50 Fun Facts About Labor Unions

Which labor union did Ronald Reagan lead as president long before he reached the White House?

Screen Actors Guild members made him their president twice, from 1947 to 1952 and again in 1959. In his second spell he secured pensions and residual payments for film actors.

Which inflatable animal, nicknamed Scabby, do US unions set up outside workplaces during disputes?

Scabby the Rat got the name in a 1990 members' contest run by an Illinois local of the operating engineers' union. Its maker's sales doubled within a year as other unions ordered their own.

Which former Teamsters president vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot in 1975?

Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982. He had driven to the Machus Red Fox for a meeting, and phoned his wife from a payphone to complain that he had been stood up.

Which 1979 film won Sally Field an Oscar as a textile worker who unionizes her Southern mill?

Norma Rae is based on the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a textile worker and union organizer. The film also won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis in April 1968 backing a strike by which city employees?

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

Which TV dad is elected union president and leads a strike to save a dental plan in a 1993 episode?

Homer Simpson wins the fight in Last Exit to Springfield, which is frequently cited as the best episode The Simpsons ever made. He only wanted the plan to pay for Lisa's braces.

Which championship was cancelled in 1994, for the first time in 90 years, by a players' strike?

World Series play had not been skipped since 1904. The 232-day walkout was, at the time, the longest work stoppage in any major professional sports league.

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

Lech Wałęsa sent his wife to collect the prize, worried that the authorities would not let him return. In 1990 he won the presidency by popular vote.

Which striking federal employees did President Ronald Reagan fire en masse in August 1981?

Air traffic controllers who ignored a 48-hour ultimatum, 11,345 in all, were dismissed and barred from federal service for life. Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1993.

Clowns demanding a raise in which Disney film are often said to mock the studio's 1941 strike?

Dumbo was in production when the walkout began in spring 1941. Strike organizer Art Babbitt denied the clowns were a dig, saying he had been assigned the scene before it started.

Which fruit did Americans boycott in the late 1960s to back striking farm workers in Delano, California?

Grapes were the target because the strike began in 1965 when more than 1,000 Filipino pickers walked off the local vineyards. It took five years to win contracts covering over 10,000 people.

On which date is International Workers' Day held, chosen to honor Chicago's 1886 Haymarket affair?

May 1 was adopted after an 1889 congress in Paris called for worldwide demonstrations on the following year's anniversary of the Chicago protests.

Which US president signed Labor Day into law as a federal holiday in June 1894?

Grover Cleveland signed the bill when thirty states already kept the holiday. Oregon had been the first to make it official, in 1887.

Which British prime minister's government defeated a year-long miners' strike led by Arthur Scargill?

Margaret Thatcher's government outlasted the walkout, which ended on 3 March 1985 and cleared the way for most of Britain's collieries to close.

Which 2000 British film follows a miner's 11-year-old son in County Durham during the 1984–85 strike?

Billy Elliot discovers ballet while his widowed father and older brother are out on the picket line. His Royal Ballet School acceptance arrives just as the dispute ends.

Which sitcom star was union president when Hollywood performers struck for almost four months in 2023?

Fran Drescher, creator and star of The Nanny, took office in 2021. When she announced the walkout, the cast of Oppenheimer left the film's London premiere to join it.

Staten Island warehouse workers voted in 2022 to form the first recognized US union at which company?

Amazon had fired organizer Chris Smalls after he led a walkout over its handling of the pandemic at the same warehouse. The ballot went 2,654 to 2,131 in favor.

Which 1992 Disney musical, later a Broadway show, is based on an 1899 strike against Joseph Pulitzer?

Newsies took only $2.8 million at the box office on a $15 million budget, then built a cult following on home video before its stage revival.

Which Irish-born union organizer led a 1903 children's march to Theodore Roosevelt's New York home?

Mother Jones turned to organizing after yellow fever killed her husband and four children in 1867 and the Great Chicago Fire destroyed her dress shop in 1871.

Which 1954 Best Picture winner stars Marlon Brando as a longshoreman who defies his corrupt union boss?

On the Waterfront won eight of its twelve Oscar nominations. Brando at first turned the part down, and Frank Sinatra briefly had a handshake deal to play it.

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

Frances Perkins ran the Labor Department from 1933 to 1945, the longest anyone has held the post, and helped design Social Security.

Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for most of 38 years?

Samuel Gompers was apprenticed to the cigar trade three months after his tenth birthday. He ran the federation from 1886 until his death, with just one year out of office.

The 44-day Flint sit-down strike of 1936–37 won the United Auto Workers recognition from which company?

General Motors signed a one-page agreement on 11 February 1937. Within a year the union's membership had grown from 30,000 to 500,000.

Which rail union leader, jailed after the 1894 Pullman Strike, later ran for president from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs sought the White House five times as a Socialist. His last run, in 1920, was made from behind bars and still drew 3.4 percent of the popular vote.

Before trucks, the workers who gave the Teamsters union its name made deliveries by driving what?

Horse-drawn wagons were the original job: a teamster was the driver of a team of horses, oxen or mules. Two rival drivers' unions merged in 1903 to form the brotherhood.

Which detective agency sent 300 armed agents by river barge to the 1892 Homestead steel strike?

