50 Fun Facts About The Labor Movement

Which union did Jimmy Hoffa lead from 1957 until 1971, four years before he vanished near Detroit?

Teamsters membership passed 2.3 million under Hoffa, making it the largest union in the United States. He disappeared from a restaurant parking lot and was declared legally dead in 1982.

In which city was Martin Luther King Jr. backing a sanitation workers' strike when he was assassinated in 1968?

Memphis sanitation workers walked out after two of them, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage compactor while sheltering from the rain.

Which president fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and banned them from federal jobs?

Ronald Reagan gave the controllers 48 hours to return to work, even though their union, PATCO, had endorsed him in the 1980 campaign. It lost its certification that October.

Which industrialist stunned rivals in 1914 by more than doubling most of his workers' pay to five dollars a day?

Henry Ford was trying to stop a costly churn of staff: some of his departments were hiring 300 men a year to keep 100 jobs filled.

Which protest tactic takes its name from an English land agent shunned by his Irish neighbors in 1880?

Boycott was the surname of Captain Charles Boycott, cut off so completely in County Mayo that it took soldiers and constables to bring in his crops, at a cost of £10,000 for a £500 harvest.

Which English textile workers of the early 1800s wrecked the machines they blamed for threatening their pay and trades?

Luddites signed their threatening letters with the name of Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver. Parliament answered by making machine breaking a capital crime.

Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel exposed the misery of Chicago's meatpacking workers and led to federal food laws?

The Jungle was written to win readers to socialism, but the public outcry was over filthy packing houses, and it produced the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act instead.

Which glowing element poisoned the 1920s watch-dial painters whose lawsuits strengthened American workplace safety law?

Radium was in the luminous paint, and the women were told it was harmless and taught to point their brushes on their lips to keep a fine tip.

Which co-founder of the United Farm Workers became the public face of California's Delano grape strike of 1965–1970?

Cesar Chavez joined a walkout that Filipino American farm workers had already begun, then wove Catholic processions, Masses and fasts into the campaign.

What had managers done at New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that trapped workers in the deadly 1911 fire?

Managers locked the exit doors to stop theft and unauthorized breaks, and 146 people died. The fire led to laws requiring better factory safety standards.

Which founding president of the American Federation of Labor began as a ten-year-old apprentice cigar maker in London?

Samuel Gompers led the federation from 1886 until his death in 1924, apart from a single year out of office in the 1890s.

Which American Railway Union leader later ran for president five times as a Socialist, once from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs became a socialist behind bars: jailed for six months for defying a court order during an 1894 rail walkout, he spent the time reading socialist theory.

Which Irish-born organizer of miners was called the most dangerous woman in America by a prosecutor in 1902?

Mother Jones turned to organizing after yellow fever killed her husband and all four of her children and the Great Chicago Fire destroyed her dress shop.

Which Secretary of Labor, the first woman in a US cabinet, held the post for twelve years from 1933?

Frances Perkins had watched the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in person, and in Washington she helped design the Social Security Act of 1935.

Which founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters went on to head the 1963 March on Washington?

A. Philip Randolph had forced a president's hand before: his threat to bring 50,000 marchers to the capital in 1941 won an order banning discrimination in the defense industries.

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

Knights of Labor began in 1869 as a secret society of Philadelphia tailors, and Powderly himself disliked strikes, calling them a relic of barbarism.

Which radical union, co-founded in Chicago in 1905 by Big Bill Haywood, has members nicknamed Wobblies?

Industrial Workers of the World organizers went after the unskilled workers that the craft unions of the day refused to admit.

Which demand brought workers to the 1886 Chicago rally that ended in the deadly Haymarket bombing?

An eight-hour workday was the cause of the peaceful rally. None of the eight anarchists tried for the bombing had thrown the bomb, yet four of them were hanged.

Which sleeping-car maker cut wages in 1894 while charging workers the same rents, sparking a national rail strike?

Pullman housing came with the job, so workers were squeezed from both sides; the walkout tied up rail traffic west of Detroit until federal troops were sent in.

At which Pennsylvania mill town did Andrew Carnegie's workers fight a gun battle with 300 Pinkerton agents in 1892?

Homestead's strikers beat the hired guards on the riverbank, but the state militia then occupied the town for 95 days and the strike collapsed.

Which federation, formed in 1935 to unionize mass-production workers regardless of craft, rejoined the AFL in 1955?

Congress of Industrial Organizations unions signed up everyone in a plant, skilled or not, an approach the older federation's craft leaders had resisted.

Which tactic forced General Motors to recognize its workers' union after 44 winter days in Flint, Michigan in 1936–37?

A sit-down strike kept the workers inside the plants, beside the machinery and out of the weather, so the company could not simply bring in replacements.

Which 1935 law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to unionize and set up the National Labor Relations Board?

Wagner Act opponents introduced several hundred bills to amend or repeal it within a decade. Its nickname honors the New York senator who sponsored it.

Which 1938 New Deal law created the first federal minimum wage and curbed the employment of children?

Fair Labor Standards Act rules are also the reason overtime exists: the law gave workers time-and-a-half pay for hours beyond forty in a week.

Which newly elected president sent federal troops from city to city to end the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?

Rutherford Hayes agreed reluctantly, and his use of troops helped win bipartisan backing for the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which limits a president's power to use the army to enforce the law at home.

Which president summoned mine owners and union leaders in 1902, the first to step into a strike as a neutral referee?

Theodore Roosevelt feared a fuel famine in winter, and when the owners kept refusing to bargain he threatened to send soldiers to run the mines.

