Joe Hill wrote a song about “Mr.
Block”, who was a boss-loving, American Dream-believing, self-sabotaging
knucklehead. Some call Riebe the first underground comic book artist. – 1912
Some 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts
participated in a general strike on all military work in the area to protest
the use of open-shop (a worksite in which union membership is not required as a
condition of employment) builders. The strike held on for a week in the face of
threats from the U.S. War Department. – 1917
The first Red Scare,
or “Palmer’s Reign of Terror”, began in the U.S.
on this date with the imprisonment of 3,000 anarchists without bail at Ellis Island . During the Palmer raids,
hundreds of anarchists, communists, union leaders and other radicals were
rounded up, imprisoned, deported and even killed. – 1919
The U.S. Supreme Court used the Taft-Hartley Act to break a steel
strike. Taft-Hartley was passed in 1947, in the wake of the 1946 Oakland
General Strike. It severely limited strike activities, specifically prohibiting
sympathy strikes and General Strikes and was essentially a giveaway to
employers helping to pave the way for the progressive weakening of the U.S. labor
movement. – 1959
Lemuel Ricketts Boulware died in Delray Beach , Florida
on this date at age 95. As a GE vice president in the 1950s he created the
policy known as Boulwarism, in which management decides what is “fair” and
refuses to budge on anything during contract negotiations. IUE Union President
Paul Jennings described the policy as “telling the workers what they are
entitled to and then trying to shove it down their throats.” – 1990
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