mail, derails near Danville, Va., killing engineer Joseph “Steve” Broady and ten other railroad and postal workers.  Many believe Broady had been ordered to speed to make up for lost time.  The Wreck of the Old 97 inspired balladeers; a 1924 recording is sometimes cited as the first million-selling country music record - 1903 The first production Ford Model T leaves the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Mich.  It was the first car ever manufactured on an assembly line, with interchangeable parts.  The auto industry was to become a major U.S. employer, accounting for as many as one of every eight to 10 jobs in the country - 1908 September 27 Striking textile workers in Fall River, Mass., demand bread for their starving children - 1875 The Int’l 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 remained totally nonunion until 2009, when the GCIU—now the Graphic Communications Conference of the Teamsters—organized the pressroom – 1893 Int’l Ladies' Garment Workers Union begins strike against Triangle Shirtwaist Co.  This would become the "Uprising of the 20,000," 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 (Triangle: The Fire that Changed America: On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York City. Within minutes it engulfed three upper floors, burning to death—or causing to jump to their deaths—146 workers, 123 of them women, some as young as 15.) 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 President George W. Bush invokes the Taft-Hartley Act - 2002 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 —Compiled and edited by David Prosten Copyright © 2014 Union Communication Services—Worker Institute at Cornell ILR, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted-in, or are a current customer. 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