This week in labor history: January 3-9

JANUARY 3
1852 – The ship Thetis arrives in Hawaii with 175 Chinese field workers bound to serve for five years at $3 per month.
1917 – Wobbly Tom Mooney tried in San Francisco for Preparedness Day bombing.
1931 – In a familiar scene during the Great Depression, some 500 farmers, Black and White, their crops ruined by a long drought, march into downtown England, Ark., to demand food for their starving families, warning they would take it by force if necessary. Town fathers frantically contacted the Red Cross; each family went home with two weeks’ rations.
1949 – The Supreme Court rules against the closed shop, a Labor-management agreement that only union members can be hired and must remain members to continue on the job.
1981 – AFL-CIO American Institute for Free Labor Development employees Mike Hammer and Mark Pearlman are assassinated in El Salvador along with a Peasant Workers’ Union leader with whom they were working on a land reform program.

JANUARY 4
1961 – What many believe to be the longest strike in modern history, by Danish barbers’ assistants, ends after 33 years.
1965 – Eight thousand New York City social workers strike, demand better conditions for welfare recipients.

JANUARY 5
1869 – The nation’s first Labor convention of Black workers was held in Washington, D.C., with 214 delegates forming the Colored National Labor Union.
1914 – Ford Motor Company raises wages from $2.40 for a nine-hour day to $5 for an eight-hour day in effort to keep the unions out.
1933 – Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins. Ten of the 11 deaths on the job came when safety netting beneath the site — the first-ever use of such equipment — failed under the stress of a scaffold that had fallen. Nineteen other workers were saved by the net over the course of construction. They became members of the (informal) Halfway to Hell Club.

JANUARY 6
1882 – The Toronto Trades and Labour Council endorses the principle of equal pay for equal work between men and women.
1916 – Eight thousand workers strike at Youngstown Sheet & Tube. The following day the strikers’ wives and other family members join in the protest. Company guards use tear gas bombs and fire into the crowd; three strikers are killed, 25 wounded.

JANUARY 7
1892 – An explosion at Osage Coal and Mining Company’s Mine Number 11 near Krebs, Okla., kills 100, injures 150 when an untrained worker accidentally sets off a stash of explosives.
1939 – Wobbly Tom Mooney, accused of a murder by bombing in San Francisco, pardoned and freed after 22 years in San Quentin.

2009 – The presidents of 12 of the nation’s largest unions meet and call for reuniting the American Labor Movement, which split into two factions in 2005 when seven unions left the AFL-CIO and formed a rival federation. The meeting followed signals from President-elect Barack Obama that he would prefer dealing with a united movement, rather than a fractured one that often had two competing voices. Unions from both sides of the split participated in the meeting. The reunification effort failed, but by mid-2013 four of the unions had rejoined the AFL-CIO.

JANUARY 8
1811 – The largest slave revolt in U.S. history begins on Louisiana sugar plantations. Slaves armed with hand tools marched toward New Orleans, setting plantations and crops on fire, building their numbers to an estimated 300-500 as they went. The uprising lasted for two days before being brutally suppressed by the military.
1864 – Birthdate of Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, first AFL woman organizer. In 1880 she organized the Woman’s Bookbinder Union and in 1903 was a founder of the National Women’s Trade Union League.
1912 – American Federation of Labor charters a Mining Department.
1920 – The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee ends the “Great Steel Strike.” Some 350,000 to 400,000 steelworkers had been striking for more than three months, demanding union recognition. The strike failed.

JANUARY 9
1918 – A Mediation Commission appointed by President Woodrow Wilson finds that “industry’s failure to deal with unions” is the prime reason for Labor strife in war industries.
1922 – Eighty thousand Chicago construction workers strike.
1939 – Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union leads Missouri Highway sit-down of 1,700 families. They had been evicted from their homes so landowners wouldn’t have to share government crop subsidy payments with them.
1954 – Former Hawaii Territorial Gov. Ingram Steinbeck opposes statehood for Hawaii, saying left-wing unions have an “economic stranglehold” on the islands. Hawaii was to be granted statehood five years later.
2003 – The administration of George W. Bush declares federal airport security screeners will not be allowed to unionize so as not to “complicate” the war on terrorism. The decision was challenged and eventually overturned after Bush left office.

(Compiled by David Prosten, founder of Union Communication Services)