Tag: Organized Labor

IBEW Founded, Sinn Fein Founded, & Nunn-Lugar Passed, in Peace & Justice History for 11/28

November 28, 1891

Early IBEW delegates
The National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (now International, the IBEW) was founded when 10 men met at Stolley’s Dance Hall in St. Louis, Missouri. Their goal: the joining together of electricians in a common organization to make a better life for all.

The original logo adopted at the First Convention.
Read more 
November 28, 1905

The political party Sinn Fein (meaning “we ourselves” in Gaelic) was founded in Dublin by Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith. Its objective was to end British rule in Ireland and seek national self-determination as a sovereign state.

Sinn Fein’s story of its origins 
November 28, 1991
The U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Threat Reduction Act (the Nunn-Lugar legislation), which provided up to $400 million to assist with the destruction of Soviet nuclear and chemical warheads.
The legislation was initiated by Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana).

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november28

U.S. Labor Organizes, & Acts, On This Date In Peace & Justice History

November 8, 1892
Thirty thousand black and white, factory and dock workers staged a general strike in New Orleans, demanding union recognition, closed shops (where all co-workers join the union), and hour and wage gains. They were joined by non-industrial laborers, such as musicians, clothing workers, clerks, utility workers, streetcar drivers, and printers.
November 8, 1935
United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). They had split with the existing labor union umbrella organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was not interested in organizing unskilled workers, such as those in the steel, rubber, textile and auto industries.

John L. Lewis
CIO history 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november8

AFL Boycotts This Date In Peace & Justice History for 10/13

October 13, 1934
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) voted to boycott all German-made products as a protest against Nazi antagonism to organized labor within Germany.
Watch The U.S. and the Holocaust , 2022, A new documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october13

Shoemakers Organize, & Women Win, in Peace & Justice History for 9/18

October 18, 1648

I. Marc Carlson  
The Shoemakers Guild of Boston became the first labor union in the American colonies. 
Labor organization in colonial times 
October 18, 1929
The Persons Case, a legal milestone in Canada, was decided.
Five women from Alberta, later known as the Famous Five, asked the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on the legal status of women.
Some decisions of Magistrate Emily Murphy had been challenged on the basis that she was not a legal person, and she was a candidate for appointment to the Canadian Senate. After the Supreme Court ruled against them, they appealed to the British Privy Council.The Privy Council found for the women on this day (eight years after the case began and eleven years after women received the federal vote), declaring that women were persons under the law. October 18 has since been celebrated as Persons Day in Canada, and October as Women’s History Month.


Sculpture by Barbara Paterson of the Famous Five in Ottawa, first on Parliament Hill to honor women
The other women activists in the Famous Five: Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Irene Parlby.
The Persons Case 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october18

“There is not peace in many of our cities because there is not freedom.” – Pres. John F. Kennedy

September 10, 1897
Nineteen unarmed striking coal miners were killed and 36 more wounded in Lattimer (near Hazleton), Pennsylvania, for refusing to disperse, by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff. The strikers, most of whom were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later created their own union. 
The background and details 
September 10, 1963
Twenty black students entered public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Alabama. The Governor George C. Wallace had ordered Alabama state troopers to stop the federal court-ordered integration of Alabama’s elementary and high schools. President John Kennedy responded by calling out the Alabama National Guard to protect the students and to see the order enforced.
President Kennedy spoke that day at American University’s commencement, saying, “Peace need not be impractical, war not inevitable . . . There is not peace in many of our cities because there is not freedom.”
September 10, 1996
 
Sheryl Crow’s second album was banned from Wal-Mart stores because the song she co-wrote with Tad Wadhams, “Love Is A Good Thing” opens with
“Watch out sister, watch out brother,
Watch our children while they kill each other
With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores….”
Read more about this event   and an update

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september10

Emancipation, Pullman Strike & Boycott, & More, in Peace & Justice History for 7/5

July 5, 1827
The newly freed African-American population of New York, led by men on horseback, marched in an Emancipation Day Parade from the Battery at the foot of Manhattan to City Hall.
Follow the route of the parade 
July 5, 1894
Buildings erected for the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park were set ablaze, seven reduced to ashes. The fire was part of the chaos in reaction to President Grover Cleveland’s calling out federal troops to end the Pullman Strike.
The Pullman Palace Car Company produced the sleeping cars used by most of the railroads. The contingent of federal, state and local forces equalled the number of striking workers.The Pullman employees, who lived in company-owned housing in Pullman, Illinois, had suffered massive layoffs and pay cuts averaging 25%. The company refused to cut the rent on the housing its employees were required to occupy, nor would it bargain with workers’ representatives.

