Today in Labor History March 9, 1902: Actor Will Geer was born. Best known for his role as Grandpa Walton in the long-running series, “The Waltons,” Geer also appeared in the groundbreaking film, “Salt of the Earth,” which portrayed the struggle of Mexican American workers at the Empire Zinc Mine. Because of his activism on labor and political issues, he was blacklisted in Hollywood for many years. In 1934, he became a member of the Communist Party. He also met LGBTQ activist Harry Hay that year and they became lovers. Together, they supported the 1934 San Francisco General Strike and demonstrated against fascism and for workers’ rights. Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first major gay rights group in the United States, and the Radical Faeries, an anarcho-pagan queer spiritual-political movement.
Today in Labor History March 6, 1978: President Jimmy Carter invoked the Taft-Hartley law to quash the 1977-78 national contract strike by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UMWA had been on strike since December 1977, but rejected a tentative contract agreement in early March, 1978. Carter invoked the national emergency provision of Taft-Hartley and ordered strikers back to work. They ignored the order and the government did little to enforce it. By late March, they reached a settlement. Taft-Hartley was enacted in the wake of the strike wave of 1945-1946 and was designed to prevent solidarity strikes and General Strikes. The last General Strike in U.S. history (Lancaster, PA; Stamford, CT; Rochester, NY; and Oakland, CA) occurred just prior to Taft-Hartley.
Today in Labor History February 25, 1941: The outlawed Communist Party of the Netherlands initiated a General Strike in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in protest of the persecution of Dutch Jews. It started one day after a pogrom in Amsterdam. 300,000 people participated. It was the first public protest against the Nazis in Europe. The Nazis brutally suppressed the strike, ending it after three days.
Today in Labor History February 25, 1913: The IWW-led silk strike began in Paterson, New Jersey. 25,000 immigrant textile workers walked out when mill owners doubled the size of the looms without increasing staffing or wages. Workers also wanted an 8-hour workday and safer working conditions. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five workers were killed during the 208-day strike. The strike ended in failure on July 28.
Today in Labor History February 15, 1764: the city of St. Louis was established in Spanish Louisiana (now Missouri). In the 1800s, St. Louis would grow to become the second largest port in the U.S. and one of the major centers of labor organizing. In 1877, during the Great Train Strike, black and white workers united to take over the town in what some called the St. Louis Commune, after the Paris Commune, a few years earlier. The uprising in St. Louis was led by the socialist Workingmen’s Party, fighting for the 8-hour workday and an end to child labor. The Commune was quashed after soldiers killed 18 workers.
Today in Labor History February 11, 1919: The Seattle General Strike ended after five days as a result of a sell-out compromise by AFL bureaucrats. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AFL and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee.
Today in Labor History February 8, 1919: A General Strike occurred in Butte, Montana against a wage cut. Inspired by the Seattle General Strike, members of the IWW and the Metal and Mine Workers Union, Local 800, organized Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Workers Councils to lead the strike. Streetcar workers joined in, shutting down transportation for 5 days. Soldiers, returning from World War I, joined the pickets. Montana’s governor called in the National Guard. They bayoneted 9 workers. The workers ultimately called off the strike out of fear that there would be fatalities.
Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.
A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."
The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.
We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.
-Lucy Parsons
Today, In honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Lucy Parsons (c. 1851 – 1942) an American anarchist born to an enslaved African American who then married a black freedman in Texas. She may also have had indigenous and Mexican heritage. She married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate officer, in Waco, Texas. After the war, he was shot in the leg for helping African Americans register to vote.
They moved to Chicago together around 1873 and their politics were radicalized by the violent repression of the Great Upheaval of 1877. Both members of the International Workingmen's Association, and the Knights of Labor, they participated in the strikes that would result in up to 30 deaths by cops and national guards, in Chicago, alone. Nationwide, the wave of wildcat strikes associated with the Great Upheaval would result in over 100 worker deaths. Because of his revolutionary street speeches, Albert was fired from his job at the Chicago Times and blacklisted. Albert Parsons was executed in 1887 as one of the Haymarket Martyrs who had been fighting for the eight-hour workday.
Lucy Parsons later set up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank and other women. Lucy would go on to cofound the IWW, in 1905, with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, and others. The IWW was and is a revolutionary union seeking not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends. Lucy also edited radical newspapers and became a sought-after public speaker.
In 2021, Lakeside Investment Company bought the Redstone Labor Temple in the Mission. tiny gray-garcia from Poor Magazine, and Rick Gerharter, a movement photographer who's had an office in the Redstone for decades, talk about the significance of the building as the new landlord drops a gentrification bomb in the form of massive rent increases.
"UPS announced this week that they will be laying off 12,000 people, approximately 2.4 percent of their global workforce...
As you may recall, UPS drivers won a hard fought battle earlier this year for higher wages and less batshit working conditions so they don’t die of heat stroke.
Is the company truly suffering? Well, no. It still had an adjusted operating profit of $9.9 billion... they “returned $7.6 billion of cash to shareowners through dividends and share buybacks".
At the same time the company is laying off workers, the board of directors approved — for the 15th year in a row — an increase to the company’s quarterly dividend. This means that people are getting laid off, but shareholders are getting a raise."
Today in Labor History February 1, 1913: The IWW Patterson silk workers’ strike began. They were fighting for an 8-hr work day and better working conditions. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Two workers died in the struggle, one shot by a vigilante and the other by a private guard. The strike ended in failure on July 28.
Today in Labor History January 31, 1912: A General Strike began in Brisbane, Australia. It lasted until March 6. The strike was a response to the suspension of tramway workers for wearing union badges. Within a few days, the strike committee became the de facto government of Brisbane. No work could be done in the city without the committee’s permission. They created their own independent police force and provided ambulance service for the city. They issued strike coupons, redeemable at stores that were in solidarity with the strikers. People wore red ribbons to show their support and even put them on their dogs and dray horses. On the second day of the strike, 25,000 people marched, with another 50,000 supporters watching. On Black Friday, February 2, the cops attacked a women’s march with batons. Emma Miller, a trade unionist and suffragist who was in her 70s and weighed less than 80 pounds, pulled out a hat pin and stabbed the rump of the police commissioner’s horse. The horse reared and threw the commissioner. As a result of his injury, he limped for the rest of his life. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of the unionists, and their right to wear union badges while on the job. Errol O’Neill wrote a play about the strike, “Faces in the Street.”
Over a million people across the country flooded the streets in the first general strike against Milei, a taste of what’s to come if #Milei pushes ahead with his more radical policies. These policies include the #privatization of state companies, the destruction of workers’ #rights, and the end of all funding for infrastructure projects — a crucial source of jobs and development for the country…
Argentina's general strike against Javier Milei's austerity package gets underway today. The strike brings together all of the largest union federations in both the public and private sectors. These include the CGT, CTA, and the CTA-Autónomo.