This week in labor history: September 26-October 2

SEPTEMBER 26
1903 – The Old 97, a Southern Railway train officially known as the Fast Mail, derails near Danville, Va., killing engineer Joseph “Steve” Broady and 10 other railroad and postal workers. Many believe Broady had been ordered to speed to make up for lost time. The Wreck of the Old 97 inspired balladeers; a 1924 recording is sometimes cited as the first million-selling country music record.
1908 – The first production Ford Model T leaves the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Mich. It was the first car ever manufactured on an assembly line, with interchangeable parts.  The auto industry was to become a major U.S. employer, accounting for as many as one of every eight to 10 jobs in the country.

SEPTEMBER 27
1875 – Striking textile workers in Fall River, Mass., demand bread for their starving children.
1893 – The Int’l Typographical Union renews a strike against the Los Angeles Times; a boycott runs intermittently from 1896 to 1908. A local anti-Times committee in 1903 persuades William Randolph Hearst to start a rival paper, the Los Angeles Examiner. Although the ITU kept up the fight into the 1920s, the Times remained totally nonunion until 2009, when the GCIU — now the Graphic Communications Conference of the Teamsters — organized the pressroom.
1909 – Int’l Ladies’ Garment Workers Union begins strike against Triangle Shirtwaist Co. This would become the “Uprising of the 20,000,” resulting in 339 of 352 struck firms — but not Triangle — signing agreements with the union. The Triangle fire that killed 146 would occur less than two years later.
2002 – Twenty-nine west coast ports lockout 10,500 workers in response to what management says is a worker slowdown amid negotiations on a new contract.  The ports are closed for 10 days and reopen when President George W. Bush invokes the Taft-Hartley Act.

SEPTEMBER 28
1864 – The International Workingmen’s Association is founded in London. It was an international organization trying to unite a variety of different left-wing, socialist, communist and anarchist political groups and unions. It functioned for about 12 years, growing to a membership declared to be eight million, before being disbanded at its Philadelphia conference in 1876, a victim of infighting brought on by the wide variety of members’ philosophies.

SEPTEMBER 29
1962 – The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report finds that the average weekly take-home pay of a factory worker with three dependents is now $94.87.
2010 – Tens of thousands of protesters take to the streets of Europe, striking against government austerity measures. Workers in more than a dozen countries participate, including Spain, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia, and Lithuania, protesting job losses, retirement deferments, pension reductions, and cuts to schools, hospitals, and welfare services.

SEPTEMBER 30
1892 – A total of 29 strike leaders are charged with treason — plotting “to incite insurrection, rebellion & war against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” — for daring to strike the Carnegie Steel Co. in Homestead, Pa. Jurors refuse to convict them.
1899 – Seventy-year-old Mother Jones organizes the wives of striking miners in Arnot, Pa., to descend on the mine with brooms, mops and clanging pots and pans. They frighten away the mules and their scab drivers. The miners eventually won their strike.
1915 – Railroad shopmen in 28 cities strike the Illinois Central Railroad and the Harriman lines for an eight-hour day, improved conditions and union recognition, but railroad officials obtain sweeping injunctions against them and rely on police and armed guards to protect strikebreakers.
1919 – Black farmers meet in Elaine, Ark., to establish the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union to fight for better pay and higher cotton prices. They are shot at by a group of whites and return fire. News of the confrontation spread and a riot ensued, leaving at least 100, perhaps several hundred, Blacks dead and 67 indicted for inciting violence.
1962 – Cesar Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, co-founds the National Farm Workers Association, which later was to become the United Farm Workers of America.

OCTOBER 1
1910 – An ink storage room in the L.A. Times building is dynamited during a citywide fight over labor rights and organizing. The explosion was relatively minor, but it set off a fire in the unsafe, difficult-to-evacuate building, ultimately killing 21. A union member eventually confessed to the bombing, which he said was supposed to have occurred early in the morning when the building would have been largely unoccupied.
1931 – The George Washington Bridge officially opens, spanning the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York. Thirteen workers died during the four-year construction project for what at the time was the longest main span in the world.
1935 – Thousands of dairy farmers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa strike in demand of higher prices for their milk.
1940 – The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened as the first toll superhighway in the United States. It was built in most part by workers hired through the state’s Re-Employment offices.
1975 – Some 200 Pressmen begin what is to become a two-year strike at the Washington Post. Nine of the paper’s ten other unions engaged in sympathy strikes for more than four months but ultimately returned to their jobs as the paper continued publishing. The press operators picketed for 19 months but eventually decertified the union.
1994 – The National Hockey League team owners began a lockout of the players that lasted 103 days.

OCTOBER 2
1934 – American Federation of Labor officially endorses campaign for a six-hour day, five-day workweek.
1949 – Joining with 400,000 coal miners already on strike, 500,000 CIO steel workers close down the nation’s foundries, and steel and iron mills, demanding pensions and better wages and working conditions.
2007 – Starbucks Workers Union baristas at an outlet in East Grand Rapids, Mich., organized by the Wobblies, win their grievances after the National Labor Relations Board cites the company for labor law violations, including threats against union activists.
2010 – Union members, progressives and others rally in Washington D.C., under the Banner of One Nation Working Together, demanding “good jobs, equal justice, and quality education for all.” Crowd estimates range from tens of thousands to 200,000.

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