Today in Labor History

October 07  --  Union Communications Services, Inc.

Joe Hill, labor leader and songwriter, born in Gavle, Sweden - 1879

The Structural Building Trades Alliance (SBTA) is founded, becomes the AFL’s Building Trades Dept. five years later. SBTA’s mission: to provide a form to work out jurisdictional conflicts - 1903

Hollywood’s "Battle of the Mirrors." Picketing members of the Conference of Studio Unions disrupted an outdoor shoot by holding up large reflectors that filled camera lenses with blinding sunlight. Members of the competing IATSE union retaliated by using the reflectors to shoot sunlight back across the street. The battle went on all day, writes Tom Sito in Drawing the Line - 1946

(Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions is the book for you if your interests include one of the following: Animated features like The Simpsons, The Lion King or the Mickey Mouse cartoons; What it’s like to work as a creative artist in Hollywood; What an absolute, anti-union jerk Walt Disney was—as are so many of today’s Hollywood titans.  Author Tom Sito is an animator and director who served for five years as president of The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists. Today he is an adjunct professor in the television and cinema departments at the University of Southern California and at the University of California at Los Angeles. Named one of the most important people in animation, his screen credits include Beauty and the Beast, Shrek, and The Lion King.)