September 26 - Disaster on the Job Around the World

On this day in Labor History the year was 2007. 

It was that morning that a bridge under construction in Vietnam collapsed.

The disaster happened in Can Tho, about 100 miles south of Ho Chi Minh City.

It was a suspension bridge project to cross the Hau River.

The project was run by Japanese firms working with the Vietnamese government.

250 workers were on site at the project when the disaster happened.  

55 people were killed and another one hundred were injured due to the collapse. 

One reason cited for the collapse was that torrential downpours had caused the support structure for the bridge to sink. 

Another possible reason was that the scaffolding on the construction project was too weak to hold the weight.

When it failed, it took down a section of the four-lane concrete deck approach ramp with it. 

The fallen section weighed between 1,500 and 2,000 tons.  

The collapse was considered the worst disaster in the history of the Vietnam construction industry. 

Manh Hung, leader of one of the construction teams described what occurred. 

“We suddenly heard a great explosion at a bridge head.  Dust covered a great air space while workers screamed out.  The scene was so terrible.  The whole great block fell on people below.” 

Vietnamese, along with Japanese and Filipino rescue volunteers rushed to attempt to find survivors. 

1,000 local residents gave blood at the hospital for those injured.

The rescue efforts were hampered by the danger of a further collapse.

They had to use a crane to clear the rubble.

Finally, after four days, the rescue efforts were called off. 

The bridge project was completed in 2010.  

The names of the fallen workers are inscribed on a memorial.

September 25 - Martyred for the Vote

On this day in Labor History the year was 1961.

That was the day when Herbert Lee was murdered just outside of Liberty, Mississippi. 

He was a successful black cotton farmer, who became active in efforts to register black voters.

Lee had nine children. 

He was one of the few area black farmers with a vehicle. 

This made him very valuable to the voter registration movement. 

Lee would drive Bob Moses from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee around Amite County to reach unregistered voters.  

It was dangerous work to register black share croppers and farmers in rural Mississippi. 

Attempts by black residents to gain legal or economic equality were met with threats and violence.

On the morning of his murder, Lee had come to the Westbrook Cotton Gin outside of Liberty to drop off a truck load cotton.  

There he was met by a childhood friend, Mississippi State Representative, E. H. Hurst. 

Hurst came up to the truck and started shouting at Lee.  

He then took out a gun and shot Herbert Lee in the head. 

Witnesses stated that Lee had brandished a tire iron at Hurst.

Hurst claimed self-defense.

A jury declared the murder a justifiable homicide.

Louis Allen, a black farmer and timber worker, was one who had testified about witnessing the shooting. 

Later he recanted his testimony, saying he had lied about Lee threatening Hurst because he feared for his life. 

After Allen began to talk about what he saw that day, he became the victim of harassment and beatings. 

Finally, on January 31, 1964 he too was gunned down in his driveway. 

No one was every convicted or arrested for his murder.  

September 24 - Banned in Canada

On this day in Labor History the year was 1918. 

That was the day that the Industrial Workers of the World union was banned in Canada. 

The Industrial Workers of the World union had grown steadily in Canada reaching as many as 10,000 members by 1911. 

The union was especially strong in mining, logging, and the textile industry. 

But backlash against the radical union was mounting in the United States and in Canada.

Swept up in Red Scare hysteria, the governments of both nations targeted the IWW.

With the beginning of World War I, labor unions that dared to threaten strikes or to speak out against militarization were met with harsh reprisals.  

By 1914 the Canadian IWW had less than 1,000 members.

In May of 1918, eighteen Canadian IWW leaders were arrested while they attended a meeting in Ottawa.

Those arrested were immigrants and were sent to a labor internment camp. 

Then the Canadian government moved to ban the organization all together. 

The ban against the IWW would last until the end of World War I. 

Those found to be affiliated with the union faced up to five years in prison. 

13 other organizations were also banned in Canada, including the Chinese Labour Association and the Social Labor Party.

The act further read that it was illegal to attend “meetings, except religious services, during the present war at which the proceedings are conducted in the language of any country with which Canada is at war, or in the languages of Russia, Ukraine or Finland.” 

After the war, the IWW was allowed again in Canada, and slowly it began to rebuild. 

But the scars inflicted during the war years took a lasting toll on the union’s membership.

September 23 - Dr. Harriet Louise Hardy is Born

On this day in Labor History the year was 1906. 

That was the day that Dr. Harriet Louise Hardy was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. 

She pursued a career in medicine, driven by personal family tragedy. 

