50 Fun Facts About Labor History

Which president fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 after they ignored his back-to-work order?

Ronald Reagan had once led a union himself, serving twice as president of the Screen Actors Guild. The fired controllers were barred from federal jobs until the ban was lifted in 1993.

Which icon of women war workers began as a 1942 song before appearing on a Saturday Evening Post cover?

Rosie the Riveter was a hit song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb before Norman Rockwell painted her. The flexing-arm Westinghouse poster now tied to her name was shown for only two weeks in 1943.

Which carmaker astonished industry in 1914 by more than doubling most workers' pay to five dollars a day?

Henry Ford wanted to stop workers quitting: turnover was so heavy that departments hired 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. Afterwards the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to his plants.

Which witness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire became the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet?

Frances Perkins went on to spend twelve years as secretary of labor, longer than anyone else in the job. Witnessing the fire was a pivotal event in her life.

Which farm labor leader led the Delano grape strike of 1965 to 1970 and co-founded the United Farm Workers?

Cesar Chavez took his methods from Gandhi, pressing growers with picketing, boycotts and fasts rather than force. The strike ended with a union contract covering more than 10,000 farm workers.

Which former Teamsters president vanished in 1975 after heading to a meeting at a restaurant in suburban Detroit?

Jimmy Hoffa is thought to have been murdered in a Mafia hit, and was declared legally dead in 1982. He had run the union from 1957 to 1971.

Which striking Memphis city employees was Martin Luther King Jr. supporting when he was assassinated in April 1968?

Sanitation workers walked out after two of their crewmates were crushed to death in a garbage compactor while sheltering from the rain.

Which Irish-born organizer, branded the most dangerous woman in America, led a 1903 march of child mill workers?

Mother Jones got the label from a prosecutor at her 1902 trial for defying a ban on meetings of striking miners. Her children's march set out from Philadelphia for the president's New York home.

Which English textile workers smashed machinery in the 1810s and gave their name to opponents of new technology?

Luddites took their name from Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver whose name signed their threatening letters to mill owners. Parliament answered by making machine breaking a capital crime.

Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity union, won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize and later became president?

Lech Wałęsa did not collect the Nobel in person: his wife accepted it, because he feared the authorities would not let him back into Poland.

Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel about Chicago's meatpacking workers led to new federal food-safety laws?

The Jungle was written to win readers to socialism by showing how packing-house workers lived, but the public outcry fixed on the filthy meat instead. Sinclair spent seven weeks in the stockyards gathering material.

Which union leader was jailed over the 1894 Pullman strike and later ran for president from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs won 3.4 percent of the vote in 1920 while locked up for sedition. His first jail term, six months for defying a court order during the rail boycott, was where he turned to socialism.

Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for nearly four decades until 1924?

Samuel Gompers was re-elected president every year but one until his death. He had been sent to work as an apprentice just after his tenth birthday to help support his family.

Which detective agency sent 300 armed agents on river barges to retake Carnegie's Homestead steel works in 1892?

Pinkerton agents were met by armed strikers on the riverbank, and the gun battle left men dead on both sides. The agency's founder had made his name claiming to foil a plot against Abraham Lincoln.

Which company's plants in Flint, Michigan, did auto workers occupy for 44 days in the sit-down strike of 1936–37?

General Motors ended the standoff by recognizing the United Auto Workers in a one-page agreement. Michigan's governor had sent in the National Guard not to evict the strikers but to protect them.

Which Massachusetts town's 'mill girls' walked out over an 1834 pay cut and later formed a pioneering women's union?

Lowell's operatives founded the Female Labor Reform Association in 1845, the first union of working women in the United States. One of its first acts was to petition the state for a ten-hour day.

Which name is given to the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, waged largely by immigrant women workers?

Bread and Roses strikers made headlines with their signature move, sending hundreds of their hungry children to sympathetic families in other states. The walkout lasted more than two months of a bitter winter.

Which nickname is given to members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union founded in Chicago in 1905?

Wobblies preached One Big Union: every worker in a single organization, whatever the trade, so that the whole working class could act together.

In which state did the National Guard attack a tent colony of striking coal miners at Ludlow in 1914?

Colorado's Ludlow Massacre killed about 21 people, most of them miners' wives and children. John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family controlled the mining company, was widely blamed.

At which West Virginia site did 10,000 armed coal miners battle lawmen and strikebreakers for five days in 1921?

Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history, and ended only when the Army stepped in by presidential order. About a million rounds had been fired.

Which 1935 New Deal law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively?

The Wagner Act, formally the National Labor Relations Act, took its everyday name from the New York senator who wrote it. It also banned employers from interfering when workers set up a union.

Which president's veto did Congress override in 1947 to pass the Taft–Hartley Act restricting union power?

Harry Truman called the bill a dangerous intrusion on free speech, and union leaders branded it a slave-labor bill. Many of his fellow Democrats still joined Republicans to override him.

Which worker protection did Massachusetts pioneer in 1912 and the Fair Labor Standards Act extend nationwide in 1938?

Minimum wage rules in the 1938 act came with time-and-a-half pay for overtime. The same law banned what it called oppressive child labor.

Which governor's stand against the 1919 Boston police strike won him national fame and, later, the White House?

Calvin Coolidge backed the police commissioner, who replaced every striker with a new recruit on better pay. A year later he was elected vice president.

Which president called mine owners and union leaders together to settle the 1902 anthracite coal strike?

Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to step into a labor dispute as a neutral arbitrator. The miners went back with a 10 percent raise and a nine-hour day instead of ten.

