On this date in 1935, the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) was created. Ever since the failure of the Knights of Labor to organize all workers behind the 8 hour day in 1886, the American labor movement was primarily dominated by the American Federation of Labor. Led by the cigarmaker […]
Tag: This Day in Labor History
On November 5, 1916, a boat loaded with members of the Industrial Workers of the World attempted to dock in Everett, Washington. Local leaders, determined to stop the I.W.W. from entering their nice l
On this date in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, the leader of the movement known as Bacon’s Rebellion, died of dysentery. This effectively ended the rebellion, an event that helped entrench slavery as th
On September 17, 1989, 98 miners and one minister conducted a peaceful takeover of the Pittston Moss 3 Coal Preparation Plant. The Pittston strike was one of the most brutal and hard-fought of the last three decades. The sit-in was part of a 10 month strike that pitted the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) […]
We sometimes don’t immediately think of the history of slavery as labor history, but of course, it’s absolutely fundamental to any understanding of labor history in the American South (and
On July 14, 1877, the Great Railroad Strike began in Martinsburg, West Virginia. After the Civil War, industrialists engaged in an enormous rail building program. Much of this was funded through shaky
The summer of 1917 was tense in the United States. The entrance of the nation into World War I that spring seemed to place the entire nation on edge. Progressivism, a diverse movement with widely mixed motivations among its members, showed its dark side like never before, using the increasingly activist federal government to suppress […]
This occasional series will highlight moments in American labor and working-class history writ large, including the history of American radicalism and the history of slavery, which too often takes a b