She lost her father to pneumonia when she was only four years old. 

She also lost a baby brother to the 1918 influenza outbreak. 

Dr. Hardy became an early leader in the field of occupational medicine. 

She was also the first woman to become a full professor at Harvard medical School. 

Dr. Hardy began her career in occupational medicine when she began to investigate the causes of illness among workers making fluorescent lights in factories north of Boston. 

Most of these workers were women. 

Dr. Hardy researched the cases of berylliosis in Lynn and Salem Massachusetts. 

The metal beryllium is used in making the lights. 

Inhaling dust or fumes of the metal can be deadly, but symptoms often do not begin to show up until years after exposure. 

Symptoms include shortness of breath, coughing and scarred lungs. 

Dr. Hardy developed the National Beryllium Registry. 

It was one of the first registries of its kind to track the impact of a chronic health disorder.

Her research helped lead to safety measures in the handling of this dangerous metal. 

Dr. Hardy also worked with unions including the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and The United Mine Workers to identify and address workplace health hazards. 

These included substances like lead, mercury, anthrax and asbestos.

She wrote a textbook on the subject of industrial toxicology, with another pioneer in the field of occupational health, Dr. Alice Hamilton. 

Dr. Hardy helped to forge new ground in making jobsites more safe and healthy for workers.

September 22 - The First Farm Aid

On this day in Labor History the year was 1985. 

That was the year that the first Farm Aid concert was held in Champaign, Illinois.    

A retrospective article in Time magazine reported, “In the 1980s, American farmers were hit hard by what were, at the time, the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.  Droughts ravaged the fields, property values plunged, loan interest rates soared, thousands were forced off their land and faced foreclosure and bankruptcy.”

Farmer suicides rose at alarming rates.

The idea to use music to aid the farmers began with Bob Dylan at an event to help African famine victims. 

Then, musicians Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young took up his idea and ran with it. 

Fifty musicians took the stage at the University of Illinois football stadium. 

The organizers were joined by such headliners as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Bonnie Raitt, Kenny Rogers, Joni Mitchel, the Beach Boys, Jimmy Buffet, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, and more. 

The musicians played for fourteen hours to a rain-soaked crowd of nearly 80,000. 

A telethon also helped to bring in donations. 

It raised $9 million for farm relief. 

More importantly it helped raise national awareness of the dire economic conditions faced by many small farmers. 

Farm Aid has continued to hold concerts for small farmers. 

In 2015 the thirtieth anniversary concert was held in Chicago. 

As an organization Farm Aid has raised more than $50 million for small farmers. 

September 21 - Fighting to Maintain Standards

On this day in Labor History the year was 1991. 

That was the day that members of Culinary Workers Union Local 226 went on strike against the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. 

What they did not know was that the strike would last for more than six years—becoming one of the longest work actions in U.S. labor history.

The Frontier was the second casino to open on the Vegas Strip in 1942.  

At the time of the strike the Elardi family owned the historic casino. 

The Elardi’s were vehemently anti-union. 

They renovated the old facility and then reopened refusing to sign a contract to pay its workers the same rate provided at most other Vegas casinos. 

Claiming that the Frontier was too small to match the wages of the larger outfits, management refused to budge from their position.

In response, Local 226 members mobilized. 

The year before Hattie Canty had been elected President of the local. 

She was a black mother of ten children and a widow. 

She had worked as a hotel maid. 

Her leadership brought new determination to the Culinary Union. 

Local 226 set up 24-hour picket lines outside the Frontier. 

The strike was joined by Bartenders Local 165, Teamsters Local 995, Operating Engineers local 501 and Carpenters Local 1780. 

The strike became an important moment in Vegas labor history—as other casino owners looked on, watching the labor battle unfold. 

The unions stood strong. 

The picketers demand that the owners should “Sell, Shut Down, or Sign.” 

In the end, the Elardis decide to sell. 

The new ownership signed a union contract and rehired 280 striking workers.  

Triumphant union members cut a red ribbon at the hotel to mark their victory. 

September 20 - The Fight for Equality

On this day in Labor History the year was 1830. 

That was the day that the Reverend Richard Allen brought black leaders together at his Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia. 

They met to discuss the rising white racial violence and discrimination toward free black residents of northern cities. 

Forty people answered Allen’s call, representing seven states.

The delegates included many of the leading black ministers and abolitionists of the day.

Those who attended risked personal harm as white mobs threatened the delegates. 

Due to the danger, the group met in secret starting on September 15^th.  

