The Labor Movement
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50 free The Labor Movement trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The weekend, the minimum wage and the end of child labor were not handed down from above. They were won by organized workers over more than a century of walkouts, court fights and lawmaking, and the story has more gunfire, more courtroom drama and more colorful characters than most history units let on. This quiz follows the labor movement from the early textile towns and craft societies through the railroad and mining conflicts of the late 1800s, the factory reforms that followed, and the New Deal laws that still shape the workplace. It also looks beyond the United States, to the union movement in Britain, Poland, Canada and the Pacific, and forward to the organizing drives of the 2020s. It is written for students revising a unit on organized labor, for teachers who want a ready-made review, and for union members putting together a trivia night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you knowing the story.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which union did Jimmy Hoffa lead from 1957 until 1971, four years before he vanished near Detroit?
Teamsters
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.
Q 02In which city was Martin Luther King Jr. backing a sanitation workers' strike when he was assassinated in 1968?
Memphis
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.
Q 03Which president fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and banned them from federal jobs?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 04Which industrialist stunned rivals in 1914 by more than doubling most of his workers' pay to five dollars a day?
Henry Ford
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.
Q 05Which protest tactic takes its name from an English land agent shunned by his Irish neighbors in 1880?
Boycott
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.
Q 06Which English textile workers of the early 1800s wrecked the machines they blamed for threatening their pay and trades?
Luddites
Luddites signed their threatening letters with the name of Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver. Parliament answered by making machine breaking a capital crime.
Q 07Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel exposed the misery of Chicago's meatpacking workers and led to federal food laws?
The Jungle
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.
Q 08Which glowing element poisoned the 1920s watch-dial painters whose lawsuits strengthened American workplace safety law?
Radium
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.
Q 09Which co-founder of the United Farm Workers became the public face of California's Delano grape strike of 1965–1970?
Cesar Chavez
Cesar Chavez joined a walkout that Filipino American farm workers had already begun, then wove Catholic processions, Masses and fasts into the campaign.
Q 10What had managers done at New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that trapped workers in the deadly 1911 fire?
Locked the exit doors
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.
Q 11Which founding president of the American Federation of Labor began as a ten-year-old apprentice cigar maker in London?
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers led the federation from 1886 until his death in 1924, apart from a single year out of office in the 1890s.
Q 12Which American Railway Union leader later ran for president five times as a Socialist, once from a prison cell?
Eugene V. Debs
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.
Q 13Which Irish-born organizer of miners was called the most dangerous woman in America by a prosecutor in 1902?
Mother Jones
Q 21Which federation, formed in 1935 to unionize mass-production workers regardless of craft, rejoined the AFL in 1955?
Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations unions signed up everyone in a plant, skilled or not, an approach the older federation's craft leaders had resisted.
Q 22Which tactic forced General Motors to recognize its workers' union after 44 winter days in Flint, Michigan in 1936–37?
A sit-down strike
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.
Q 23Which 1935 law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to unionize and set up the National Labor Relations Board?
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.
Q 14Which Secretary of Labor, the first woman in a US cabinet, held the post for twelve years from 1933?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins had watched the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in person, and in Washington she helped design the Social Security Act of 1935.
Q 15Which founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters went on to head the 1963 March on Washington?
A. Philip Randolph
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.
Q 16Which union led by Terence Powderly admitted women and Black workers and topped 700,000 members by 1886?
Knights of Labor
Knights of Labor began in 1869 as a secret society of Philadelphia tailors, and Powderly himself disliked strikes, calling them a relic of barbarism.
Q 17Which radical union, co-founded in Chicago in 1905 by Big Bill Haywood, has members nicknamed Wobblies?
Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World organizers went after the unskilled workers that the craft unions of the day refused to admit.
Q 18Which demand brought workers to the 1886 Chicago rally that ended in the deadly Haymarket bombing?
An eight-hour workday
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.
Q 19Which sleeping-car maker cut wages in 1894 while charging workers the same rents, sparking a national rail strike?
Pullman
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.
Q 20At which Pennsylvania mill town did Andrew Carnegie's workers fight a gun battle with 300 Pinkerton agents in 1892?
Homestead
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.
Wagner Act
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.
Q 24Which 1938 New Deal law created the first federal minimum wage and curbed the employment of children?
Fair Labor Standards Act
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.
Q 25Which newly elected president sent federal troops from city to city to end the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
Rutherford Hayes
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.
Q 26Which president summoned mine owners and union leaders in 1902, the first to step into a strike as a neutral referee?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 27Which family owned the Colorado mining company whose guards helped attack a strikers' tent camp at Ludlow in 1914?
Rockefeller
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.
Q 28Which Massachusetts textile town's mill girls walked out in the 1830s and later formed an early union of working women?
Lowell
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.
Q 29Which photographer left teaching in 1908 to document child workers for the National Child Labor Committee?
Lewis Hine
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.
Q 30Which nickname for America's late-1800s boom and labor unrest comes from the title of an 1873 Mark Twain novel?
Gilded Age
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.