Labor History in 2:00

October 13 - Delivering a Better Future

On this day in Labor History, the year was 2000. That was the day the newspaper carriers for the San Jose Mercury News ended their walkout. Eighty percent of the newspaper carriers were Vietnamese immigrants to the United States.  Many were elderly, or recent immigrants with families.  

October 12 - Bury Me with My Boys in Mt.Olive

Bury me with my boys in Mt. Olive, and let no traitor draw breath over my grave.” Such was the last wish of labor leader Mother Jones. She wanted her final resting to place to be alongside the coal miners who gave their lives in the struggle to bring fair wages and a safe working environment to Virden, Illinois.

October 11 - The Mother Jones Monument is Dedicated

On this day in Labor History the year was 1936. 50,000 people gathered in the small town of Mount Olive, in southern Illinois. They had come to commemorate a new memorial to renowned labor leader Mother Jones and the honor mine workers who had lost their lives. Five special trains and twenty-five Greyhound buses helped bring the crowd to the Union Miners Cemetery. 

October 10 - Murder in the Fields

On this day in Labor History the year was 1933. That was the day that forty armed cotton growers shot at a group of striking workers in the small town of Pixley, California.  That year a wave of labor unrest had swept through the fields of California’s agriculture industry. Nearly 50,000 workers participated in strikes throughout the year.  

October 9 - The United Hebrew Trades is Founded

On this day in Labor History the year was 1888. That was the day that the United Hebrew Trades was founded in New York City. The new effort was patterned after the United German Trades. The goal was to organize Yiddish speaking workers. 

October 8 - The Not So Friendly Skies for Women

On this day in Labor History the year was 1986. Female flight attendants won an important legal victory. Can you imagine losing your job because you decided to get married? It might have happened if you were a flight attendant working in the mid-Twentieth century. 

October 7 - Happy Birthday, Joe Hill!

On this day in Labor History the year was 1879. The man who came to be known as Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund in Gavle, Sweden.  Hill traveled the United States organizing for the grassroots labor organization the Industrial Workers of the World. 

 

 

October 6 - Québec Autoworkers Walk Off the Job

On this day in Labor History the year was 1996 fifteen thousand workers at the General Motors Plant in Quebec walked off the job. Members of the Canadian Auto Workers union were frustrated with their wages. They were also angry about layoffs and GM’s moves to outsource some of the auto production to non-unionized labor. 

October 5 - Labor‘s Candidate for NYC Mayor

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

October 4 - Truman Seizes the Nation’s Oil Refineries

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.