A daily, pocket-sized history of America's working people, brought to you by The Rick Smith Show team.
Episodes
16 minutes ago
16 minutes ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1933.
That was the day garment factory owners locked out dressmakers in several shops throughout Los Angeles.
The women garment workers, overwhelmingly Mexican, had been organizing with the ILGWU for over a month.
They began conducting strikes at selected shops the previous month to press their demands.
The women wanted union recognition, a thirty-five hour workweek, an end to homework, shop floor committees, a guaranteed wage and more.
Historian Douglas Monroy observes that their demands reflected the harsh working conditions they faced.
It was a volatile, competitive, seasonal industry.
Businesses worked tirelessly to undercut each other and job out the work.
Women workers were routinely unemployed or underemployed, subject to widespread wage theft and discrimination.
They were frustrated by promises of the new National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised the right to organize but held no provisions for enforcement.
Employers flaunted the new legislation and continued to discharge workers for union activity.
When the employers forced a lockout, Local 96 looked to the AFL’s Central Labor Council to sanction a general dressmakers strike, which started four days later on October 12.
As many as 3,000 Latina strikers maintained solid picket lines, despite dozens of arrests.
ILGWU organizer Rose Pesotta arrived from New York to help with food distribution and packing the picket lines.
The rank and file leadership produced a bilingual strike bulletin and made daily radio announcements.
The strike ended in arbitration that conceded few gains to the garment workers.
But the women of Local 96 continued to organize throughout the Los Angeles area.
They led a series of strikes that finally won the closed shop in 1936.
14 hours ago
14 hours ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1933.
That was the day Detroit anarchist labor leader, Joseph Labadie died.
Born in Paw Paw in 1850, Jo was born to descendants of French immigrants and grew up among Native Potawatomi peoples in southwest Michigan.
He became a printer, joined the local Typographical Union No.18 and worked for the Detroit Post and Tribune.
He was an early leader of the Socialist Labor Party.
By 1878, Jo organized the first Knights of Labor Assembly in Detroit.
He served as the first president of the Detroit Trades Council and founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.
He wrote tirelessly for a number of labor and socialist newspapers across the country.
He embraced anarchism and soon produced a popular column titled, “Cranky Notions.”
Labadie enjoyed the company and correspondence with radical labor leaders like Emma Goldman, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Eugene V. Debs, Benjamin Tucker, Terrance Powderly and others of the Progressive Era.
He was often referred to as ‘The Gentle Anarchist’ for his insistence on non-violence and distancing from those Anarchists who advocated the use of violence as an acceptable tactic.
Labadie was also known to never throw out any printed material relevant to labor or radical causes.
His biographer, Carlotta Anderson notes that, “the story of his life, deeds and thoughts is abundantly revealed through the treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings, manuscripts, booklets, photos and circulars once stored in his attic and now housed in the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan. His stockpile of documents of social protest has proved a boon to scholars, enabling them to study the early labor movement in detail.”
When he died at the age of 83, he considered this to be his legacy.
2 days ago
2 days ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi.
She was the youngest of 20 children.
Her parents were sharecroppers and she began working the fields at the age of six.
At the age of 12, Fannie had to drop out of school to sharecrop to meet the needs of her family.
Marrying in 1944, she and her husband continued to work as sharecroppers on a plantation near Ruleville.
After decades of abject poverty and Southern political repression, Fannie Lou Hamer joined up with voter registration activists in 1962.
When she and seventeen others traveled to Indianola to register, Fannie was fired from her job and driven from the plantation she had worked at for decades.
She began working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and played a central role in organizing Freedom Summer.
In a short time, Fannie was repeatedly arrested, beaten and shot at for her activism.
She suffered kidney damage after police beat her nearly to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail as she traveled home from a literacy workshop.
By 1964, she helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention.
President Lyndon Johnson was so threatened by live testimony she was giving before the Convention’s Credentials Committee, that he orchestrated an emergency press conference to preempt the broadcast.
When the Committee attempted a backroom deal to seat just two MFDP delegates with no voting rights at the convention, Hamer and other delegates left in disgust.
Hamer continued her activism but her life was tragically cut short in 1977 from hypertension and breast cancer.
She was just 59.
2 days ago
2 days ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1886.
That was the day Henry George accepted the nomination to run for mayor of New York on the United Labor Party ticket.
In cities across the country, trade unionists met to found state labor parties and to hammer out political platforms for local and state elections.
In New York City, ULP advocates issued the Clarendon Hall platform and nominated Henry George as the ULP candidate for the mayoral race.
George had gained prominence with the 1879 publishing of his book, Progress & Poverty.
