Labor History in 2:00

November 29 - A Deadly Dust in the Air

On this day in labor history, the year was 1937. That was the day the National Labor Relations Board began hearings on an unfair labor practice brought by the International Union Mine, Mill and Smelters. Mine, Mill had been fighting the union busting tactics at Eagle-Picher Lead Company. The union had been organizing lead and zinc miners in the Tri-State area of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, they built the union by emphasizing safer working conditions, stressing the hazards of silicosis and tuberculosis. In their book, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosmer note that one of Mine Mill’s demands included the elimination of the company clinic. They argued it was used to target and fire diseased workers, rather than provide a safe work environment. Mine Mill also organized other area industries, to counteract the near total power of the mine owners in the region. When the union called a strike at area mines in May 1935, the area’s largest producer, Eagle Picher Lead moved quickly to force a lockout and establish a company union. During the hearings, the union was limited in its ability to raise health and safety issues. They did win reinstatement and back pay for workers fired during the strike. But the case brought national attention to silicosis in the Tri-State area. In a letter to Francis Perkins the following year, the head of the Cherokee County Central Labor Body hoped to secure legislation to compel the companies to install ventilation systems and safety devices. He noted the average life of a miner was 7-10 years, with many dying in 2 or 3 years. But a federal standard on silica was still decades away.

November 28 - Stop the Presses! Workers Demand a Living Wage!

On this day in labor history, the year was 1953. That was the day 400 photo-engravers at six New York City newspapers walked off the job. Members of the AFL’s International Photo-Engravers Union had just voted down arbitration. All but one local newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune were idled as 20,000 newspaper workers refused to cross the engravers picket lines. Six days into the strike, that newspaper suspended operations as well. Writers at The New Yorker magazine remarked they were “curled up with the Wall Street Journal, The Daily Worker and a two-day old copy of La Prense.” In the decades before digital images, photoengraving was a labor-intensive process. Highly skilled workers made metal plates from which newspaper images were printed. Photo-Engravers had been working without a contract since the end of October. They demanded a $15 a week raise. The Newspapers Association was only willing to grant $3.75. The other newspaper unions had been offered similar wage and benefit packages, far below their demands. They knew that whatever they won or lost depended on the victory of the Photo-Engravers strike. So they walked out in solidarity. Federal mediators intervened in an attempt to settle the strike. Hysteric newspaper editors across the country shrieked that the union had accomplished what the government would never dare to do: subvert the freedom of the press! They sulked that the strike had broken 35 years of industrial harmony and peace; adding that the ungrateful workers didn’t appreciate just how good they had it. After eleven days, members voted to end the walkout and let a fact-finding board solve the dispute. Three months later, that board upheld the Newspaper’s Association original offer of $3.75 a week plus benefits.

November 27 - Sitting Down at Midland Steel

On this day in labor history, the year was 1936. That was the day 1200 production workers at Detroit’s Midland Steel sat-down for higher wages, an end to piecework and union recognition.

 

The strike was called just before noon. When 800 on the second shift arrived for work, they readily handed their lunches, cigarettes and newspapers through the windows to the sit-downers.

 

The UAW had embarked on a massive organizing drive throughout the country. Days earlier, the GM sit-down strike had begun in Atlanta, spread to Kansas City and would eventually reach Flint, Michigan. But the UAW was also organizing parts suppliers like Midland, who produced car body frames for the industry.

 

The UAW first used the tactic of the sit-down strike ten days earlier at the Bendix Products brake plant in South Bend, Indiana. There, workers had just organized with the UAW. They braved eight days in an unheated factory during winter, demanding the company union be dismantled.

 

At Midland, workers stayed in the plant, stating they would hold out till Christmas if they had to. Within a week, the Midland strike had idled 72,000 workers at Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge, Desoto, Briggs and Ford’s Lincoln-Zephyr plants. Stakes were so high at Midland that strikers threw a suspected company spy out a second story plant window.

 

Just as Midland workers returned victorious to their job ten days later, thousands of others began sitting down at their jobs. Rubber workers in Akron, glass workers in Ottawa, Illinois, bus drivers in Flint, Kelsey Hayes brake workers and aluminum workers just two blocks from Midland were all sitting down for union recognition, wage increases and better working conditions. The massive strike wave had begun.

November 26 - Revolutionizing the Rails

On this day in Labor History the year was 1867. That was the day that J.B. Sutherland of Detroit patented the first specialized refrigerated railroad car. Southerland’s design included ice tanks at both ends of the car and ventilation flaps on the floor, which used gravity to send a draft of cold air flowing throughout the car. 

November 25 - Strike for Better Schools

On this day in Labor History the year was 1946. That was the day that teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota went on strike. It was the first ever organized walkout of teachers in the United States. The strike was organized by the St. Paul Federation of Teachers Local 28. 

November 24 - Cigar Makers Organize

On this day in Labor History the year was 1875. That was the day that Samuel Gompers founded the Cigar Makers’ International Union Local 144 in New York City. The very first Cigar Marker’s Union local had been established in Baltimore in 1851 by craftsmen who opposed importation of lower-paid laborers from Germany. 

