Labor Unions
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50 free Labor Unions trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The eight-hour day and safer factories did not arrive on their own. They were argued for, walked out for and sometimes fought for by organized workers, and the stories behind them are stranger than most people expect: secret oaths, sit-ins on factory floors, presidents who crossed unions and a president who once ran one. This quiz covers the history of organized labor in the United States and beyond: the great strikes of the railroad, steel, coal and auto industries, the organizers and union presidents who became household names, the laws that still shape the workplace, and the slang of the picket line. There are questions on union stories in film and television, on walkouts in professional sports, and on labor movements in Britain, Poland, Brazil and Australia. It is written for union members planning a trivia night at the local, for teachers building a Labor Day or labor history lesson, and for anyone who likes a pub quiz with some grit. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work read aloud to a hall as well as played alone on a phone.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which labor union did Ronald Reagan lead as president long before he reached the White House?
Screen Actors Guild
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.
Q 02Which inflatable animal, nicknamed Scabby, do US unions set up outside workplaces during disputes?
Rat
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.
Q 03Which former Teamsters president vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot in 1975?
Jimmy Hoffa
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.
Q 04Which 1979 film won Sally Field an Oscar as a textile worker who unionizes her Southern mill?
Norma Rae
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.
Q 05Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis in April 1968 backing a strike by which city employees?
Sanitation workers
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.
Q 06Which TV dad is elected union president and leads a strike to save a dental plan in a 1993 episode?
Homer Simpson
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.
Q 07Which championship was cancelled in 1994, for the first time in 90 years, by a players' strike?
World Series
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.
Q 08Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity union and won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize?
Lech Wałęsa
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.
Q 09Which striking federal employees did President Ronald Reagan fire en masse in August 1981?
Air traffic controllers
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.
Q 10Clowns demanding a raise in which Disney film are often said to mock the studio's 1941 strike?
Dumbo
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.
Q 11Which fruit did Americans boycott in the late 1960s to back striking farm workers in Delano, California?
Grapes
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.
Q 12On which date is International Workers' Day held, chosen to honor Chicago's 1886 Haymarket affair?
May 1
May 1 was adopted after an 1889 congress in Paris called for worldwide demonstrations on the following year's anniversary of the Chicago protests.
Q 13Which US president signed Labor Day into law as a federal holiday in June 1894?
Grover Cleveland
Q 21Which eyewitness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire became the first woman in a US presidential cabinet?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins ran the Labor Department from 1933 to 1945, the longest anyone has held the post, and helped design Social Security.
Q 22Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for most of 38 years?
Samuel Gompers
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.
Q 23The 44-day Flint sit-down strike of 1936–37 won the United Auto Workers recognition from which company?
General Motors
Grover Cleveland signed the bill when thirty states already kept the holiday. Oregon had been the first to make it official, in 1887.
Q 14Which British prime minister's government defeated a year-long miners' strike led by Arthur Scargill?
Margaret Thatcher
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.
Q 15Which 2000 British film follows a miner's 11-year-old son in County Durham during the 1984–85 strike?
Billy Elliot
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.
Q 16Which sitcom star was union president when Hollywood performers struck for almost four months in 2023?
Fran Drescher
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.
Q 17Staten Island warehouse workers voted in 2022 to form the first recognized US union at which company?
Amazon
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.
Q 18Which 1992 Disney musical, later a Broadway show, is based on an 1899 strike against Joseph Pulitzer?
Newsies
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.
Q 19Which Irish-born union organizer led a 1903 children's march to Theodore Roosevelt's New York home?
Mother Jones
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.
Q 20Which 1954 Best Picture winner stars Marlon Brando as a longshoreman who defies his corrupt union boss?
On the Waterfront
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.
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.
Q 24Which rail union leader, jailed after the 1894 Pullman Strike, later ran for president from a prison cell?
Eugene V. Debs
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.
Q 25Before trucks, the workers who gave the Teamsters union its name made deliveries by driving what?
Horse-drawn wagons
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.
Q 26Which detective agency sent 300 armed agents by river barge to the 1892 Homestead steel strike?
Pinkerton
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.
Q 27What kind of labor dispute wiped out the entire 2004–05 NHL season, a first in major North American sports?
Owners' lockout
An owners' lockout, not a walkout by the players, was to blame. The Stanley Cup went unawarded for the first time since 1919.
Q 28Which co-founder of the union that became the United Farm Workers was its first contract negotiator?
Dolores Huerta
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.
Q 29Which president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters went on to head the 1963 March on Washington?
A. Philip Randolph
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.
Q 30Which term for union–employer negotiations was first used by British reformer Beatrice Webb in 1891?
Collective bargaining
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.