In it, he addressed private land ownership as the basis for inequality and advocated for a single tax system.
At New York’s Cooper Union that evening, where thousands of supporters gathered, George addressed the crowd.
He presented the ULP platform: higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, government ownership of railroads and communications and an end to police repression.
Burrows and Wallace describe the scene that night in their book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
During his speech, George declared that, “this government of New York City—our whole political system is rotten to the core.”
He argued that “politicians had made a trade out of assembling votes and selling them to powerful interests; what business got in return was police protection, lax enforcement of housing and health codes, friendly judges and fat franchises. To purify the political order, working class voters had to sever ties to all the established parties and choose from their own ranks.”
For a party that had just been founded weeks before, George came in second.
But like its sister organization in Chicago, the New York ULP would split over the issue of socialism within a year.
2 days ago
2 days ago
On this day in Labor History the year was 1945. That was the day President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9639. It ordered the US Navy to seize control of more than four dozen oil refineries across the country. As World War II was drawing to a close, workers in many industries were growing increasingly restless. They had seen company owners rake in record profits, and the workers felt they had not received their fair share.
6 days ago
6 days ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1932.
That was the day the State Militia was called into Kincaid, Illinois.
164 high school students had just walked out of the classroom, declaring themselves on strike.
They were protesting the school board’s use of coal from the Peabody Coal Company.
The students walked out in solidarity with their fathers, who were on strike against the Peabody Coal mine in nearby Langleyville over wage concessions.
The father-son strike, as it was referred to, was one more in a series of protest actions that came on the heels of the founding of the Progressive Miners of America a month earlier.
Thousands of Illinois miners had just voted with their feet to repudiate John L. Lewis’ UMWA over wage concessions.
After their founding conference, new PMA leaders began aggressively organizing non-union mines.
They marched into mining towns and ordered non-union diggers out of the mines.
They also struck UMW mines, picketing against the industry standard of $5 a day that had been set by the latest concessionary contract.
At some mines, the PMA was able to win the old $6.10 a day wage.
Throughout the month, the State National Guard had been called out to a number of mining towns to quell armed conflicts between PMA and UMW supporters.
The Peabody Coal mine at Langleyville had been shut down for months by ongoing PMA/UMW conflict.
Now it had reopened under heavy National Guard protection and was the only mine operating in Christian County.
The striking fathers were PMA miners picketing the continued mine operations under the UMW concessionary contract.
The years-long Illinois mine wars had just begun.
7 days ago
7 days ago
On this day in labor history, the year was 1949.
That was the day Americans awoke to fears the nationwide steel strike would spread rapidly to include key fabrication plants.
Half a million steel workers had joined 400,000 coal miners on strike the morning before.
The miners’ resolve to defend their $100-a month pensions, instituting what John L. Lewis called the “no-day work week,” emboldened the steel workers to walk out of the mills.
Within 24 hours, 96% of all steel production in the country was completely shut down.
USW contracts were due to expire on the 15th, But the writing was on the wall.
The mill owners decried anything close to mine pensions as nothing short of socialistic and refused to budge in negotiations.
USW president Phil Murray thundered that those companies that failed to agree to demands for non-contributory pensions and insurance would be shut down.
But militants warned that President Truman’s Fact-Finding Board had already watered down strike demands.
The President’s Board had been established to put off two previous strike deadlines.
The ‘guidelines’ it issued only encouraged steel magnates to stand tough against USW demands.
These included a 30-cent raise plus increased company insurance and pension contributions.
Now it had become a defensive struggle over whether steel workers would have to begin contributing to health and pension plans through wage cuts.
By the time steelworkers ended their strike forty-two days later, they had won the $100 a month pension, minus what they would receive from social security.
And they had to begin contributing to a health insurance plan with no wage increase at all.
Still, workers celebrated that they had successfully defended the USW against the all out union-busting drive.
Tuesday Oct 01, 2024
Tuesday Oct 01, 2024
On this day in Labor History the year was 1991. That was the day that the Pattern Makers League of North America merged with International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Have you ever heard of the Pattern Makers union? The Pattern Makers can trace their history all the way back to 1887.
Monday Sep 30, 2024
Monday Sep 30, 2024
On this day in Labor History the year was 1892. That was the day that 29 leaders of the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania were charged with treason against the state. If you are a regular listener to this broadcast, you have heard about this strike before.
Monday Sep 30, 2024
Monday Sep 30, 2024
On this day in Labor History the year was 1931. Canadian Coal miners, their wives, and children marched through the streets of Estevan, Saskatchewan. The miners were on strike for union recognition, and better pay and working conditions. Safety was a major concern for the 600 men and boys who worked in the mines.