Our History

1936: The Steelworkers Organizing Committee launches its first successful organizing drive in Minnesota, winning representation for workers at the U.S...

1930: Northwest Airlines pilots in Minneapolis organize a pilots council, which a year later becomes Council 1 of the new Air Line Pilots Association...

1920: Women get the right to vote when Congress adopts the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The victory follows decades of agitation by the “suffra...

1917: The Minnesota Commission on Public Safety, created during World War I by the state Legislature, assumes near unlimited power and is hostile to o...

1910: St. Paul Post Office clerks are the first to organize in Minnesota. 1910: Women represent 1 in 4 workers in the waged workforce. By 1930, they r...

1900: The Boot & Shoe Workers union organizes a Minneapolis plant in 1900 and two St. Paul plants in 1901.1902: Charles James, African-American le...

1890: The Minnesota State Federation of Labor is formed. Its platform includes the 8-hour day; state inspection of mines and factories; free textbooks...

1886: Printers in Duluth organize, followed within a few months by the Cigar Makers...

1884: First shipment of iron ore from the Vermilion Range to the port of Duluth. The Mesabi Range ships its first ore to the port in 1892 and the...

1880s: From 1880 through the 1940s, immigrants change the face of America. Drawn by economic opportunity and fleeing war and political or religio...

1880's: The notion of “Employment at Will” starts to become the pervasive doctrine in American workplaces and remains so today. The central tenet...

1878, December 5: First organization of the Stonecutters Union in St. Paul.  ...