Federal troops guarding the Arcade Building in Pullman, Illinois.
The Pullman workers’ cause had been taken up by Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who helped organize a nationwide boycott of any train that included a Pullman car.
The Pullman Strikers’ Statement 
More on the Great Pullman Strike 
July 5, 1934

Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, near Rincon Hill.
On “Bloody Thursday,” police armed with machine guns opened fire against striking longshoremen and their supporters, killing two, wounding 32 more by gunfire, and injuring 75 others at Rincon Hill in San Francisco.
July 5, 1935
The National Labor Relations or Wagner Act (named for New York’s Senator Robert Wagner) became law, recognizing workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read more about the act 
July 5, 1989
   
Former National Security Council aide Oliver North received a $150,000 fine and a suspended prison term for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. The scandal was a secret arrangement directed from the Reagan White House that provided funds to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels (despite specific congressional prohibition) from profits gained by selling arms to Iran (at war with Iraq at the time) in hopes of their releasing hostages, despite President Reagan’s claim that he would never negotiate with hostage-takers.
North’s conviction was later overturned because evidence revealed in the congressional Iran-Contra hearings had compromised his right to a fair trial.
The real details on Ollie North’s activities   (It’s still up! -A.)

IWW & So Much Republican Crime in Peace & Justice History for 6/27

June 27, 1905
The IWW (Industral Workers of the World) was founded in Chicago.
June 27, 1954
The first atomic power plant opened at Obninsk, Russia, near Moscow, and could generate up to 5 megawatts. The plant was ordered by Josef Stalin and—being graphite-moderated and water-cooled—could be switched to plutonium production in case it was needed.
The facility was shut down in 2002.
June 27, 1954
Military action directed and funded by the CIA (Operation PBSUCCESS) forced the resignation of the Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
Winner of the country’s first election under universal suffrage, and having taken office in the country’s first peaceful transition of governments, he was accused by the U.S. of Communist influence. Following the coup d’etat, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed.

Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate, the security forces of successive military regimes murdered more than 100,000 civilians, including genocide against Guatemalan native peoples.
More about Arbenz 
The CIA’s own documents on the action 
June 27, 1973
President Nixon’s former White House counsel, John W. Dean, III, told the Senate Watergate Committee about Nixon’s “enemies list.”He released a 1971 memo, written by presidential advisor (now Rev.) Charles Colson, proposing the use of “available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

John Dean
Twenty persons were to be subjected to IRS audits, litigation, prosecution, or denial of federal grants, and an additional list contained 200 names of other individuals and organizations considered enemies of the administration.
The complete Enemies List and memos from Colson 
The president’s misuse of government agencies and powers, in pursuing those he saw as his political enemies, was the basis for one of the articles of impeachment that forced Nixon from office.
June 27, 1978
Seven citizens of the Soviet Union sought refuge in the American Embassy in Moscow as escape from government oppression of religious minorities. The Pentecostal Christians, known as the Siberian Seven, from two families, the Vashchenkos and Chmykhalovs, spent months in the basement of the embassy awaiting permission for all family members to emigrate to the U.S.
One of their sons was already in prison for defying the military draft, and another was about to reach conscription age. Recently released from prison, Baptist Pyotr Vins was twice assaulted by police after trying to arrange his family’s emigration. His father Georgi, national leader of dissident Baptists, though due for release from a labor camp, faced five additional years of Siberian “exile.” The leader of a breakaway Seventh-day Adventist group was sentenced to five years of hard labor at age 83.
June 27, 1980
President Jimmy Carter signed a measure that required approximately
4 million U.S. men age 18 to 25 to register for the military draft, and all 18-year-old males thereafter. If there were to be a crisis, registered men would be inducted as determined by age and a random lottery.
June 27, 1986
The International Court of Justice (“World Court”) decided that the United States violated international law as well as its bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Amity with Nicaragua through its use of force against the Central American country. This included a trade embargo, the mining of harbors and bombing of airfields, as well as furnishing financial, military and logistical support to the so-called Contra insurgents. The Contras’ goal was to overthrow Nicaragua’s popular left-wing government. The Court also ruled that the U.S. should compensate the country financially.The Reagan administration had originally contested the standing of the Court to rule on such an issue, and it had walked out of Court after losing the ruling on jurisdiction, despite its treaty obligation to appear. The Court’s judgment to act had been decided 11-3 on almost all counts, those voting for the U.S. position being an American, a British and a Japanese judge.
THE WORLD COURT IN ACTION by Howard N. Meyer 
More about the Court’s decision 

