Labor history Seot 22, 350,000 workers demand union recognition, 400,000 steelworkers strike, more!

[Omaha Steve]

September 22

Emancipation Proclamation signed - 1862

Eighteen-year-old Hannah (Annie) Shapiro leads a spontaneous walkout of 17 women at a Hart Schaffner & Marx garment factory in Chicago. It grows into a months-long mass strike involving 40,000 garment workers across the city, protesting 10-hour days, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages - 1910

September 22, 1912 - The motion picture operators at the Elite Theater, Lyndale and Lake Streets in Minneapolis, went on strike for better wages.


Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919

September 22, 1919 - Nearly 400,000 steelworkers in 50 cities went on strike to protest intolerable working conditions. The Great Steel Strike of 1919 was one of the seminal events in American history. If the steel industry could be unionized, William Z. Foster and other strike leaders reasoned, it would lead to unionization on a mass scale. Corporations, drawing on the power of federal troops, crushed the strike after 3 ½ months. Twenty-two people were killed, including Fanny Sellins, an organizer for the United Mine Workers.

Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va. after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922

U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent - 1931

United Textile Workers strike committee orders strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South - 1934

Some 350,000 workers demand union recognition for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio - 1935

The AFL expels the International Longshoremen's Association for racketeering; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later - 1953

OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas plant earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 - 2005


Eleven Domino's employees in Pensacola, Fla. form the nation's first union of pizza delivery drivers - 2006

San Francisco hotel workers end a two-year contract fight, ratify a new five-year pact with their employers - 2006

Labor history found here: http://www.unionist.com/big-labor/today-in-labor-history & here: http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?history_9_09_22_2011

[Generic Other]

1. An auspicious day for Tacoma teachers to win their strike

Solidarity!