This week in labor history: November 7-13

NOVEMBER 7
1917 – Some 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts participate in a general strike on all military work in the area to protest the use of open-shop (a worksite in which union membership is not required as a condition of employment while non-union members still get the benefits of the union contract) builders. The strike held on for a week in the face of threats from the U.S. War Department.
1959 – President Eisenhower’s use of the Taft-Hartley Act is upheld by the Supreme Court, breaking a 116-day steel strike.
1990 – Lemuel Ricketts Boulware dies in Delray Beach, Fla., at age 95. As a GE vice president in the 1950s, he created the policy known as Boulwarism, in which management decides what is “fair” and refuses to budge on anything during contract negotiations. IUE President Paul Jennings described the policy as “telling the workers what they are entitled to and then trying to shove it down their throats.”

NOVEMBER 8
1892 – 20,000 workers, Black and White, stage a general strike in New Orleans, demanding union recognition and hour and wage gains.
1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces plans for the Civil Works Administration to create four million additional jobs for the Depression-era unemployed. The workers ultimately laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or made substantial improvements to 255,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 playgrounds, and nearly 1,000 airports (not to mention 250,000 outhouses still badly needed in rural America).
1956 – In one of the U.S. auto industry’s more embarrassing missteps over the last half-century, the Ford Motor Co. decides to name its new model the Edsel, after Henry Ford’s only son.  Ford executives rejected 18,000 other potential names.

NOVEMBER 9
1872 – Twenty people, including at least nine firefighters, are killed in Boston’s worst fire. It consumed 65 downtown acres and 776 buildings over 12 hours.
1935 – The creation of the Committee for Industrial Organizations announced by eight unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (in 1938 they formally break with the AFL and become the Congress of Industrial Organizations). The eight want more focus on organizing mass production industry workers.
1952 – Philip Murray, first president of the United Steelworkers Organizing Committee, first president of the United Steelworkers of America, and president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations for 12 years following the retirement of John L. Lewis, dies at age 66.

NOVEMBER 10
1933 – Sit-down strike begins at Austin, Minn., Hormel plant with the help of a Wobbly organizer, leading to the creation of the Independent Union of All Workers. Labor historians believe this may have been the first sit-down strike of the 1930s. Workers held the plant for three days, demanding a wage increase. Some 400 men crashed through the plant entrance and chased out non-union workers. One group rushed through the doors of a conference room where Jay Hormel and five company executives were meeting and declared: “We’re taking possession. So move out.” Within four days the company agreed to binding arbitration.
1975 – The ship Edmund Fitzgerald — the biggest carrier on the Great Lakes — and a crew of 29 are lost in a storm on Lake Superior while carrying ore from Superior, Wisc., to Detroit. The cause of the sinking was never established.
1988 – Tile, Marble, Terrazzo Finishers, Shop Workers & Granite Cutters Int’l Union merges into United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners.

NOVEMBER 11
1887 – Haymarket martyrs are hanged, and convicted in the bombing deaths of eight police during a Chicago Labor rally.
1919 – A confrontation between American Legionnaires and Wobblies during an Armistice Day Parade in Centralia, Wash., results in six deaths. One Wobbly reportedly was beaten, his teeth bashed in with a rifle butt, castrated and hanged: local officials listed his death as a suicide.
1940 – A total of 57 crewmen on three freighters die over a three-day period when their ships sink during a huge storm over Lake Michigan.

NOVEMBER 12
1954 – Ellis Island in New York closes after serving as the gateway for 12 million immigrants from 1892 to 1924. From 1924 to 1954 it was mostly used as a detention and deportation center for undocumented immigrants.
1966 – “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap announces he is restructuring the Sunbeam Corp. and lays off 6,000 workers—half the workforce. Sunbeam later nearly collapsed after a series of scandals under Dunlap’s leadership that cost investors billions of dollars.

NOVEMBER 13
1909 – A total of 259 miners die in the underground Cherry Mine fire. As a result of the disaster, Illinois established stricter safety regulations and in 1911, the basis for the state’s Workers Compensation Act was passed.
1914 – A Western Federation of Miners strike is crushed by the militia in Butte, Mont.
1927 – The Holland Tunnel opens, running under the Hudson River for 1.6 miles and connecting the island of Manhattan in New York City with Jersey City, N.J. Thirteen workers died over its seven-year-long construction.
1945 – GM workers’ post-war strike for higher wages closes 96 plants.
1972 – Striking typesetters at the Green Bay, Wisc., Press Gazette start a competing newspaper, The Green Bay Daily News. With financial support from a local businessman who hated the Press Gazette, the union ran the paper for four years before their angel died and it was sold to another publisher. The Gannett chain ultimately bought the paper, only to fold it in 2005.
1974 – Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union activist Karen Silkwood is killed in a suspicious car crash on her way to deliver documents to a newspaper reporter during a safety investigation of her Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma.

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