Labor History in 2:00

November 23 - The Thibodaux Massacre

On this day in Labor History the year was 1887. That was the day of the Thibodaux Massacre, in Louisiana just southwest of New Orleans. 

Thousands of African American sugar cane workers had gone out on strike. Before the Civil War, sugar cane, like other southern crops had been harvested by enslaved labor. After the war, planters put laws and practices into place to control and repress the newly freed labor force. 

By the late 1880s one of those practices was paying sugar cane workers in scrip. Instead of actual money workers received scrip only redeemable at the planters’ stores. This let planters set the prices for goods and keep their workers in debt.

The Knights of Labor began to organize the bayou sugar workers through their Local Assembly 8404. The union presented the Louisiana Sugar Producers Association, which represented 200 of the largest planters, with a list of demands.

The list included the end of scrip payment and a small wage increase. The planters refused. The union called a strike to begin on November first, during a key time in the sugar harvest. 

Outraged planters brought in scabs to replace the strikers and militia troops to protect the scabs. They evicted strikers from their plantation homes. Many evicted black workers made their way to the black section of Thibodaux. 

White armed men began to picket around the black neighborhood. Two of these white picketers were fired on by an unknown person.

In retaliation, for more than two hours the vigilantes rained gun fire on black strikers and their families. At least thirty people, and possibly many more were killed. The strike was crushed.    

November 22 - Uprising of the 20,000

On this day in Labor History the year was 1909. 

That was the evening when a crowd began to gather at the Cooper Union in the heart of New York City’s shirtwaist garment making industry. 

A meeting had been called by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Local 25 to discuss whether garment workers should go out in a general strike. 

Working conditions and pay throughout the industry were abysmal.

It was common for worker to toil eleven hours a day, with only a thirty-minute lunch break seven days a week.

But organizing all of these workers was a challenge. 

Many spoke various dialects of Yiddish or Italian, so organizing had to take place in multiple languages.

But slowly the organizing efforts began to build and show results.

Pickets and walk outs were held against some employers. 

The union called a meeting to discuss what to do next. 

They voted to strike after a stirring speech in Yiddish from Clara Lemlich, a founder of ILGWU Local 25.  

The strike came to be known as the Uprising of the 20,000.  

It lasted until February. 

In a settlement more than 300 factories agreed to recognize the union.

The factory workers also won improvements in wages, hours, and conditions.  

A song from the Educational Department of the ILGWU captured the spirit of the strike. 

The lyrics begin, “In the black winter of nineteen nine, when we froze and bled on the picket line, We showed the world that women could fight and we rose and won with women’s might.”

The song continued, “And we gave new courage to the men Who carried on in nineteen ten and shoulder to shoulder we’ll win through, Led by the I.L.G.W.U.”

November 21 - Autoworkers Join the Postwar Strike Wave

On this day in Labor History the year was 1946. 

That was the day that 320,000 United Auto Workers went out on strike against General Motors.

The strike was part of a wave of work actions that washed over the country after World War II. 

Workers were growing more and more frustrated that company profits were soaring while workers’ wages remained stagnant.

During the war, most unions had abided by ‘no strike’ pledges. 

But once the war was over, workers wanted their fair share of the growing American economy.

In just one year 5 million workers participated in more than 4,500 strikes. 

The GM strikers demanded a thirty percent pay increase.

Walter Reuther, President of the UAW, also insisted that the company could meet this demand without raising the prices of their vehicles. 

He asked the company to open their books, so workers and the public could see the full details of company’s profits. 

GM refused. 

They characterized Reuther as a socialist for even making such an outrageous request. 

During negotiations, Harry Coen, the GM assistant director of personnel, told President Reuther, “Why don’t you get down to your size and get down to the type of job you are supposed to be doing as a trade-union leader, and talk about money you would like to have for your people, and let the labor statesmanship go to hell for a while."

The GM strike lasted for 113 days. 

