Today in Labor History

February 05  --  SOURCE: Union Communications Services, Inc.

First daily labor newspaper, N.Y. Daily Sentinel, begins publication - 1830

The movie Modern Times premieres. The tale of the tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and his paramour (Paulette Goddard) mixed slapstick comedy and social satire, as the couple struggled to overcome the difficulties of the machine age, including unemployment and nerve-wracking factory work, and get along in modern times - 1937

President Bill Clinton signs the Family and Medical Leave Act.  The law requires most employers of 50 or more workers to grant up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for a family or medical emergency - 1993

(The FMLA Handbook, 4th edition is a thorough, highly readable handbook that will help every worker get the most out of the surprisingly comprehensive 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. It explains how unions can protect workers who are absent from work for justifiable medical or family-care reasons; block compulsory "light-duty" work programs; force employers to allow part-time schedules; obtain attendance bonuses for workers absent for medical reasons; and much more. An important tool for every union’s arsenal.)

In what turns out to be a bad business decision, Circuit City fires 3,900 experienced sales people because they're making too much in commissions. Sales plummet. Six years later it declares bankruptcy. Duh. - 2003
  
Working Class Heroes

Mary Moultrie organizes the successful strike of 550 black women hospital workers for union representation in Charleston, South Carolina. 1969

CHARLESTON, SC (WCIV) -- "Segregation was the course of the day…you could feel the dissension and racism," Mary Moultrie says.

Moultrie, a Charleston native, was referring to the racial climate back in 1969, when she was a 24-year-old nursing assistant at the medical college now known as MUSC. It was the year of the 113-day hospital workers' strike at the largest medical university in South Carolina.
To give you an idea of how things were at the time -- Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated the year before and news of the Orangeburg Massacre at S.C. State swept the nation. State troopers and police opened fire on a group of students who were protesting a segregated bowling alley. Three African-American men were killed. Dozens more injured, foreshadowing many more years of struggle, decades to come for African-Americans to fight for their rights. Racial tension, as you can imagine, was at an all-time high. The stage was set for 1969, the year that would change Ms. Moultrie's life forever. 

She was young, she was a woman, and African-American and Moultrie says the atmosphere was very tense and awkward.

"We knew that we were not accepted and nothing that we did would make things better for us. There were a lot of racial slurs and name-calling," Moultrie said with emotion. "The white staff would be privy to information that we were not. The African-American staff was excluded from meetings and received information second-hand."

She said there were separate lounges on each floor. They were then referred to as "white" and "colored." It was the whole, separate but equal, all the while everyone knew it was the farthest thing from equal -- Jim Crow laws still in full effect. 

Even though they ate in the same cafeteria, it was mandated whites and blacks sit separately. Ms. Moultrie said that at the age of 24, she believed her race had to do whatever they could to relieve racial and economical injustices for not just themselves, but for all African-American workers at the medical college. 

At that moment, she said, the strike began and lasted for one-third of a year. 

Led by Moultrie, it was the "strike heard round-the-world" so to speak. Some 400, black nurses' aides attempted to form a union at the hospital, citing they were fed up with what they called unequal pay compared with that of their white counterparts.

http://www.abcnews4.com/story/16949378/charleston-native-helps-to-shape-black-history