Which family owned the Colorado mining company whose guards helped attack a strikers' tent camp at Ludlow in 1914?

Rockefeller heir John D. Rockefeller Jr. managed the company from an office in New York and was widely blamed for the roughly 21 deaths, most of them miners' wives and children.

Which Massachusetts textile town's mill girls walked out in the 1830s and later formed an early union of working women?

Lowell's strikers hit their employers where it hurt during one walkout: they withdrew their savings all at once, causing a run on two local banks.

Which photographer left teaching in 1908 to document child workers for the National Child Labor Committee?

Lewis Hine's pictures of small children at dangerous jobs showed the public what employers preferred to keep hidden and helped build support for the first federal child labor law in 1916.

Which nickname for America's late-1800s boom and labor unrest comes from the title of an 1873 Mark Twain novel?

Gilded Age was a put-down, not praise: historians of the 1920s borrowed Twain's title to brand the period one of materialistic excess and political corruption.

Which trade union, born in a 1980 strike at Gdańsk's Lenin Shipyard, grew to 10 million members within a year?

Solidarity was the first independent trade union to be recognised by the state in a Warsaw Pact country, and at its peak it had enrolled a third of Poland's working-age population.

Which British political party was created in 1900 by trade unions and socialist groups to speak for the working class?

Labour was not the first name it used: the alliance began as the Labour Representation Committee, with Ramsay MacDonald, a future prime minister, as its secretary.

Which German-born thinker joined the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association in London in 1864?

Karl Marx spent much of his time in the association battling the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin, and he championed the Paris Commune of 1871.

Which country passed the first modern national minimum wage law in 1894, a year after giving women the vote?

New Zealand's 1894 law worked through the unions, prescribing minimum pay for their members. The United States had no national minimum until 1938.

Where were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six English farm workers, shipped as convicts in 1834 for swearing a union oath?

Australia held them for only a few years: mass protests at home won all six a pardon in 1836, and they sailed back to England.

Which insult do strikers shout at a replacement worker who crosses their picket line to take a striker's job?

Scab and the British equivalent, blackleg, have both been traced to names of diseases, though the origin of blackleg is disputed. Some writers keep the first for outsiders hired to replace strikers.

Which arrangement, outlawed in the US by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, lets an employer hire only existing union members?

Closed shop deals are banned in Britain too, where every form of them has been illegal since the Employment Act 1990.

Which private currency, good only at the employer's own store, did many US mining and lumber firms pay instead of cash?

Scrip trapped workers twice over: swapping it for real money, where that was allowed at all, cost a fee, so wages flowed straight back to the employer's store.

Which group of New Yorkers, mostly young immigrant women, walked out in 1909 in the Uprising of the 20,000?

Garment workers who sewed shirtwaist blouses were led by Clara Lemlich. A year after their strike ended, the Triangle fire exposed the dangers they had walked out over.

Which band of jobless men walked from Ohio to Washington in 1894 to demand that Congress fund public works jobs?

Coxey's Army ended in farce: the day after it reached Washington, its leader Jacob Coxey was arrested for walking on the grass of the Capitol.

Which coffee chain's Buffalo, New York store voted to unionize in 2021, alone among 9,000 company-owned US shops?

Starbucks baristas were not the company's first union members: warehouse and roasting plant workers in Seattle had organized back in 1985.

Which union, led by Shawn Fain, struck all of Detroit's Big Three carmakers at once for the first time in 2023?

United Auto Workers members had backed a walkout with 97 percent in favor, and during the talks their new president threw one automaker's offer in the trash on camera.

Which federal agency, created by a law Richard Nixon signed in 1970, sets and enforces US workplace safety rules?

OSHA's founding law arrived in the same year as the Environmental Protection Agency: Nixon signed it on December 29, 1970, two days before the year ran out.

In which state did 10,000 armed miners fight lawmen and strikebreakers for five days at Blair Mountain in 1921?

West Virginia's mine war stopped only when federal troops arrived by presidential order, after roughly a million rounds had been fired.

Which kind of walkout did some 65,000 Seattle workers stage in February 1919 in support of the city's shipyard workers?

A general strike stops a whole city rather than one employer: in Seattle as many as 110 union locals backed the call, and critics blamed Bolsheviks, feeding the Red Scare.

Breaker boys, child workers photographed by reformers in the early 1900s, spent their days sorting what by hand?

Coal came out of the ground mixed with rock, slate and clay, and the boys' job in the breaker was to pick those impurities out by hand.

Which Boston public employees struck in 1919 for the right to unionize, making Governor Calvin Coolidge a national name?

Police officers in Boston had to buy their own uniforms and equipment, and after the strike failed the AFL gave up trying to organize police for two decades.

Which young New Yorkers struck in 1899 against Joseph Pulitzer's World, cutting its daily sales by nearly two-thirds?

Newsboys had to buy their papers up front, and the price of a bundle of 100 had gone from 50 to 60 cents during the Spanish–American War and stayed there when sales fell.

Lochner v. New York, a 1905 Supreme Court ruling, struck down a state law capping the working hours of which trade?

Bakers at Joseph Lochner's shop in Utica slept for hours in an on-site dormitory between mixing the dough and baking the loaves, and he paid them for the sleep.

Which Canadian city did more than 30,000 strikers bring to a standstill for six weeks in the spring of 1919?

Winnipeg was Canada's third largest city at the time, and the walkout by its unions is counted among the most influential strikes in Canadian history.