Today in Labor History

July 05
During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, buildings constructed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson park were set ablaze, reducing seven to ashes - 1894

Battle of Rincon Hill, San Francisco, in longshore strike. 5,000 strikers fought 1,000 police, scabs and national guardsmen. Two strikers were killed, 109 people injured. The incident, forever known as "Bloody Thursday," led to a General Strike - 1934

Eleven firefighters are killed in an explosion in Kingman, Arizona as propane is being transferred from a railroad car to a storage tank - 1973

Fourteen firefighters are killed battling the South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain in Glenwood Springs, Colo. - 1994

July 04

Albert Parsons joins the Knights of Labor. He later became an anarchist and was one of the Haymarket martyrs - 1876

AFL dedicates its new Washington, D.C. headquarters building at 9th St. and Massachusetts Ave. NW. The building, still standing, later became headquarters for the Plumbers and Pipefitters - 1916

Five newspaper boys from the Baltimore Evening Sun died when the steamer they were on, the Three Rivers, caught fire near Baltimore, Md. They are remembered every year at a West Baltimore cemetery, toasted by former staffers of the now-closed newspaper - 1924

With the Great Depression underway, some 1,320 delegates attended the founding convention of the Unemployed Councils of the U.S.A., organized by the U.S. Communist Party. They demanded passage of unemployment insurance and maternity benefit laws and opposed discrimination by race or sex - 1930

Two primary conventions of the United Nations' International Labor Organization come into force: Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize - 1950

Building trades workers lay the cornerstone of the Freedom Tower on the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. The WTC had been leveled by a terrorist attack three years earlier. Nearly 3,000 died at the WTC and in other attacks in the eastern U.S. on the same day - 2004

SOURCE: Union Communications Services, Inc.