This Week in Labor History April 1-7

APRIL 1
1898 – United Mine Workers of America win eight-hour day.
1929 – Strike of cotton mill workers begins in Gastonia, N.C. During the strike, police raided the strikers’ tent colony; the chief of police was killed. The strike leaders were framed for murder and convicted, but later freed.
1946 – Some 400,000 members of the United Mine Workers strike for higher wages and employer contributions to the union’s health and welfare fund. President Truman seizes the mines.
1972 – Major league baseball players begin what is to become a 13-day strike, ending when owners agree to increase pension fund payments and to add salary arbitration to the collective bargaining agreement.
1992 – Players begin the first strike in the 75-year history of the National Hockey League. They win major improvements in the free agency system and other areas of conflict, and end the walkout after 10 days.

APRIL 2
1909 – The Union Label Trades Department is chartered by the American Federation of Labor.
1923 – The Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a 1918 Washington, D.C., law establishing a minimum wage for women.
1995 – Major league baseball players end a 232-day strike, which began the prior Aug. 12 and led to the cancellation of the 1994 post-season and the World Series.

APRIL 3
1954 – UAW Local 833 strikes the Kohler bathroom fixtures company in Kohler, Wisc. The strike ends six years later after Kohler is found guilty of refusing to bargain, agrees to reinstate 1,400 strikers and pay them $4.5 million in back pay and pension credits.
1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. returns to Memphis to stand with striking AFSCME sanitation workers. This evening, he delivers his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in a church packed with union members and others. He is assassinated the following day.

APRIL 4
1907 – The first issue of The Labor Review, a “weekly magazine for organized workers,” was published in Minneapolis.
1914 – Unemployed riot in New York City’s Union Square.
1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, where he had been supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.
1989 – Some 1,700 United Mine Workers members in Virginia and West Virginia beat back concessions demanded by Pittston Coal Co.

APRIL 5
2001 – Some 14,000 teachers strike Hawaii schools, colleges.
2010 – A huge underground explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, W. Va., kills 29 miners. It was the worst U.S. mine disaster in 40 years. The Massey Energy Co. mine had been cited for two safety infractions the day before the blast; 57 the month before, and 1,342 in the previous five years. Six years later Massey’s CEO at the time of the disaster, Don Blankenship, was sentenced to one year in jail.

APRIL 6
1712 – The first slave revolt in the U.S. occurs at a slave market in New York City’s Wall Street area. Twenty-one Blacks were executed for killing nine Whites. The city responded by strengthening its slave codes.
1882 – Birth of Rose Schneiderman, prominent member of the New York Women’s Trade Union League.
2006 – What was to become a two-month strike by minor league umpires begins, largely over money: $5,500 to $15,000 for a season running 142 games. The strike ended with a slight improvement in pay.

APRIL 7
1947 – National Labor Relations Board attorney tells ILWU members to “lie down like good dogs,” Juneau, Alaska.
1947 – Some 300,000 members of the National Federation of Telephone Workers, soon to become CWA, strike AT&T and the Bell System. Within five weeks all but two of the 39 federation unions had won new contracts.
2000 – Fifteen thousand union janitors strike, Los Angeles.

(Compiled by David Prosten, founder Union Communication Services)