On January 25, 1915, the Supreme Court decided the case of Coppage v. Kansas, allowing employers to force workers to sign yellow-dog contracts, making not joining a union a condition of employment. Th
On January 23, 1749, a supposed slave conspiracy was reported in Charleston, South Carolina. This probably nonexistent conspiracy is a good window into the complexities of the slave labor system and t
On December 30, 1900, advisors from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the college run by Booker T. Washington, arrived in Togo to help the German colonialists institute a southern-style cotton regime in
On December 21, 1907, the Chilean military massacred perhaps 2,000 striking nitrate miners, though possibly significantly more than that. The Santa Maria Massacre would go down as one of the most viol
On November 17, 1946, Hawaiian sugar workers organizing with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union ended their 79 day strike, winning a partial victory after costing planters at least $15 mi
On November 11, 1918, French authorities in Indochina created the first labor code for its rubber plantations there, tying workers to the land in a way that would never have been acceptable in France
On September 30, 1899, Mary “Mother” Jones organized the wives and daughters of striking coal miners in Arnot, Pennsylvania to descend on the mine and intimidate the scabs working there. T
On September 27, 2005, several unions, led by the Service Employees International Union, left the AFL-CIO to start an alternative federation entitled Change to Win. The idea was to create a federation