Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Today in Labor History

Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, goes to Butte, Mont. in an attempt to mediate a conflict between factions of the miner’s local there. It didn’t go well. Gunfight in the union hall killed one man; Moyer and other union officers left the building, which was then leveled in a dynamite blast - 1914
Congress overrides President Harry Truman's veto of the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act. The law weakened unions and let states exempt themselves from union requirements. Twenty states immediately enacted open shop laws and more followed - 19472015.06.22 history brown.lung
OSHA issues standard on cotton dust to protect 600,000 workers from byssinosis, also known as "brown lung" - 1978
A majority of the 5,000 textile workers at six Fieldcrest Cannon textile plants in Kannapolis, N.C., vote for union representation after an historic 25-year fight - 1999
2015.06.22 history hagenbeck wallace trainwreckJune 22
A total of 86 passengers on a train carrying members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus are killed, another 127 injured in a wreck near Hammond, Indiana. Five days later the dead are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Ill., in an area set aside as Showmen’s Rest, purchased only a few months earlier by the Showmen’s League of America - 1918
Violence erupted during a coal mine strike at Herrin, Ill. A total of 36 were killed, 21 of them non-union miners - 1922

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