Printers in Philadelphia began what was to be a successful strike to protest a reduction in their wages from 45 shillings to 35 shillings a week. According to Henry Rosemont, the International Typographical Union’s unofficial historian, “these were the first American workers who deliberately voted to stand out for a specific wage and to provide mutual assistance in maintaining it.” – 1786
The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), which organized the 1907 Mesabi Range Strike, was uninterested in organizing miners in 1916. This left a vacuum that the much more radical IWW gladly filled. The Wobblies sent many of their top organizers to help and succeeded in recruiting many of the people who served as strikebreakers in 1907 to join the current strike. Carlos Tresca, an IWW leader, was arrested for murder in conjunction with the strike but was released without trial. Tresca went on to oppose Mussolini and the fascists, as well as the Stalinists in the USSR. He was assassinated in 1943. The Mesabi Strike was suppressed violently by police and vigilantes, with numerous strikers being jailed. The struggle was a precursor to the infamous labor deportations in Bisbee, Arizona in July 1917, in which 1,300 Wobblies, their supporters, and even innocent bystanders, were rounded up, forced into cattle cars, and dumped in the desert after 16 hours without food or water. – 1916
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