This week in labor history: June 19-25

JUNE 19
1912 – Eight-hour work day adopted for federal employees.
1917 – AFL President Sam Gompers and Secretary of War Newton Baker sign an agreement establishing a three-member board of adjustment to control wages, hours and working conditions for construction workers employed on government projects.
1937 – The Women’s Day Massacre in Youngstown, Ohio, when police used tear gas on women and children, including at least one infant in his mother’s arms, during a strike at Republic Steel.

JUNE 20
1893 – The American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs, is founded in Chicago. In the Pullman strike a year later, the union was defeated by federal injunctions and troops, and Debs was imprisoned for violating the injunctions.
1943 – Striking African-American auto workers are attacked by KKK, National Workers League, and armed White workers at Belle Isle amusement park in Detroit. Two days of riots follow, 34 people are killed, more than 1,300 were arrested.
1947 – The Taft-Hartley Labor Management Relations Act, curbing strikes, is vetoed by President Harry S. Truman. The veto was overridden three days later by a Republican-controlled Congress.

JUNE 21
1877 – Ten miners accused of being militant “Molly Maguires” are hanged in Pennsylvania. A private corporation initiated the investigation of the 10 through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested them, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them.
1948 – The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the right of unions to publish statements urging members to vote for a specific congressional candidate, ruling that such advocacy is not a violation of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.
1997 – An estimated 100,000 unionists and other supporters march in solidarity with striking Detroit News and Detroit Free Press newspaper workers.

JUNE 22
1918 – A total of 86 passengers on a train carrying members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus are killed, another 127 injured in a wreck near Hammond, Ind.
1922 – Violence erupted during a coal mine strike at Herrin, Ill. A total of 36 were killed, 21 of them non-union miners.

JUNE 23
1914 – Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, goes to Butte, Mont. in an attempt to mediate a conflict between factions of the miner’s local there. It didn’t go well. Gunfight in the union hall killed one man; Moyer and other union officers left the building, which was then leveled in a dynamite blast.
1947 – Congress overrides President Harry Truman’s veto of the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act. The law weakened unions and let states exempt themselves from union requirements. Twenty states immediately enacted open shop laws and more followed.
1978 – OSHA issues standard on cotton dust to protect 600,000 workers from byssinosis, also known as “brown lung.”
1999 – A majority of the 5,000 textile workers at six Fieldcrest Cannon textile plants in Kannapolis, N.C., vote for union representation after an historic 25-year fight.

JUNE 24
1880 – Birth of Agnes Nestor, president of the Int’l Glove Workers Union and longtime leader of the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League. She began work in a glove factory at age 14.
1971 – Seventeen workers are killed as methane explodes in a water tunnel under construction in Sylmar, Calif.

JUNE 25
1893 – More than 8,000 people attend the dedication ceremony for The Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago, honoring those framed and executed for the bombing at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886.
1938 – Fair Labor Standards Act passes Congress, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week.
1941 – At the urging of Black labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, Franklin Roosevelt issues an executive order barring discrimination in defense industries.
1943 – Congress passes the Smith-Connally War Labor Disputes Act over President Franklin Roosevelt’s veto.
1994 – Decatur, Ill., police peppergas workers at A.E. Staley plant gate one year into the company’s two-and-a-half-year lockout of Paperworkers Local 7837.

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