APRIL 3
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
1989 – Some 1,700 United Mine Workers members in Virginia and West Virginia beat back concessions demanded by Pittston Coal Co.
2016 – The Democratic governors of New York and California sign legislation enacting phased-in $15-per-hour minimum wages for workers in their states. Since 2009, the federal minimum had been stagnating at $7.25.
APRIL 5
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
1905 – A sympathy strike by Chicago Teamsters in support of clothing workers leads to daily clashes between strikebreakers and armed police against hundreds and sometimes thousands of striking workers and their supporters. By the time the fight ended after 103 days, 21 people had been killed and 416 injured.
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.
APRIL 8
1911 – A total of 128 convict miners, leased to a coal company under the state’s shameful convict lease system, are killed in an explosion at the Banner coal mine outside Birmingham, Ala. The miners were mostly African-Americans jailed for minor offenses.
1935 – The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is approved by Congress. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s when almost 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. It created low-paying federal jobs providing immediate relief, putting 8.5 million jobless to work on projects ranging from construction of bridges, highways and public buildings to arts programs like the Federal Writers’ Project.
APRIL 9
1930 – IWW organizes the 1,700-member crew of the Leviathan, then the world’s largest vessel.
(Compiled by David Prosten, founder of Union Communication Services)
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