Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Today in Labor History

September 11

Some 75,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia end a ten-week strike after winning an eight hour day, semi-monthly pay, and the abolition of overpriced company-owned stores, where they had been forced to shop. (Remember the song, "16 Tons," by coal miner’s son Merle Travis, in which there’s this line: "I owe my soul to the company store.") - 1897

More than 3,000 people died when suicide highjackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Among the dead in New York were 634 union members, the majority of them New York City firefighters and police on the scene when the towers fell - 2001

Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life Norma Rae of the movies, dies at age 68. She worked at a J.P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. when low pay and poor working conditions led her to become a union activist - 2009

No comments:

Post a Comment

For now, we're opening this blog to Anonymous comments. This will continue as long as civility rules. Disagree as you may, just keep it clean and stay on topic. No profanity, and no name calling. We reserve the right to moderate such comments, though the person who made it may come back and reword their message in a more civil way.