Today in Labor History

September 22  --  Union Communications Services, Inc.

Emancipation Proclamation signed - 1862

Eighteen-year-old Hannah (Annie) Shapiro leads a spontaneous walkout of 17 women at a Hart Schaffner & Marx garment factory in Chicago. It grows into a months-long mass strike involving 40,000 garment workers across the city, protesting 10-hour days, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages - 1910

Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later - 1919

Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va., after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners' strike - 1922

U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent - 1931

United Textile Workers strike committee orders strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South - 1934

Some 400,000 coal miners strike for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio - 1935

The AFL expels the Int’l Longshoremen's Association for racketeering; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later - 1953

OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas, plant earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 - 2005

(Tools of the Trade: A Health and Safety Handbook for Action: This 180-page book is a valuable resource for those who want to promote worker health and safety while building their unions and community groups at the same time. It includes: Examples of successful workplace health and safety campaigns; Strategies to actively engage workers in advocating for their own protection; Specific tools for winning safety improvements, such as collecting information, using legal rights, working with the community; Step-by-step instructions for using these tools, complete with checklists, forms and resources.)

Eleven Domino's employees in Pensacola, Fla., form the nation's first union of pizza delivery drivers - 2006

San Francisco hotel workers end a 2-year contract fight, ratify a new 5-year pact with their employers - 2006