Minnesota Another General Strike Now Likely

This month in labour history

1-01-1966 From 8:02 a.m., a public transport strike spread across New York. After 12 days, the strikers will get a 15% wage increase and other benefits. [more]

2-01-1920 Thousands of US labor activists are arrested in the 'Palmer Raids' during the first Red Scare. [more]

3-01-1917 Trial of labour organizer Tom Mooney begins in San Francisco for Preparedness Day bombing. He was framed & serves 22 years. [more]

4-01-1965 Start of victorious 28-day strike by 8000 New York City social workers over better conditions for welfare recipients. [more]

4-01-1966 Transport Workers Union of America leader Mike Quill arrested for violating an anti-strike court injunction in 4-day old 35000-member strike. [more]

6-01-1916 8,000 workers strike the Youngstown steel mills. The next day, they are joined by their families. The guards fired bullets and tear gas canisters at the crowd. 3 strikers die and 25 are injured. [more]

7-01-1920 Five elected members of the New York state assembly belonging to the Socialist Party are refused their seats. [more]

7-01-1939 Tom Mooney of the IWW, after 22 years in prison, is found not guilty of murder. [more]

7-01-1892 100 dead and 150 injured in the explosion at No. 11 mine near Krebs, Oklahoma, when an untrained new hire handles dynamite. [more]

8-01-1811 A slave revolt takes place on the Louisiana sugar plantations. 300 to 500 slaves march on New Orleans, burning the fields in the process. After 2 days, the military crushed the protest. [more]

9-01-1939 1,700 tenant farm families are blocking the Missouri highway after being evicted from their homes so landowners do not have to share government aid with them. [more]

10-01-1860 Collapse of a Pemberton factory in Lawrence, Massachussetts. 900 workers, mostly Irish, trapped in the rubble. More than 100 dead, more injured. [more]

11-01-1912 The 'Bread and Roses' strike began in Lynn Massachusetts. The strike was begun and led by mainly immigrant women. [more]

11-01-1937 Police beat and arrest UAW members during the great sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan [more]

13-01-1874 Mounted police from the NYPD violently attack a demonstration of unemployed workers in Tompkins Square Park. [more]

14-01-2003 General Electric decides to transfer $ 400 / year from the employer's share of health insurance contributions to each employee. 14,000 of them go on strike for 2 days in protest. [more]

15-01-1929 Birth of civil rights activist and labor movement supporter Martin Luther King, Jr [more]

17-01-1915 The song 'Solidarity Forever' by Ralph Chaplin is first sung, on a hunger march through Chicago organised by Lucy Parsons. [more]

19-01-1915 20 strikers in Roosevelt, New Jersey, are killed when security guards open fire at an agricultural chemicals factory. They had stopped a train to look for scabs. [more]

19-01-1920 In Hawaii 3,000 members of the Philippine Federation of Labour strike at Ohao plantations. Joined later by members of the Japanese Federation of Labour, their number rose to 8,300. [more]

19-01-1973 In Yuba City, California, a labour contractor, Juan V. Corona, was found guilty of the murder of 25 migrant farm workers between 1970 and 1971. [more]

19-01-2000 Charleston, SC. 600 police officers disperse a demonstration of dockers whose collective agreement is called into question. 5 of them will be arrested on pretexts; the start of the campaign for the liberation of the Charleston 5. [more]

22-01-1969 Black workers at the Eldon Chrysler plant in Detroit march on the autoworkers' union with a list of grievances. The workers had formed ELRUM - the Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement - and they called a strike the next day. [more]

23-01-1913 Joe Hill's song 'Mr. Block', extolling the virtues of industrial unionism, is first published in the IWW's newpaper. [more]

27-01-1850 Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, is born. [more]

29-01-1834 Federal troops are used to break a strike for the first time in America, on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal [more]

31-01-1938 12,000 pecan shellers, most of them Hispanic women, strike for higher wages and civil rights in San Antonio, Texas. [more]

31-01-1919 The Collar Laundry Union was formed in New York, the first women's union in US history, led by Kate Mullany. Over the next few years the women increase their wages from $2 to $14 a week. [more]