Labor History in 2:00

October 14 - Marching for Equality

On this day in Labor History the year was 1979. 

That was the day that the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights took place in Washington D.C. 

Estimates of marchers ranged from as few 75,000 to as many as 200,000.

The year of the march was significant. 

It marked the ten-year anniversary of the police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. 

When police raided Stonewall it sparked a series of protests that helped launch the modern LGBT rights movement. 

Ten years later, gay and lesbian Americans still faced significant employment and legal discrimination. 

Many also faced violence.

The published program for the event included a tribute to Harvey Milk, the openly gay Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who had been assassinated a year earlier. 

Lyrics to the song “Harvey Milk’s Body” was written for the tune of “John’s Brown Body.”

The program also included an article urging march participants to lobby Capitol Hill for justice. 

A sample letter to congress was printed as a template. 

It noted that that “Many lesbians and gay men face unjust discrimination in employment,” and called for change. 

The march organizers issued five demands. 

The second demand was that President Carter issue an “order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in the Federal Government, the military and federally-contracted private employment.” 

The program included a list of organizations that supported the march. 

Not many labor unions endorsed, with a few notable exceptions such as Actors Equity Association, three AFSCME locals, and one American Federation of Teachers local. 

More demonstrations in Washington D.C. followed. 

A march held in 1993 drew crowds estimated at one million—a powerful gathering for the movement to end LGBT discrimination.

October 13 - We Whipped the Ivy League and You Can Too!

On this day in Labor History the year was 1985.  That was the day that clerical and support staff at Columbia University went out on strike.

More than 1,000 staff members were represented by United Auto Workers District 65.  The workers wanted improvements to benefits and wages. They were also concerned by pay discrimination for women and minorities.  

Two days before the proposed strike was set to begin the workers held a rally.  Trade union leaders spoke out in support of the clerical staff.  Members of the clerical staff union from Yale University also made the trip to support the Columbia workers.  The Yale union had won its first contract just the year before after a ten-week strike.

The Yale delegation changed, “We love you 65, oh yes we do, we whipped the Ivy League and You Can too.”  The strike lasted for five days. Some of the students formed “Students for a Fair Contract” and helped pass out leaflets on the picket lines.  The Teamsters refused to cross the picket lines, stopping deliveries to campus. 

According to the Columbia Spectator newspaper, the final contract including significant gains for the members.  They won “a six percent pay increase with retro-activity and additional hikes for minority workers, lower deductibles on medical insurance, and non-discriminatory clause, and new technology language.”

The union victory at Columbia was part of a wave of strikes by clerical workers at some of the nation’s top schools.  Stanford staff went on strike in 1974 and 1982.  Cornell staff held three strikes during the 1980s. The workers who helped to run these elite, well-funded institutions were standing up for their rights as workers.

October 12 - Workers Begin to Come Together

On this day in Labor History the year was 1845. That was the day that the first Industrial Congress of the United States met in New York.  People interested in the problems facing working people—including long hours, low pay and unsafe conditions gathered together.

The labor movement was just beginning in this country.  These were the years when early trade unions were formed.  Women played an important role in this early movement.

Female textile mill workers in Lowell Massachusetts began to organize for the ten-hour day.  In 1844 they established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.  Their goal was to improve conditions in the mills.  The Lowell women’s group sent a representative to New York for the labor congress.

Another important development of the fledgling labor movement was the establishment of labor presses. George Henry Evans, a labor newsman, also attended the congress.  He was the editor of a series of U.S. labor papers, starting with the Workingman’s Advocate in 1829. He had come to the United States from England, where he had been involved in the trade labor movement. He also attended the labor congress.

The meeting recommended the formation of three organizations.  The first was an “Industrial Brotherhood,” for workers including farmers.  The second was an “Industrial Sisterhood” for women workers.  The third was a group for friends of labor.  The congress met again in New York in 1847.  It next met in Chicago in 1950. 

These early efforts to establish larger labor groups did not gain much traction.  But they began to lay the framework for workers to come together to discuss their challenges and imagine how they could work together to bring about change.

October 11 - Remembering Mary Heaton Vorse

On this day in Labor History the year was 1874.  That was the day that Mary Heaton Vorse was born in New York City. 

She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts in a well-off family.  She traveled across Europe with her parents, receiving her education and learning to speak multiple languages fluently. 

