News

Led by 23-year-old Kate Mullaney, the Collar Laundry Union forms in Troy, N.Y., and raises earnings for female laundry workers from $2 to $14 a week - 1864

Some 12,000 pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas?mostly Latino women?walk off their jobs at 400 factories in what was to become a three-month strike against wage cuts. Strike leader Emma Tenayuca was eventually hounded out of the state - 1938

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is born in Hyde Park, N.Y. He was elected president of the United States four times starting in 1932. His New Deal programs helped America survive the Great Depression. His legislative achievements included the creation of the National Labor Relations Act, which allows workers to organize unions, bargain collectively, and strike - 1882

Responding to unrest among Irish laborers building the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, President Andrew Jackson orders first use of American troops to suppress a labor dispute - 1834

American Miners? Association formed - 1861

New York City maids organize to improve working conditions - 1734

In what could be considered the first workers? compensation agreement in America, pirate Henry Morgan pledges his underlings 600 pieces of eight or six slaves to compensate for a lost arm or leg. Also part of the pirate?s code, reports Roger Newell: shares of the booty were equal regardless of race or sex, and shipboard decisions were made collectively - 1695

Sojourner Truth addresses first Black Women?s Rights convention - 1851

Krueger?s Cream Ale, the first canned beer, goes on sale in Richmond, Va. Pabst was the second brewer in the same year to sell beer in cans, which came with opening instructions and the suggestion: "cool before serving" - 1935

Some 10,000 clothing workers strike in Rochester, N.Y., for the 8-hour day, a 10-percent wage increase, union recognition, and extra pay for overtime and holidays. Daily parades were held throughout the clothing district and there was at least one instance of mounted police charging the crowd of strikers and arresting 25 picketers. Six people were wounded over the course of the strike and one worker, 18-year-old Ida Breiman, was shot to death by a sweatshop contractor. The strike was called off in April after manufacturers agreed not to discriminate against workers for joining a union ? 1913

Indian field hands at San Juan Capistrano mission refused to work, engaging in what was probably the first farm worker strike in California - 1826

Some 750,000 steel workers walk out in 30 states, largest strike in U.S. history to that time - 1946

Chicago Crib Disaster?A fire breaks out during construction of a water tunnel for the city of Chicago, burning the wooden dormitory housing the tunnel workers. While 46 survive the fire by jumping into the frigid lake and climbing onto ice floes, approximately 60 men die, 29 burned beyond recognition and the others drowned - 1909

Twenty strikers at the American Agricultural Chemical Co. in Roosevelt, N.J., were shot, two fatally, by factory guards. They and other strikers had stopped an incoming train in search of scabs when the guards opened fire - 1915

U.S. Supreme Court rules in Moyer v. Peabody that a governor and officers of a state National Guard may imprison anyone?in the case at hand, striking miners in Colorado?without probable cause ?in a time of insurrection? and deny the person the right of appeal - 1909

Radical labor organizer and anarchist Lucy Parsons leads hunger march in Chicago; IWW songwriter Ralph Chaplin wrote "Solidarity Forever" for the march - 1915

The United States Civil Service Commission was established as the Pendleton Act went into effect - 1883

Wobbly Ralph Chaplin, in Chicago for a demonstration against hunger, completes the writing of the labor anthem ?Solidarity Forever? on this date in 1915. He?d begun writing it in 1914 during a miners? strike in Huntington, W. Va. The first verse:
When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong ? 1915

Clinton-era OSHA issues confined spaces standard to prevent more than 50 deaths and 5,000 serious injuries annually for workers who enter confined spaces - 1993

The original Tompkins Square Riot. As unemployed workers demonstrated in New York's Tompkins Square Park, a detachment of mounted police charged into the crowd, beating men, women and children with billy clubs. Declared Abram Duryee, the Commissioner of Police: "It was the most glorious sight I ever saw..." - 1874

Novelist Jack London is born. His classic definition of a scab?someone who would cross a picket line and take a striker's job: "After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles" - 1876

The IWW-organized ?Bread & Roses? textile strike of 32,000 women and children begins in Lawrence, Mass. It lasted 10 weeks and ended in victory. The first millworkers to walk out were Polish women, who, upon collecting their pay, exclaimed that they had been cheated and promptly abandoned their looms - 1912

President Roosevelt seizes the railroads to avert a nationwide strike. His decision to temporarily place the railroads under the ?supervision? of the War Department prompts the five railroad brotherhoods to agree to his offer to arbitrate the wage dispute - 1943

Knights of Labor founded. Constitution bars from membership ?parasites,? including stockbrokers and lawyers - 1869