Pinkerton agents with Winchester rifles were towed upriver on two barges overnight, came under steady fire from the high ground, and ended up surrendering to the strikers.

What kind of labor dispute wiped out the entire 2004–05 NHL season, a first in major North American sports?

An owners' lockout, not a walkout by the players, was to blame. The Stanley Cup went unawarded for the first time since 1919.

Which co-founder of the union that became the United Farm Workers was its first contract negotiator?

Dolores Huerta ran the East Coast boycott campaigns during the Delano strike and negotiated with the growers to end it. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

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

A. Philip Randolph had used the idea before: in 1941 his threat to bring 50,000 Black marchers to the capital pushed Roosevelt to ban discrimination in defense industries.

Which term for union–employer negotiations was first used by British reformer Beatrice Webb in 1891?

Collective bargaining was named by Webb, a founder of industrial relations as a field of study, who was also among the founders of the London School of Economics.

Which union, founded as a secret society by Philadelphia tailors in 1869, topped 700,000 members by 1886?

Knights of Labor membership stood at just 28,000 in 1880. Its best-known leader opposed strikes as a relic of barbarism, but local assemblies kept a great deal of autonomy.

Which union, founded in Chicago in 1905 to unite every trade, has members nicknamed Wobblies?

Industrial Workers of the World membership turned over so fast, by an estimated 133 percent between 1905 and 1915, that historians struggle to say how large it ever was.

Which 1935 law, named for the senator who wrote it, guaranteed private-sector workers the right to unionize?

Wagner Act protections never reached everyone: farm workers, domestic workers and government employees were all left outside the law.

Which US president saw Congress override his veto of the union-curbing Taft–Hartley Act in 1947?

Harry S. Truman called the bill a dangerous intrusion on free speech, but many Democrats joined the Republican majority in Congress to override him.

Which Massachusetts governor won national fame for his hard line against the 1919 Boston police strike?

Calvin Coolidge declared that there was no right to strike against the public safety. The line put him on the 1920 Republican ticket, and he was president within four years.

At West Virginia's 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, what did hired planes drop on 10,000 armed coal miners?

Homemade bombs fell during five days of fighting between the miners and 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, in what is still the largest labor uprising in American history.

Which name is given to US state laws that stop union contracts from requiring workers to pay dues?

Right-to-work laws are allowed under the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which lets each state decide. One account credits the modern phrase to a Dallas Morning News editorial writer in 1941.

Britain's strike-hit Winter of Discontent of 1978–79 takes its name from the opening line of which Shakespeare play?

Richard III lent its first words to a season of walkouts made worse by the coldest winter in 16 years. Even gravediggers in Liverpool stopped work.

Which kind of strike, called without union leaders' approval, did over 210,000 US postal workers stage in 1970?

Wildcat is the word, and this was the biggest such walkout in American history. It began in New York City and spread across the country, and President Nixon sent troops to move the mail.

A contract in which a new hire promised never to join a union, outlawed in 1932, was nicknamed after which animal?

A yellow dog was already slang for a contemptible person when it gave these contracts their name. In the 1870s, a written pledge not to join a union was simply called the Infamous Document.

Which future UAW president was beaten by Ford security men at the 1937 Battle of the Overpass?

Walter Reuther held a city permit to hand out leaflets that day. Ford tried to destroy the news photographs on the spot, but those that survived swung public opinion toward the union.

Which Swedish-born union songwriter was shot by firing squad in 1915 despite President Wilson's appeal?

Joe Hill was offered hanging or a firing squad and chose to be shot. After a huge funeral procession in Chicago, his ashes were scattered around the globe.

The union anthem Solidarity Forever, written by Ralph Chaplin in 1915, is sung to the tune of which song?

Battle Hymn of the Republic supplied the melody. Chaplin began the words in 1913 while reporting on West Virginia miners whose families had spent a year of their strike living in tents.

What did the women and girls of London's Bryant & May factory make before their landmark strike in 1888?

Matches meant dipping sticks in white phosphorus, which could rot the jawbone in a disease known as phossy jaw. The strikers won with the help of the social activist Annie Besant.

Which six Dorset farm workers were sentenced to transportation to Australia in 1834 over a secret union oath?

Tolpuddle Martyrs became popular heroes at home: 800,000 signatures were collected for their release, and all six were pardoned in 1836.

Which former steelworkers' economist became the first executive director of baseball's players' union in 1966?

Marvin Miller negotiated the players' first labor contract in 1968. He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019, seven years after his death.

Which future Brazilian president lost a finger in a factory press and later led metalworkers' strikes?

Lula da Silva lost his left little finger at 19 while working as a press operator. He led the ABC strikes of 1978 to 1980 and helped start the Workers' Party.

Which 1919 peace treaty created the International Labour Organization, now a UN agency in Geneva?

Versailles drafters gave the new body a whole section of the text to itself. Fifty years on, in 1969, the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which pope's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended the right of workers to form trade unions?

Leo XIII also argued in it for a living wage. In 2025 a newly elected pope took the name Leo XIV in his honor, pointing to that same letter.

In which Australian city did stonemasons down tools in April 1856 and march on Parliament for an eight-hour day?

Melbourne masons won an eight-hour day on public works with no loss of pay, and celebrated three weeks later with a holiday procession of 19 trades.