The workers won a 17.5 percent pay increase, and improvements to vacation and overtime. 

But they did not get to look at the GM books or gain a say in how GM vehicles were priced.

November 20 - Birth of the Time Clock

On this day in Labor History the year was 1888. 

That was the day that William Le Grand Bundy is credited with inventing something that has become a daily part of life for millions of workers.

His “Time Recorder” was a time clock that could record when workers arrived and left their jobs each day. 

The clock would record the time on a paper tape when a worker inserted his or her individualized, numbered key.

Bundy was a jeweler and inventor from New York.  

After inventing his time clock, he went into business with his brother Harlow and founded the Bundy Manufacturing Company. 

With the growth of factories, there was more and more demand for time clocks. 

They were considered more exact and efficient than human time keeping.

Keeping track of hours worked and labor costs became an essential part of squeezing every drop of profit out of the industrial workforce. 

The Bundy brothers located their company in the city of Binghamton, in southern New York. 

Business thrived.  

Other inventors put their own twist on the time clock.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Bundy company merged with several other time-keeping outfits, forming the International Time Recorder Company. 

Workers across the United States, Canada and Europe had their work hours recorded by International Time clocks. 

Later the company became part of International Business Machines, or IBM, one the world-wide leaders in workplace technologies. 

Over the years, new innovations have been introduced to employee time keeping, such as time cards and computer-linked swipe cards

November 19 - Joe Hill’s Final Words

On this day in Labor History the year was 1915.  On that sad day, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and songwriter, Swedish-born Joe Hill, was executed in Utah. In 1914, Hill was framed for the murder of a grocer and his son in Salt Lake City.  The evidence was circumstantial at best. 

November 18 - Accident or Murder?

On this day in Labor History the year was 1929. 

That was the day that Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen disappeared on their way to recruit workers at a bushcamp during a strike in northwestern Ontario, Canada near Thunder Bay. 

They were both Finnish-Canadians. 

Viljo Rosvall was an organizer for the Lumber Workers Industrial Union of Canada. 

The union included many Finnish lumber workers and had ties to the Canadian Communist Party. 

Janne Voutilainen was an experienced trapper. 

The two men never made it to their destination—the Pigeon Timber Company Camp, located north of Onion Lake.  

It was unknown what happened to them until the next April.

Voutilainen’s body was found in shallow water at the edge of Onion Lake. 

A few days later Rosvall was found, also drowned, in a nearby creek that emptied into the lake. 

The Finnish workers blamed the deaths of the two men on the conservative Finnish camp boss, who oversaw the Onion Lake encampment. 

The coroner’s autopsies ruled the deaths accidental drownings. 

But many remained unconvinced and suspected foul play. 

They questioned how an experience trapper such as Voutilainen could fall through the ice and drown in such shallow water. 

Thousands attended the funeral for the martyrs. 

The debate over what happened to the two men continues to this day.

An historical marker reads “The mystery surrounding the deaths of Rosvall and Voutilainen endures, sustaining them in public memory as martyrs to the cause of organized labor.”

A headstone donated by the Thunder Bay and District Labor Council was erected in 1993, to honor the graves which had gone previously unmarked. 

The deaths of the two men travelling to organize workers remains a mystery of the Canadian labor movement to this day.

November 17 - Resisting Impressment

 

On this day in Labor History the year was 1747. 

That was the day that a crowd of Boston workers took British officers as hostage and held them for three days. 

The workers were outraged that fellow Bostonians had been pressed into service on British Navy ship against their will. 

Impressing ship crews was one of the ways the British manned their ships when there were not enough willing crew members. 

The seaport at Boston had become so notorious for this kind of worker kidnapping that other merchant vessels had begun to avoid the area for fear their crews might be taken by the British Navy. 

Bostonians became increasingly vocal against the practice, and worried about its impact on the local economy. 

In 1745 the local Selectmen petitioned for “immediate relief” from impressment.

