This week in labor history: July 4-10

JULY 4
1924 – Five newspaper boys from the Baltimore Evening Sun die when the steamer they are on, the Three Rivers, catches fire near Baltimore. They are remembered every year at a West Baltimore cemetery, toasted by former staffers of the now-closed newspaper.
2004 – Building trades workers lay the cornerstone of the Freedom Tower on the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. The WTC had been leveled by a terrorist attack three years earlier. Nearly 3,000 died at the WTC and in other attacks in the eastern U.S. on the same day.

JULY 5
1894 – During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, buildings constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park were set ablaze, reducing seven to ashes.
1934 – West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, Battle of Rincon Hill, San Francisco. Some 5,000 strikers fought 1,000 police, scabs and national guardsmen. Two strikers were killed, 109 people injured. The incident, forever known as “Bloody Thursday,” led to a general strike.
1935 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act.
1973 – Three fire fighters, a state policeman and an employee of Doxol Gas in Kingman, Arizona, are killed in a propane gas explosion. Eight more fire fighters were to die of burns suffered in the event.
1994 – Fourteen fire fighters are killed battling the South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain in Glenwood Springs, Colo.

JULY 6
1889 – Two strikers and a bystander are killed, 30 seriously wounded by police in Duluth, Minn. The workers, mostly immigrants building the city’s streets and sewers, struck after contractors reneged on a promise to pay $1.75 a day.
1892 – Two barges, loaded with Pinkerton thugs hired by the Carnegie Steel Co., land on the south bank of the Monongahela River in Homestead, Pa., seeking to occupy Carnegie Steel Works and put down a strike by members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers.
1894 – Rail union leader Eugene V. Debs is arrested during the Pullman strike, described by the New York Times as “a struggle between the greatest and most important Labor organization and the entire railroad capital” that involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states at its peak.
1926 – Transit workers in New York begin what is to be an unsuccessful three-week strike against the then-privately owned IRT subway. Most transit workers labored seven days a week, up to 11.5 hours a day.
1988 – Explosions and fires destroy the Piper Alpha drilling platform in the North Sea, killing 167 oil workers – the worst loss of life ever in an offshore oil disaster. The operator, Occidental, was found guilty of having inadequate maintenance and safety procedures, but no criminal charges are ever brought.

JULY 7
1882 – Striking New York longshoremen meet to discuss ways to keep new immigrants from scabbing. They were successful, at least for a time. On July 14, 500 newly arrived Jews marched straight from their ship to the union hall. On July 15, 250 Italian immigrants stopped scabbing on the railroad and joined the union.
1903 – Mary Harris “Mother” Jones begins “The March of the Mill Children,” when, accompanied part of the way by children, she walked from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home on Long Island to protest the plight of child laborers. One of her demands: reduce the children’s work week to 55 hours.
1910 – Cloak makers begin what is to be a two-month strike against New York City sweatshops.
1931 – Workers begin construction on Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam) on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. Wages and conditions were horrible – 16 workers and work camp residents died of the heat over a single 30-day period – and two strikes over the four years of construction led to only nominal improvements in pay and conditions.
1998 – Some 500,000 people participate when a two-day general strike is called in Puerto Rico by more than 60 trade unions and other organizations, protesting privatization of the island’s telephone company.

JULY 8
1842 – First anthracite coal strike in U.S.
1862 – Labor organizer Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor born on Staten Island, N.Y. Among her activities were investigating child labor in glass factories and mines and working undercover in meat packing plants, to verify for federal investigators the nightmarish working conditions that author Upton Sinclair had revealed in The Jungle.
1966 – Some 35,000 members of the Machinists union begin what is to become a 43-day strike that shuts down five major U.S. airlines, about three-fifths of domestic air traffic. The airlines were thriving, and wages were a key issue in the fight.

JULY 9
1918 – The worst rail accident in U.S. history occurs when two trains pulled by 80-ton locomotives collide head-on at Dutchman’s curve in west Nashville, Tenn. 101 people died, another 171 were injured.
1923 – New England Telephone “girls” strike for seven-hour workday, $27 weekly pay after four years’ service.
1953 – Fourteen volunteer fire fighters and one Forest Service employee die fighting the Rattlesnake wildfire in California’s Mendocino National Forest. The blaze was set by an arsonist.
1968 – United Packinghouse, Food & Allied Workers merge with Amalgamated Meat Cutters & Butcher Workmen.
2001 – Five thousand demonstrators rally at the state capitol in Columbia, S.C., in support of the “Charleston Five,” Labor activists charged with felony rioting during a police attack on a 2000 longshoremen’s picket of a non-union crew unloading a ship.

JULY 10
1894 – Some 14,000 federal and state troops finally succeed in putting down the strike against the Pullman Palace Car Co., which had been peaceful until July 5, when federal troops intervened in Chicago, against the repeated protests of the governor and Chicago’s mayor. A total of 34 American Railway Union members were killed by troops over the course of the strike.
1902 – A powerful explosion rips through the Rolling Mill coal mine in Johnstown, Pa., killing 112 miners, 83 of whom were immigrants from Poland and Slovakia.

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