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?

August 12
The national Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners is founded in Chicago in a gathering of 36 carpenters from 11 cities - 1881

What was to become a 232-day strike by Major League Baseball players over owners' demands for team salary caps began on this day; 938 games were cancelled - 1994

August 13
Striking miners at Tracy City, Tenn., capture their mines and free 300 state convict strikebreakers. The convicts had been "leased" to mineowners by officials in an effort to make prisons self-supporting and make a few bucks for the state. The practice started in 1866 and lasted for 30 years - 1892

Newspaper Guild members begin three-month strike of Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shutting the publication down in their successful fight for union recognition - 1936

Civil rights leader and union president A. Philip Randolph strongly protests the AFL-CIO Executive Council's failure to endorse the August 28 "March on Washington" - 1963

- David Prosten

Today’s Labor Quote: Lillian Russell

“We all have a fear of the unknown. What one does with that fear will make all the difference in the world.”

Actress and former chorus girl Lillian Russell's financial support helped the chorus girls in the Ziegfield Follies create their own union, the Chorus Equity Association on this date in 1919.