She then worked as a book reviewer for the Criterion magazine.  In 1912 Mary and the man who would be her husband witnessed the Massachusetts’s textile strike.  The experience was a turning point in her life. She later wrote: “Both Joe O’Brien and I had come a long road to get to Lawrence…Together we experienced the realization of the human cost of our industrial life.  Something transforming happened to both of us.  We knew now where we belonged—on the side of the workers and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born…Some synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by misery of the many.  It was in Lawrence that we realized what we must do, that we could make one contribution—that of writing the workers’ story—as long as we lived.”  

For more than fifty years after Lawrence, Mary travelled the United States, reporting and participating in strikes and the labor movement.  She wrote about the 1919 steel strike, and the lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest.  She wrote about the struggles of auto workers and textile workers and child labor.  In 1962 the United Auto Workers honored Mary with the Social Justice Award

October 10 - With a Push of a Button, Oceans Are Joined

On this day in Labor History the year was 1913.  At 2:02 in the afternoon President Woodrow Wilson at the White House touched of an explosion at the Gamboa Dike in Panama.  With that touch of a button the last barrier to joining the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Panama Canal went up in smoke.  The Chicago Tribunedescribed the scene in Panama, “Then suddenly came the muffled roar of the discharge of 1,600 pounds of dynamite, which sent a shower of water, mud, and rock high into the air, spreading out as it went upward, the whole heavily veiled in a cloud of smoke...As water began to pour through the rent made by the explosion...the crowd sent up a great cheer.” It was a momentous moment in the construction of the canal.  But that moment came at a staggering cost of workers lives. For more than twenty years the French and then the United States worked on the canal project. The US phase lasted for a decade. As many as 45,000 workers toiled on the canal during the peak years of construction.  These workers came from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Panama.  West Indians formed the core of the work crews.   These workers faced stifling heat, brutal work conditions, and poor accommodations.  Workers had to contend with ravaging disease, poisonous snakes and torrential rains.  Workers also faced racial discrimination.   West Indian workers earned half the hourly wages of US and European workers.  They also lived in much more crowded barracks. Worker deaths were so frequent that “frunery trains” ran to bring the bodies away from the construction site.  It is estimated that more than 27,000 men died building the canal.

October 9 - The End of the Boom Boom RoOm

On this day in Labor History the year was 1997. 

That was the day that a group of female employees at the investment firm Smith Barney came to a tentative agreement to settle a sexual harassment law suit against the firm. 

Smith Barney was one of the oldest Wall Street firms, with a reputation for respectability. 

But behind closed doors the firm more closely resembled what the Chicago Tribune described as a “fraternity-house atmosphere.” 

The accounts women told of their treatment at the firm were lewd and disgusting. 

In the basement of the Garden City, New York office there was a room called the “Boom, boom room,” where female employees were told to entertain clients. 

Fed up with this treatment, more than 20 women joined together and filed a class-action law suit. 

To settle the suit, the firm agreed to invest $15 million in diversity training, along with settlements to the harassed women. 

But sexual harassment of women in the financial industry was not only a problem at Smith Barney. 

Female brokers in Chicago filed a suit against Merrill Lynch, who agreed to a settlement with the plaintiffs.

Smith Barney also did not learn its lesson.

Just over a decade later, the firm again settled another sexual harassment law suit to the tune of 33 million. 

This time according to Forbes Magazine, the suit was filed by “four female brokers who accused Smith Barney of preventing them from competing fairly for new accounts, promotions and pay, and depriving women of equal training and sales support.” 

Over the course of fifteen years Merrill Lynch paid out almost half a billion dollars in discrimination suits to women and minority brokers.

October 8 - The Great Chicago Fire

On this day in Labor History the year was 1871. 

That was the day that the Great Chicago Fire began. 

The fire started in a barn on the property of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. 

Legend pins the blame for starting a fire on a cow.

Whatever the cause, the fire spread quickly through the cities wooden houses. 

For two days the uncontrollable fire raged destroying everything in its path. 

In the wake of its devastation nearly 300 people died and 100,000 families had their homes destroyed. 

One person who lost her business in the fire was renowned labor leader Mother Jones. 

In her autobiography she wrote about the fire destroying her dress shop saying, “the great Chicago fire burned up our establishment and everything that we had.  The fire made thousands homeless.  We stayed all night and the next day without food on the lake front, often going into the lake to keep cool.” 

Millions of dollars were raised by the Chicago Relief and Aid Society to help those who needed help to rebuild.

While the society did provide significant aid, treatment varied along class lines.

To get assistance, the working class had to prove themselves worthy with personal references. 

