Today in Labor History

July 04  --  Union Communications Services, Inc.

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' Int’l 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