Then on this day they began open sessions.

For five days the delegates considered multiple responses to the conditions black northerners faced.  

They founded the “American Society for Free Persons of Colour for Improving their Condition in the United States: For Purchasing Lands: and for Establishment of a Settlement in the Province of Canada.” 

The organization emphasized pushing for legal protections for black residents in the United States.

They focused on education as a means of uplifting and improving the lives of black citizens.  

But delegates also supported the idea of an outlet to Canada for those black families who wanted to leave for their safety.  

The national Convention reconvened several times over the next three decades.  

Multiple meetings were held at the state and local levels.

These meetings gave black leaders a chance to devise coordinated strategies to stand up against the increasing violence and restrictive laws of the North, and to call for the end of slavery in the South.

One outcome of these meetings was the founding of labor schools to train black students in the skilled trades, as means to gain economic independence.

September 19 - The End of My Sweet Jennie

On this day in Labor History the year was 1977. 

That was the day that is remembered in Youngstown, Ohio as “Black Monday.” 

The Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company announced plans to close its doors laying off more than 4,000 workers. 

Youngstown was a steel town. 

During the first half of the twentieth century, plants were booming.

Youngstown was a union town, a stronghold for the United Steelworkers by the 1940s.

But by the 1970s the once booming steel industry was going bust in Youngstown. 

More and more jobs moved overseas and to states with less union protections. 

Black Monday began a devastating series of plant closings. 

Two years later Brier Hill Mill closed, followed in 1980 by US Steel.

In 1985 it was Republic Steels’ turn. 

By the early 1990s, the steel industry, which had once employed 40,000 people only had 1,000 workers left in Youngstown.  

William Lawson, the Executive Director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, recalled the impact of the closings. 

“Over the course of my high school career, many boys and girls I had known in grade school left—some in the middle of school years, most during the summers—as their parents accepted transfers…to work in other plants around the country, or lost their jobs and went out in search of employment elsewhere.” 

In 1997, the Jeanette Furnace at the shuttered Briar Hill plant was dynamited, despite preservationists’ efforts to save it. 

Bringing down the “Sweet Jennie” furnace became symbol of Youngstown’s economic ruin, memorialized in Bruce Springtseen’s song Youngstown. 

September 18 - The Atlanta Compromise

On this day in Labor History the year was 1895. 

That was the day that Booker T. Washington delivered what came to be known as the “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” which outlined his vision for race relations and black labor in the South. 

Washington was the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a college to train black students for careers in teaching, farming and other trades. 

Washington was invited to give an address to the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. 

It was the first time that a black man was asked to speak before a black and white Southern audience. 

In his speech he urged Southern land owners and business leaders to employ black labor over European immigrants. 

He said, “To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” 

He continued, “Cast it down among those people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.” 

His speech outlined a plan for gradual black economic advancement. 

He declared, “agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly.”

Other black leaders, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois rejected Booker T. Washington’s ideas of gradual advancement.

Instead DuBois fought racial discrimination through the legal system and helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.

September 17 - Striking in the South

On this day in Labor History the year was 1934. 

That was the day that leading Southern textile employers met together in Greenville, North Carolina. 

They met to plan a coordinated response to the national textile strike. 

The Great Depression had ravaged the textile industry. 

Workers were subjected to the “stretch out.” 

Fewer workers were expected to work at a faster pace and produce the same amounts of products. 

Work in textile mills was already grueling. 

The stretch out made conditions even more unbearable. 

Fed up, 20,000 southern workers walked off the job in July.   

From there the numbers grew. 

On Labor Day, 65,000 workers in North Carolina joined the strike. 

Strikers confronted scabs and moved to close down mills not participating in the strike. 

They also disrupted railroad traffic. 

In response, the National Guard was called out against the strikers. 

Violence erupted between the strikers and armed police and strikebreakers throughout the South and New England. 

The Southern owners decided it was time to marshal their own response to the strike. 

According to historian Jeremy Brecher, “An army of 10,000 National Guardsmen was mobilized in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, supplemented by 15,000 armed deputies.” 

But despite this show of force the strike grew.

More than 400,000 textile workers had walked off the job. 

In response, President Franklin Roosevelt's’ administration declared that the working conditions and wages in the industry should be studied. 

Although there were no guarantees for improvement, union leaders called off the strike. 

Much to the anger of many rank-and-file union members, one of the largest worker actions in U.S. history, and one of the most important uprisings of Southern labor, was ended.