Today's Labor History

This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Remembering Gene Debs; Waging Peace
Shubert Sebree remembers Eugene Debs. Professor Laura McEnaney, author of Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago, on the fate of labor's complex New Deal coalition and connecting the essential workers of the 1940s with those fighting today’s war against the pandemic.
Plus Joe Glazer and The Ballad of Eugene Victor Debs, and this week’s Labor History in 2: Workers Pay the Price for Bad Management
Last week’s show: No longer newsworthy?

The Air Line Pilots Association is founded at a meeting in Chicago attended by 24 activists from across the country - 1931

Hundreds of Transport Workers Union members descend on a New York City courthouse, offering their own money to bail out their president, Mike Quill, and four other union leaders arrested while making their way through Grand Central Station to union headquarters after picketing the IRT subway company offices in lower Manhattan - 1935

President Roosevelt signs amendments to the 1935 Social Security Act, broadening the program to include dependents and survivors' benefits - 1939

Construction on the St. Lawrence Seaway begins. Ultimately 22,000 workers spent five years building the 2,342 mile route from the Atlantic to the northernmost part of the Great Lakes. Employees of the St. Lawrence Seaway are represented today by AFGE Local 1968 - 1954

Pres. Barack Obama signs a $26 billion bill designed to protect 300,000 teachers, police and others from layoffs spurred by budgetary crises in states hard-hit by the Great Recession - 2010

- David Prosten

Today's Labor Quote: I.W. Abel

''Collective bargaining is pretty much of a crisis business. You have to have patience and you have to be tolerant. You have to be a fair fisherman. You have to sit back and wait for a bite.''

Abel -- better known as "Abe" -- was president of the United Steel Workers of America from 1965 to 1977, and died on this date in 1987 at the age of 79. In one year, he led 42 wildcat walkouts.