Today in Labor History

April 29  --  Union Communications Services, Inc.

Coxey’s Army of 500 unemployed civil war veterans reaches Washington, D.C. - 1894

An estimated one thousand silver miners, angry over low wages, the firing of union members and the planting of spies in their ranks by mineowners, seize a train, load it with 3,000 pounds of dynamite, and blow up the mill at the Bunker Hill mine in Wardner, Idaho - 1899

(Fire in the Hole! The Bunker Hill mine conflagration is told through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Mick, who doesn’t want to end up like his father, a miner working for low wages in the Coeur d’Alene silver-mining district of Idaho.  Mick doesn’t like the militant, often confrontational approach of his father’s union as the men struggle against an uncaring mine owner;  he’d rather do his fighting with words like his mentor, Mr. Delaney, who runs the town newspaper.)

The special representative of the National War Labor Board issues a report, “Retroactive Date for Women’s Pay Adjustments,” setting forth provisions for wage rates for women working in war industries who were asking for equal pay. Women a year earlier had demanded equal pay for comparable work as that done by men – 1943