Which president made Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894, the same summer he sent troops against the Pullman strike?

Grover Cleveland signed the holiday into law in the same weeks that the Army was ordered in to clear the rail lines. By then thirty states were already celebrating it.

Which organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters later headed the 1963 March on Washington?

A. Philip Randolph built the first successful African-American-led labor union among the Pullman Company's porters. It took him twelve years to win them a contract.

Which secret society of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania saw twenty alleged members hanged in the 1870s?

Molly Maguires went to the gallows largely on the word of a private detective sent undercover among them. Pennsylvania's governor pardoned one of the hanged men, John Kehoe, in 1979.

Which union, led by Terence Powderly, had more than 700,000 members by 1886 and admitted women and Black workers?

Knights of Labor membership collapsed almost as fast as it grew, to 100,000 at most by 1890. Powderly himself disliked strikes, calling them a relic of barbarism.

Which photographer documented children at work in mills and mines for the National Child Labor Committee from 1908?

Lewis Hine often had to trick his way past factory gates with his camera. His pictures backed the lobbying that won the first federal child labor law in 1916.

Which glowing element poisoned the 1920s watch-dial painters who were told to point their brushes with their lips?

Radium paint was said to be harmless, so the women shaped their brushes on their lips all day. Their lawsuits established a worker's right to sue an employer for damages over labor abuse.

Which product did the women and girls who struck at a Bow, London, factory in 1888 make, risking 'phossy jaw'?

Matches were tipped with white phosphorus, whose vapour rotted the workers' jawbones. Helped by the activist Annie Besant, the women won their strike and formed a union the same year.

Which six Dorset farm laborers were transported to Australia in 1834 for swearing a secret oath to their union?

Tolpuddle Martyrs were convicted under an obscure 1797 law against unlawful oaths, because unions themselves were legal. Mass protests won them a pardon two years later.

Which British prime minister defeated Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers after a year-long coal strike?

Margaret Thatcher had prepared by building up ample coal stocks, and likened the dispute to the Falklands War. A miners' strike had badly damaged Edward Heath's government ten years before.

Which German mill owner's son wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England after two years in Manchester?

Friedrich Engels had been sent to Manchester by his father to work in a cotton mill the family had invested in. He later used his income from the firm to support Karl Marx's family.

Which 1979 film won Sally Field an Oscar as a North Carolina textile worker who helps unionize her mill?

Norma Rae was based on Crystal Lee Sutton, a textile worker who fought to organize the J.P. Stevens mill in her hometown of Roanoke Rapids.

Which Swedish-born IWW songwriter became a folk hero after Utah executed him by firing squad in 1915?

Joe Hill was convicted of murder on questionable evidence, and even President Woodrow Wilson backed calls for clemency. The union had his ashes scattered across the world.

Which labor leader ran the United Auto Workers from 1946 until his death in a 1970 plane crash?

Walter Reuther was the union's longest-serving president, and had already survived two assassination attempts. Weeks before the crash he helped fund and organize the first Earth Day.

Which president sent federal troops to end the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, months after a disputed election?

Rutherford Hayes sent the soldiers reluctantly, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut pay for the third time in a year and the walkout spread from state to state.

Which president approved the creation of OSHA in 1970, months after sending troops to move the mail in a postal strike?

Richard Nixon went on television to order the mail carriers back to work, which only angered workers in another 671 locations into walking out too.

Which 1894 march of jobless men from Ohio ended with its leader arrested for walking on the Capitol grass?

Coxey's Army was the first significant protest march on Washington, and it asked the government to create jobs building roads. The idea became federal policy decades later in the New Deal.

Which young New York street sellers struck in 1899 against Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst?

Newsboys cut the daily sales of Pulitzer's World from 360,000 to 125,000 in two weeks. The publishers kept their higher price but agreed to buy back every unsold paper.

Which workers' ten-hour day did the Supreme Court strike down in the 1905 case Lochner v. New York?

Bakers lost because the Court held that the limit violated their freedom of contract. Oliver Wendell Holmes's three-paragraph dissent became one of the most famous in American law.

Which Arizona mining town's posse forced about 1,300 strikers into cattle cars in 1917 and dumped them in New Mexico?

Bisbee's deportation was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the big mining company, which gave the sheriff lists of whom to arrest. The 2,000-strong posse first held its captives in a baseball park.

Which Pacific Northwest city was brought to a halt for five days in 1919 by a general strike of 65,000 workers?

Seattle's unions walked out in support of shipyard workers who had been locked out after striking for higher pay. The mayor brought in extra police and troops, though there was no disorder.

Which co-founder of the United Farm Workers ran its East Coast grape boycott and negotiated with the growers?

Dolores Huerta began by persuading local unions to refuse to carry California grapes across the Hudson River. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Which British workers' movement took its name from an 1838 document demanding the vote for every man?

Chartists saw every demand of their People's Charter but one, yearly elections, become law after the movement itself had died out.

Which substitute for cash, spendable only in the mine owner's own store, were many American coal miners paid in?

Scrip kept a miner's pay inside the company, and about three-quarters of it was issued by coal firms in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Paying workers this way became illegal in 1938.

Which nickname was given to contracts, outlawed in 1932, in which workers promised never to join a union?

Yellow-dog was the labor press's label for such contracts, arguing that a worker who signed one sank to the level of a cur. The Norris–La Guardia Act outlawed them.

Which Welsh-born mill owner ran New Lanark in Scotland and became a founder of the co-operative movement?

Robert Owen left school at ten to become a draper's apprentice. He later sank most of his fortune into an experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana.