Labor History in 2:00

Today in Labor History, May 21, the year was 1946.  That was the day that Democratic President Harry Truman ordered government seizure of the nation’s bituminous coal mines.  800,000 United Mine Workers of America, led by John L. Lewis, had gone out on strike.  

Today in Labor History, May 20, the year was 1937.  That was the day that workers at the Jones and Laughlin plant in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania voted in the first ever union election in the United States’ steel industry under the National Labor Relations Board.  

Today in Labor History, May 19, the year was 1989.  That was the day that black author and Marxist theorist CLR James passed away.  James was born in Trinidad, at the time a Caribbean colony that was part of the British empire.  

Today in Labor History, May 18, the year was 1972.  That was the day that Maggie Kuhn stood before a group of reporters to tell them about her organization, the Gray Panthers.  The idea for the group had started two years earlier.  

Today in Labor History, May 17, the year was 1954.  That was the day the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.  In the unanimous decision the court declared that racial segregation in public education was illegal.  

On this day in Labor History the year was 1979.  That was the day we lost one of the giants of the US Labor Movement, A Philip Randolph.  A Philip Randolph spent his life working for black workers and the cause of labor.  

On this day in Labor History the year was 1917.  That was the day of the founding that the Library Employees Union of Greater New York.  This was the first public library workers’ union in the United States.  From its beginning, one of the key efforts of the union was to fight for “equal rights of women and men in the library field.”  

Do you ever enjoy a cold beer after a long day’s work? Well if you were worker in the United States from 1920 to 1933, you would have to break the law to down a brew. On this day in Labor History the year was 1932.  That was the day that massive demonstrations for the re-legalization of beer were held in New York City and Detroit. Prohibition had lasted for more than a decade. 

On this day in Labor History the year was the 1968. That was the day at the workers across Paris joined students in a city-wide general strike.  College students had begun an occupation at the famed Sorbonne University earlier that May.  

On this day in Labor History the year was 1856 workers of Melbourne, Australia marched to celebrate a victory in the campaign to win the eight-hour day. At the time it was common to work as long as twelve or fourteen hour days.