... for the week of March 8, 2010 

March 08

Thousands of New York needle trades workers demonstrate for higher wages, shorter workday, and end to child labor. The demonstration became the basis for International Women’s Day - 1908

New York members of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, many of them women, strike. They persevere despite beatings by police, winning a 10 percent wage increase and five-day work week - 1926

The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act took effect on this day. It limits the ability of federal judges to issue injunctions against workers and unions involved in labor disputes - 1932

March 09
The Westmoreland County (Pa.) Coal Strike – known as the "Slovak strike" because some 70 percent of the 15,000 strikers were Slovakian immigrants – begins on this date and continues for nearly 16 months before ending in defeat. Sixteen miners and family members were killed during the strike - 1912

Work begins on the $8 billion, 800-mile-long Alaska Oil pipeline connecting oil fields in northern Alaska to the sea port at Valdez. Tens of thousands of people worked on the pipeline, enduring long hours, cold temperatures, and brutal conditions. At least 32 died on the job - 1974

March 10

U.S. Supreme Court upholds espionage conviction of labor leader and socialist Eugene V. Debs. Debs was jailed for speaking out against World War I. Campaigning for president from his Atlanta jail cell, he won 6 percent of the vote - 1919

New York City bus drivers, members of the Transport Workers Union, go on strike. After 12 days of no buses – and a large show of force by Irish-American strikers at the St. Patrick’s Day parade – Mayor Fiorello La Guardia orders arbitration - 1941

United Farm Workers leader César Chávez breaks a 24-day fast, by doctor’s order, at a mass in Delano, California’s public park. Several thousand supporters are at his side, including Sen. Robert Kennedy. Chavez called it “a fast for non-violence and a call to sacrifice” - 1968

March 11
Luddites smash 63 “labor saving” textile machines near Nottingham, England - 1811

Fabled railroad engineer John Luther “Casey” Jones born in southeast Missouri. A member of the Railroad Engineers, he was the sole fatality in a wreck near Vaughan, Miss. on April 29, 1900. His skill and heroics prevented many more deaths - 1863

Transport Workers Union members at American Airlines win 11-day national strike, gaining what the union says was the first severance pay clause in industry - 1950

March 12

The Lawrence, Mass. "Bread and Roses" textile strike ends when the American Wollen Co. agrees to most of the strikers’ demands; other textile companies quickly followed suit - 1912

Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO from 1979 to 1995, born in Camden, South Carolina - 1922

Steelworkers approve a settlement with Oregon Steel Mills, Inc. and its CF&I Steel subsidiary, ending the longest labor dispute in the USWA’s history and resulting in more than $100 million in back pay for workers - 2004 

March 13
A four-month UAW strike at General Motors ends with a new contract. The strikers were trying to make up for the lack of wage hikes during World War II - 1946 

March 14
The Movie "Salt of the Earth" opens. The classic film centers on a long and difficult strike led by Mexican-American and Anglo zinc miners in New Mexico. Real miners perform in the film, in which the miners’ wives – as they did in real life – take to the picket lines after the strikers are enjoined - 1954 

Sources:
Toil and Trouble, by Thomas R. Brooks; American Labor Struggles, by Samuel Yellen; IWW calendar, Solidarity Forever; Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, edited by Robert E. Weir and James P. Hanlan; Southwest Labor History Archives/George Meany Center; Geov Parrish’s Radical History; workday Minnesota; Andy Richards and Adam Wright, AFL-CIO Washington DC Metro Council (graphics research).