They wrote that it was a matter that “nearest effects the Libertys of the People and is a great insult upon this government.”

Two years later, Commodore Charles Knowles sailed into Boston on his way to the West Indies. 

While he resupplied and refit his ships, some of his crewmembers escaped from service. 

To make up his diminished crew, on November 16 Knowles ordered local workers to be rounded up as replacements. 

Fed up Bostonians detained members of the British fleet including one of Knowles lieutenants. 

The Massachusetts Governor William Shirley was able to persuade Knowles not to retaliate. 

He helped facilitate an exchange the impressed Bostonians for the British hostages. 

That January a young Samuel Adams founded the newspaper the Independent Advertiser, published to “defend the rights and liberties of mankind.” 

The paper commended the mob for standing up to impressment. 

Samuel Adams would go on to become a leader in the American Revolution.

That was the day that a crowd of Boston workers took British officers as hostage and held them for three days. 

The workers were outraged that fellow Bostonians had been pressed into service on British Navy ship against their will. 

Impressing ship crews was one of the ways the British manned their ships when there were not enough willing crew members. 

The seaport at Boston had become so notorious for this kind of worker kidnapping that other merchant vessels had begun to avoid the area for fear their crews might be taken by the British Navy. 

Bostonians became increasingly vocal against the practice, and worried about its impact on the local economy. 

In 1745 the local Selectmen petitioned for “immediate relief” from impressment.

They wrote that it was a matter that “nearest effects the Libertys of the People and is a great insult upon this government.”

Two years later, Commodore Charles Knowles sailed into Boston on his way to the West Indies. 

While he resupplied and refit his ships, some of his crewmembers escaped from service. 

To make up his diminished crew, on November 16 Knowles ordered local workers to be rounded up as replacements. 

Fed up Bostonians detained members of the British fleet including one of Knowles lieutenants. 

The Massachusetts Governor William Shirley was able to persuade Knowles not to retaliate. 

He helped facilitate an exchange the impressed Bostonians for the British hostages. 

That January a young Samuel Adams founded the newspaper the Independent Advertiser, published to “defend the rights and liberties of mankind.” 

The paper commended the mob for standing up to impressment. 

Samuel Adams would go on to become a leader in the American Revolution.

November 16 - NFL Players End Strike

On this day in Labor History the year as 1982. 

That Tuesday the National Football League players ended their fifty-seven-day strike. 

The league scrambled to get the new season going, scheduling games for that very next Sunday. 

The shortened nine-game season included two games played before the walkout, and the rest after the strike ended. 

The biggest issue that lead to the strike was pay. 

The NFL had seen a surge in television revenue with a new five-year contract worth $2.1 billion. 

The players asked for 55% of the leagues’ growing profits. 

The players’ association also wanted a minimum pay scale based on years of service, and improved health and retirement benefits.

The owners flatly refused. 

On September 20, the Green Bay Packers beat the New York Giants in a Monday Night Football game. 

The next day the New York Daily News reported, “For the first time in its 63-year history, labor troubles will throw the NFL for a loss.  By a unanimous vote of its executive committee, the league’s Players Association yesterday voted to call a strike.”

The article continued by writing, “The players stressed that they had been forced to call the strike in frustration over what they termed management’s twin failures to take them seriously and to bargain in good faith.”   

Sports Illustrated summed up fan sentiments about the strike with a cover headline reading pffffft! over the image of a deflated football.

Finally, the two sides came to an agreement. 

The players won raises, bonuses based on years in the league, and severance packages for retiring players. 

But the gains were far below the union’s goals. 

Bitterness lingered, and five years later the players would be on strike again.

November 15 - The IWW is Raided

On this day in Labor History the year was 1919. 

That was the day that federal agents stormed the offices of the Industrial Workers of the World in New York City, looking for evidence connecting the organization to radical Communists or Anarchists.