Middle class applicants for aid were more likely to be quickly approved to get money to rebuild.

Working class people had to wade through long approval processes. 

Some never received that approval.  

The experience galvanized some members of the working class to organize for change. 

One of them was Mother Jones. 

She wrote, “From the time of the Chicago fire I became more and more engrossed in the labor struggle and I decided to take an active part in the efforts of the working people to better the conditions under which they worked and lived.”

October 7 - Housing Now!

On this day in Labor History the year was 1989. 

That was the day thousands of people marched on Washington to protest against homelessness.

They gathered to protest against massive cuts in federal housing funding.

President Reagan had cut the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in half. 

The protesters hoped President George H. W. Bush would change this course. 

They called their protest, “Housing Now!".

Estimates of the crowd ranged from 40,000 to more than 200,000.

The New York Times described those who participated writing, “They came from far away as Miami and Beverly Hills, Memphis and Portland, Ore.  Some had walked from New York City.  They included homeless men and women, families who rent but can’t afford to buy homes, state and local officials and prominent figures…”

A delegation of 500 homeless people and allies came on buses from Chicago.

They were joined by famous participants that included Coretta Scott King, Susan Sarandon and a performance by Stevie Wonder.  

Union members joined the protest.

One of the participants interviewed by the New York Times was a 24-year old apprentice with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. 

Cassandra Benton told the paper, “Hopefully, now they will see everyone is unified. They’ll stop spending so much on weapons and other countries.” 

During the protest musician Tracy Chapman played her “Revolution,” a fitting song for the event. 

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, in January 2015, more than half a million people were homeless in the US. 

October 6 - Clinton Signs the Hatch Act

On this day in Labor History the year was 1993. 

That was the day that President Bill Clinton signed into law reforms to the Hatch Act. 

The Hatch Act was passed in 1939. 

It limited the political activity of federal employees. 

The act was passed due to accusations of alleged political cronyism by Democrats on New Deal projects. 

Half a century later, Congress loosened the restrictions. 

In his speech signing the reform, President Clinton explained the changes, “The Federal Employees Political Activities Act, which I'm about to sign, will permit Federal employees and postal workers on their own time to manage campaigns, raise funds, to hold positions within political parties. Still, there will be some reasonable restrictions. They wouldn't be able to run for partisan political office themselves, for example.” 

President Clinton described the importance of the changes, “We've been supporting democracy throughout the world…But here in our own country, millions of our own citizens have been denied one of the most basic democratic rights, the right to participate in the political process.” 

He ended his remarks by saying, “I look forward to the infusion and Federal and postal employee energy, expertise, and dedication into our political system that this bill makes possible.”

Today under the regulations of the act, most employees can assist in voter registration drives, attend fundraisers, contribute money, and distribute campaign literature. 

They can even run for office in non-partisan elections. 

They cannot use their jobs to influence elections or engage in political activity while on the clock. 

Today there remains a balancing act between protecting the free speech of federal employees, and keeping the government politically neutral.

 

October 5 - Hollywood’s Black Friday

On this day in Labor History the year was 1945. 

That was a day known as in Hollywood “Black Friday.” 

After World War II, the movie industry began to rake in profits. 

But they did not pass those on to their employees.

10,000 members of the Conference of Studio Unions, were on strike. 

They were part of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. 

They were also in a jurisdictional battle with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, over who should represent set decorators.

The strike wore on for half a year.   

The studios had more than 100 films backlogged, and were able to wait out the strikers. 

But as the strike continued, and the studios remained silent, pressure mounted.  

Despite the tensions between the two unions, thousands of IATSE members refused to cross the picket lines.

On “Black Friday” the strikers decided to concentrate their efforts at the Warner Brothers Studio gate.

300 picketers gathered to hold the line.  

Scabs hired by Warner Brothers tried to drive through the worker’s pickets lines to the studio.  

Variety accounted what happened next.  “Strikers deployed from their barricades, halted the non-strikers and rolled three automobiles on their sides.  By noon reinforcements arrived from both sides.” 

Firemen were called in to turn their hoses on the striking workers. 

Warner Brothers security deployed tear gas. 

Common for the time accusations were hurled that the Conference of Studio Unions strikers were communists. 

As a result of the strike, the Conference of Studio Unions employees were assigned to other jobs in the studios. 

When they refused, they were locked out. 

The union never recovered. 

The violence at the Warner Brothers gate also helped to fuel the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act through congress, which eroded union protections.