This Week In Labor History January 29-February 4

JANUARY 29
1834 – 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.
1889 – Six thousand railway workers strike for a union and the end of the 18-hour day.
1936 – Sit-down strike helps establish United Rubber Workers as a national union, Akron, Ohio.
1957 – American Train Dispatchers Department granted a charter by the AFL-CIO.
1981 – Dolly Parton hits No. 1 on the record charts with “9-to-5,” her anthem to the daily grind.
2009 – The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is signed into law by President Obama. The Fair Pay Act stipulates that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action.

JANUARY 30
1882 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt is born in Hyde Park, N.Y. He was elected president of the United States four times starting in 1932. His legislative achievements included the creation of the National Labor Relations Act, which allows workers to organize unions, bargain collectively, and strike.

JANUARY 31
1938 – 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.
1940 – Ida M. Fuller is the first retiree to receive an old-age monthly benefit check under the new Social Security law. She paid in $24.75 between 1937 and 1939 on an income of $2,484; her first check was for $22.54.
1978 – After scoring successes with representation elections conducted under the protective oversight of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the United Farm Workers of America officially ends its historic table grape, lettuce and wine boycotts.
2002 – Union and student pressure forces Harvard University to adopt new Labor policies raising wages for lowest-paid workers.
2005 – Five months after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans school board fires every teacher in the district in what the United Teachers of New Orleans sees as an effort to break the union and privatize the school system.

FEBRUARY 1
1864 – Led by 23-year-old Kate Mullany, the Collar Laundry Union forms in Troy, N.Y., and raises earnings for female laundry workers from $2 to $14 a week.
1867 – Bricklayers begin working eight-hour days.
1913 – Some 25,000 Paterson, N.J., silk workers strike for eight-hour work day and improved working conditions. Eighteen hundred were arrested over the course of the six-month walkout, led by the Wobblies.
1968 – The federal minimum wage increases to $1.60 per hour.

FEBRUARY 2
1917 – Three hundred newsboys organize to protest a cut in pay by the Minneapolis Tribune.
1977 – Legal secretary Iris Rivera fired for refusing to make coffee, secretaries across Chicago protest.
1987 – The 170-day lockout (although management called it a strike) of 22,000 steelworkers by USX Corp. ends with a pay cut, but greater job security.

FEBRUARY 3
1908 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules the United Hatters Union violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by organizing a nationwide boycott of Danbury Hatters of Connecticut.
1941 – U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act banning child labor and establishing the 40-hour work week.
1971 – An explosion at a Thiokol chemical plant near Woodbine, Georgia kills 29 workers, seriously injures 50. An investigation found that contributing factors to the explosion were mislabeled chemicals, poor storage procedures and insufficient fire protection.

FEBRUARY 4
1825 – The Ohio legislature authorizes construction of the 249-mile Miami and Erie Canal, to connect Toledo to Cincinnati. Local historians say “Irish immigrants, convicts and local farmers used picks, shovels and wheelbarrows” at 30 cents per day to construct the waterway.
1869 – “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World  (IWW), born on this day in Salt Lake City, Utah.
1913 – Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a White man launched the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, is born in Tuskegee, Ala.
1932 – Unemployment demonstrations take place in major U.S. cities.
1937 – Thirty-seven thousand maritime workers on the West Coast strike for wage increases.
2009 – President Barack Obama imposes $500,000 caps on senior executive pay for the most distressed financial institutions receiving federal bailout money, saying Americans are upset with “executives being rewarded for failure.”

(Compiled by David Prosten, founder Union Communication Services)