Labor History
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50 free Labor History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The eight-hour day, the weekend and the end of child labor were not gifts. Working people won them over two centuries of walkouts, court fights and lawmaking, and the story is full of gunfire, courtroom drama and unforgettable characters. This quiz covers labor history from the first textile mills to the modern warehouse: the great railroad, steel, coal and auto strikes, the organizers and reformers behind them, the New Deal laws that reshaped the workplace, and the presidents who sent in troops or stepped in to mediate. A handful of questions look beyond the United States, to Britain, Poland and Australia. It is written for students revising a labor history unit, for teachers who want a ready-made review, and for union members planning a trivia night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you with the story.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 after they ignored his back-to-work order?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 02Which icon of women war workers began as a 1942 song before appearing on a Saturday Evening Post cover?
Rosie the Riveter
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.
Q 03Which carmaker astonished industry in 1914 by more than doubling most workers' pay to five dollars a day?
Henry Ford
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.
Q 04Which witness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire became the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet?
Frances Perkins
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.
Q 05Which farm labor leader led the Delano grape strike of 1965 to 1970 and co-founded the United Farm Workers?
Cesar Chavez
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.
Q 06Which former Teamsters president vanished in 1975 after heading to a meeting at a restaurant in suburban Detroit?
Jimmy Hoffa
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.
Q 07Which striking Memphis city employees was Martin Luther King Jr. supporting when he was assassinated in April 1968?
Sanitation workers
Sanitation workers walked out after two of their crewmates were crushed to death in a garbage compactor while sheltering from the rain.
Q 08Which Irish-born organizer, branded the most dangerous woman in America, led a 1903 march of child mill workers?
Mother Jones
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.
Q 09Which English textile workers smashed machinery in the 1810s and gave their name to opponents of new technology?
Luddites
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.
Q 10Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity union, won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize and later became president?
Lech Wałęsa
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.
Q 11Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel about Chicago's meatpacking workers led to new federal food-safety laws?
The Jungle
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.
Q 12Which union leader was jailed over the 1894 Pullman strike and later ran for president from a prison cell?
Eugene V. Debs
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.
Q 13Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for nearly four decades until 1924?
Q 21Which 1935 New Deal law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively?
Wagner Act
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.
Q 22Which president's veto did Congress override in 1947 to pass the Taft–Hartley Act restricting union power?
Harry Truman
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.
Q 23Which worker protection did Massachusetts pioneer in 1912 and the Fair Labor Standards Act extend nationwide in 1938?
Samuel Gompers
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.
Q 14Which detective agency sent 300 armed agents on river barges to retake Carnegie's Homestead steel works in 1892?
Pinkerton
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.
Q 15Which company's plants in Flint, Michigan, did auto workers occupy for 44 days in the sit-down strike of 1936–37?
General Motors
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.
Q 16Which Massachusetts town's 'mill girls' walked out over an 1834 pay cut and later formed a pioneering women's union?
Lowell
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.
Q 17Which name is given to the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, waged largely by immigrant women workers?
Bread and Roses
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.
Q 18Which nickname is given to members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union founded in Chicago in 1905?
Wobblies
Wobblies preached One Big Union: every worker in a single organization, whatever the trade, so that the whole working class could act together.
Q 19In which state did the National Guard attack a tent colony of striking coal miners at Ludlow in 1914?
Colorado
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.
Q 20At which West Virginia site did 10,000 armed coal miners battle lawmen and strikebreakers for five days in 1921?
Blair Mountain
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.
Minimum wage
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.
Q 24Which governor's stand against the 1919 Boston police strike won him national fame and, later, the White House?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 25Which president called mine owners and union leaders together to settle the 1902 anthracite coal strike?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 26Which president made Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894, the same summer he sent troops against the Pullman strike?
Grover Cleveland
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.
Q 27Which organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters later headed the 1963 March on Washington?
A. Philip Randolph
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.
Q 28Which secret society of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania saw twenty alleged members hanged in the 1870s?
Molly Maguires
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.
Q 29Which union, led by Terence Powderly, had more than 700,000 members by 1886 and admitted women and Black workers?
Knights of Labor
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.
Q 30Which photographer documented children at work in mills and mines for the National Child Labor Committee from 1908?
Lewis Hine
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.