The ransacked office was part of the infamous “Palmer Raids,” when Attorney General Alexander Palmer responded to the growing Red Scare hysteria by raiding the offices of leftist organizations and arresting thousands. 

Hundreds of immigrants to the United States were deported during the raids without legal due process.

The 1917 Russian Revolution had stoked fears about a spreading communist threat.

Newspaper headlines helped to drum up public panic. 

A week before the IWW raid, a headline on the front page of the Evening World, published in New York City declared, “Reds in U.S. Plotted Revolution; Deportation for All Radicals.”

The day after the IWW raid, a Washington Post headline read “Law to Crush Reds.”

Writing in 1920, Attorney General Palmer warned “The chief appeal communism makes is to “The Worker.”  If they can lure the wage-earner to join their own gang of thieves, if they can show him that he will be rich if he steals, so far they have succeeded in betraying him to their own criminal course.” 

Palmer went on to describe how Communists had “stirred discontent,” “caused irritating strikes,” and “infected our social ideas with the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals.” 

Palmers’ references to workers and irritating strikes demonstrate that he perceived the labor movement as part of the communist threat. 

Anti-Communist hysteria took its toll on the most radical elements of the U.S. labor movement, especially the IWW.

That was the day that federal agents stormed the offices of the Industrial Workers of the World in New York City, looking for evidence connecting the organization to radical Communists or Anarchists.

The ransacked office was part of the infamous “Palmer Raids,” when Attorney General Alexander Palmer responded to the growing Red Scare hysteria by raiding the offices of leftist organizations and arresting thousands. 

Hundreds of immigrants to the United States were deported during the raids without legal due process.

The 1917 Russian Revolution had stoked fears about a spreading communist threat.

Newspaper headlines helped to drum up public panic. 

A week before the IWW raid, a headline on the front page of the Evening World, published in New York City declared, “Reds in U.S. Plotted Revolution; Deportation for All Radicals.”

The day after the IWW raid, a Washington Post headline read “Law to Crush Reds.”

Writing in 1920, Attorney General Palmer warned “The chief appeal communism makes is to “The Worker.”  If they can lure the wage-earner to join their own gang of thieves, if they can show him that he will be rich if he steals, so far they have succeeded in betraying him to their own criminal course.” 

Palmer went on to describe how Communists had “stirred discontent,” “caused irritating strikes,” and “infected our social ideas with the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals.” 

Palmers’ references to workers and irritating strikes demonstrate that he perceived the labor movement as part of the communist threat. 

Anti-Communist hysteria took its toll on the most radical elements of the U.S. labor movement, especially the IWW.

November 14 - The Origins of CWA

On this day in Labor History the year was 1938. 

That was the day that the National Federation of Telephone Workers was founded in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Today the union is known as the Communication Workers of America, and represents 700,000 workers in a wide range of communication fields. 

Attempts to organize the telephone industry began as early as 1910, by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. 

Yet the women who worked as telephone operators were not included in the union until two years later. 

By the end of the decade, the IBEW had more than 200 telephone unions. 

Growth in the number of union members in the telephone industry was great impeded due to World War I. 

During the war, President Woodrow Wilson issued an order to “herby take possession and assume control and supervision of each and every telegraph and telephone system, and every part thereof, within the jurisdiction of the United States.” 

He placed control of the industry under the authority of the Postmaster General.

After the war ended, telephone companies increasingly installed company unions as a way to control workers organizing efforts.

Their aim was stave off unionism from outside organizations. 

Nearly all of the IBEW locals lost their membership to the company unions.

But when Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, supporting the rights of workers to join and form independent unions, a new surge of independent unionism began in the telephone industry. 

In 1938, thirty-one organizations joined together in New Orleans to form the National Federation of Telephone workers.

It was a loose association of locally independent unions. 

By 1947, it became clear that the union would have to form a strong national presence to negotiate with nation-wide companies, and the Communication of Workers of America was born.