News

A total of 86 passengers on a train carrying members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus are killed, another 127 injured in a wreck near Hammond, Indiana. Five days later the dead are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Ill., in an area set aside as Showmen?s Rest, purchased only a few months earlier by the Showmen?s League of America - 1918

In England, a compassionate parliament declares that children can't be required to work more than 12 hours a day. And they must have an hour?s instruction in the Christian Religion every Sunday and not be required to sleep more than two in a bed - 1802

Birth of Albert Parsons, Haymarket martyr - 1848

Eight-hour work day adopted for federal employees - 1912

Union and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and others meet with President Roosevelt about a proposed July 1 March on Washington to protest discrimination in war industries. A week later, Roosevelt orders that the industries desegregate - 1941

Twenty-one young women and girls making cartridges at the Washington, D.C. arsenal during the Civil War are killed in an accidental explosion. Most of the victims were Irish immigrants. A monument was erected in the Congressional Cemetery, where 17 of the workers were buried - 1864

Eight local unions organize the Int?l Fur Workers Union of U.S. and Canada. The union later merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen - 1913

The Metal Trades Department of what is now the AFL-CIO is founded - 1908

Unions legalized in Canada ? 1872

Congress creates a Bureau of Labor, under the Interior Department. It later became independent as a Department of Labor without executive status in the Department of Commerce and Labor; in 1913 it became the Department of Labor we know today - 1884

Fifty thousand members of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen employed in meatpacking plants walk off their jobs; demands include equalization of wages and conditions throughout U.S. plants - 1904

Representatives from the AFL, Knights of Labor, populists, railroad brotherhoods and other trade unions hold a unity conference in St. Louis but fail to overcome their differences - 1894

The mayor of Monroe, Mich. organizes a vigilante mob of 1,400 armed with baseball bats and teargas to break the organizing picket line of 200 striking workers at Newton Steel. The line is broken; eight are injured and hospitalized. Sixteen workers' cars were vandalized, five cars overturned, and eight more were dumped into the River Raisin - 1937

Helen Marot is born in Philadelphia to a wealthy family. She went on to organize the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union in New York, and to organize and lead the city's 1909-1910 Shirtwaist Strike. In 1912, she was a member of a commission investigating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - 1865

A battle between the Militia and striking miners at Dunnville, Colo., ended with six union members dead and 15 taken prisoner. Seventy-nine of the strikers were deported to Kansas two days later - 1904

Militia sent to Cripple Creek, Colo., to suppress Western Federation of Miners strike - 1904

The U.S. Employment Service was created - 1933

Thirty-five members of the Teamsters, concerned about the infiltration of organized crime in the union and other issues, meet in Cleveland to form Teamsters for a Democratic Union - 1976

Massachusetts becomes the first state to establish a minimum wage - 1912

Int?l Ladies Garment Workers Union founded - 1900

Twenty-six journeymen printers in Philadelphia stage the trade?s first strike in America over wages: a cut in their $6 weekly pay - 1786.

The Ladies Federal Labor Union Number 2703, based in Illinois, was granted a charter from the American Federation of Labor. Women from a wide range of occupations were among the members, who ultimately were successful in coalescing women's groups interested in suffrage, temperance, health, housing and child labor reform to win state legislation in these areas - 1888

The Johnstown Flood. More than 2,200 die when a dam holding back a private resort lake burst upstream of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The Ford Motor Company signs a "Technical Assistance" contract to produce cars in the Soviet Union, and Ford workers were sent to the Soviet Union to train the labor force in the use of its parts. Many American workers who made the trip, including Walter Reuther, a tool and die maker who later was to become the UAW's president, returned home with a different view of the duties and privileges of the industrial laborer - 1929