Peace & Justice History for 6/21

June 21, 1877
 
The Molly Maguires
Four members of the Molly Maguires were hung for murder in what was then Mauch Chunk, and in Pottsville, towns in Pennsylvania’s Carbon County. The Molly Maguires was a secret and violent Irish-Catholic organization of coal miners formed to combat the oppressive working and living conditions in the anthracite coal region of the state.
Read more (2 links)
June 21, 1908
A Women’s Sunday Suffrage rally, supporting the right of women to vote, drew several hundred thousand to London’s Hyde Park from all over the country.

Women were encouraged to wear “the colours” – white (for purity), green (hope) and purple (dignity) – and in “as fetching, charming and ladylike a manner as possible.” As the Yorkshire Daily Post put it: “At least one half of the crowd was composed of the sort of people you would expect to see at a suburban garden party.”
The women’s suffrage movement 
June 21, 1964
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young Freedom Summer workers, disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, while registering negroes to vote. Their bodies were found six weeks later, having been shot and then buried in an earthen dam.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan eventually went to prison on federal conspiracy charges related to the disappearance; none served more than six years.
Schwerner and Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Chaney was a local African-American man who had joined CORE in 1963.
Read more and hear versions of Pete Seeger’s song,  “Those Three are On My Mind”

More on Chaney 
Read about the movie
June 21, 1997
100,000 marched in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit after nearly two years on the picket line.

support rally march 1, 1997  photo: Paul Felton
The Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA) had refused to bargain in good faith (later confirmed by a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board), even after the union members had worked for months without a contract, and the DNA, which ran both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, had begun to impose the changes they had been insisting on at the bargaining table.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june21

Peace & Justice History for 6/3

June 3, 1900

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a consolidation of seven smaller east coast needle trades unions, was founded.
Read more
 
Herman Grossman, ILGWU president
June 3, 1946
In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional as “an undue burden on commerce.”

The southern states refused to enforce it, however, and Jim Crow (the term for laws, local and state, that enforced segregation) continued as the way of life in the South.
Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia.
Read more about Irene Morgan 
Recovering from surgery and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by (future Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and two years later her case reached the Court.

Headlines when Irene Morgan won out over Jim Crow (JC) segregation law
June 3, 1957
Thousands of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make those dangers known.”
“…Then on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the scientists in Washington University, St. Louis, I wrote the Scientists’ Bomb Test Appeal, which within two weeks was signed by over two thousand American scientists and within a few months by 11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries….” –Linus Pauling
 
Linus Pauling at a disarmament demonstration photo: Robert Carl Cohen

Read “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World.”

Pauling is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry in 1954; for Peace in 1962. Read his acceptance speech, “Science and Peace”
June 3, 1964
Conscientious objection, the refusal to bear arms in time of war on the grounds of moral or religious principles, became legally recognized in Belgium.
A history of European conscientious objection 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june3

“Blowin’ In The Wind”, And An Important SCOTUS Decision in Regard to Labor in Peace & Justice History for 5/27

May 27, 1940
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a sit-down strike was not a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act even if it interfered with interstate commerce. The company had sued for treble damages (triple their financial loss) under the Act. The Court said that if the strike were found to be a restraint of trade, then “practically every strike in modern industry would be brought within the jurisdiction of the federal courts under the Sherman Act.”
The American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers under its president, William Leader, had declared a strike at Apex Hosiery Co. in Philadelphia, and had organized support among other workers in the city. When Apex refused to recognize the union, he declared a sit-down strike and led an occupation of the factory which lasted for
seven weeks.
Unlike the UAW sit-down at the GM plant in Flint, however, violence was committed against the management personnel and significant damage was done to manufacturing equipment.
Summary and full text of the Supreme Court decision 
May 27, 1963

The record album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which featured the song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was released. The song warns of the perils of nuclear war.“ …how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they’re forever banned?”
The song and the lyrics 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymay.htm#may27