November 23 - Strike Like an Egyptian

On this day in labor history, we are going way, way, way back.  The year was 1170 B.C. So the exact date is a bit of an estimate.  Egyptian workers initiated what just might be the first recorded strike in world history. The workers were toiling on public works projects, including building tombs of the pharaohs, in the Valley of the Kings. 

November 22 - Massacre at Bogalusa

On this day in labor history, the year was 1919. That was the day four leaders of the Carpenters union were shot dead in Bogalusa, Louisiana. 

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the International Union of Timber Workers had embarked on an organizing drive of white and black workers at Great Southern Lumber Company. Bogalusa functioned as a company town. Lumber bosses controlled company housing, local politicians and ruled the town with an iron fist. 

By 1919, the two unions began organizing among loggers and sawmill workers in the region. The UBC initially organized among white skilled workers, while the IUTW organized among unskilled, mostly black workers. They soon stepped up efforts to organize jointly. 

Historian Stephen Norwood notes that when Great Southern threatened to forcibly break up a union meeting among black workers, armed white union men arrived to defend the meeting. By September, 95% of the workforce was organized when the company instituted a lockout. 

On November 21, a posse of local businessmen fired on the home of leading black organizer, Sol Dacus, who narrowly escaped.  The following day, armed white union carpenter leaders, Stanley O’Rourke and J.P. Bouchillon escorted Dacus to the Central Trades and Labor Council offices. 150 special policemen were immediately dispatched. They began firing upon union headquarters, killing O’Rourke, Bouchillon and two other union leaders, Thomas Gaines and Lem Williams. Dacus was nearly lynched and escaped with his life to New Orleans. 

Norwood concludes the gun battle “represents probably the most dramatic display of interracial labor solidarity in the Deep South during the first half of the twentieth century.” For historian William P. Jones, the anti-union violence and racial terror would culminate in 1923 with a massacre of the Florida lumber town of Rosewood.

November 21 - Workers Complete the Alaskan Highway

On this day in labor history, the year was 1942.

That was the day the completion of the Alaskan Highway or Alcan, was celebrated at Soldier’s Summit. 

There had been proposals for a highway connecting the United States to Alaska since the early 1920s.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly to organize its approval and construction.

By March 1942, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the $138 million project. 

More than 10,000 troops were assigned to highway construction. 

Over a third were comprised of newly formed black regiments.

Thousands of pieces of construction equipment were moved through the railroads, including steam shovels, blade graders, tractors, trucks, bulldozers, snowplows, cranes and generators.

In a matter of eight months, workers carved out 1700 miles of road between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through the Yukon to Delta Junction in Alaska, under the most treacherous environmental conditions. 

Workers arrived in wintery Dawson Creek, pitching their sleeping quarters in snowdrifts. 

By spring , workers battled flooding rivers, equipment sinking into thick mud and fears of Japanese bombers. 

By summer, mosquitoes, dubbed “bush bombers,” were so bad workers had to eat under netting. 

Black workers also battled relentless racism.

The Army was still segregated. 

Black troops faced racist presumptions about their capacity to carry out hard labor. 

They were determined to break down stereotypes. 

By fall, white and black bulldozer drivers coordinating the work together were celebrated in the pages of the Army’s Yank magazine, Time and the New York Times. 

Some historians consider the integrated work crews a factor in President Truman’s later move to desegregate the armed forces. 

According to The New York Times, the Federal Highway Administration calls the Alcan “the road to civil rights.”

November 20 - Rose Pesotta is Born

On this day in labor history, the year was 1896.

That was the day anarchist and labor activist Rose Pesotta was born.

Her name, Rakhel Peisoty, was changed, like so many others’, at Ellis Island.

She had fled tsarist Russia in 1913 as a teenager and soon found work in New York City’s garment shops.

She readily joined the ILGWU, becoming a national organizer by 1920.

In the late 1920s, Rose went to Los Angeles in an attempt to organize Latina sweatshop workers.

There she helped women workers establish a bilingual labor journal and assisted them in winning a key strike for recognition and higher wages in 1933.

She soon ascended to the position of union vice president and worked closely with the newly formed CIO. 

Rose traveled far and wide to organize garment workers.

She led successful strikes throughout the United States and in Montreal and Puerto Rico.

By 1936, she was on the picket lines with striking rubber workers in Akron, Ohio and autoworkers in Flint, Michigan.

She increasingly found herself at odds with ILGWU head, David Dubinsky and other top male union officials over persistent sexism, her radical politics and her opposition to the no-strike pledge during World War II. 

Rose resented the fact that though women comprised the overwhelming majority of the union’s membership, she continued to be the only woman union officer. 

Frustrated by the chauvinism she experienced, Rose resigned from her post as vice president and later from the ILGWU executive board in 1944. 

She continued as a sewing machine operator, remained active at the local level and published two memoirs.

Later in life, she aligned herself with the Civil Rights Movement. 

Rose Pesotta died of cancer in 1965.