AUGUST 7
1894 – Eugene Debs and three other trade unionists arrested after Pullman Strike.
1983 – Some 675,000 employees struck ATT Corp. over wages, job security, pension plan changes and better health insurance.
1988 – Television writers, members of The Writers Guild of America, end a 22-week strike with a compromise settlement.
AUGUST 8
1902 – Delegates to the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly elect 35-year-old Charles James, leader of the Boot and Shoe Workers local union, as their president.
1979 – Amalgamated Meat Cutters & Butcher Workmen of North America merge with Retail Clerks Int’l Union to become United Food & Commercial Workers.
1904 – Cesar Chavez is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton, becoming the first Mexican-American ever to receive the honor.
AUGUST 9
1890 – Knights of Labor strike New York Central railroad, ultimately to be defeated by scabbing.
1965 – A fire and resultant loss of oxygen when a high pressure hydraulic line was cut with a torch in a Titan missile silo near Searcy, Ark., kills 53 people, mostly civilian repairmen.
2005 – The United Steelworkers and Amicus, the largest manufacturing union in the United Kingdom, announce formation of a strategic alliance to work on a range of mutual concerns.
AUGUST 10
1931 – The Air Line Pilots Association is founded at a meeting in Chicago attended by 24 activists from across the country.
1939 – President Roosevelt signs amendments to the 1935 Social Security Act, broadening the program to include dependents and survivors’ benefits.
2010 – President 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.
AUGUST 11
1884 – Federal troops drive some 1,200 jobless workers from Washington D.C. Led by unemployed activist Charles “Hobo” Kelley, the group’s “soldiers” include young journalist Jack London and William Haywood, a young miner-cowboy called “Big Bill.”
1917 – One hundred “platform men” employed by the privately owned United Railroads streetcar service in San Francisco abandon their streetcars, tying up many of the main lines in and out of the city center.
2013 – Maine lobster fishers form a local of the Machinists union as they face a 40-year low price for their catches, and other issues. By October, the New York Times reported, it had 600 members, 240 of them dues-payers.
AUGUST 12
1881 – The national Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners is founded in Chicago in a gathering of 36 carpenters from 11 cities.
1898 – Coal company guards kill seven, wound 40 striking miners who are trying to stop scabs, Virden, Ill.
1992 – The North American Free Trade Agreement — NAFTA — is concluded between the United States, Canada and Mexico, to take effect in January 1994, despite protests from Labor, environmental and human rights groups.
1994 – 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.
AUGUST 13
1892 – 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.
1936 – Newspaper Guild members begin three-month strike of Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shutting the publication down in their successful fight for union recognition.
1963 – Civil rights leader and union president A. Philip Randolph strongly protests the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s failure to endorse the Aug. 28 “March on Washington.”
1979 – Five construction workers are killed, 16 injured when the uncompleted roof of the Rosemont (Ill.) Horizon arena collapses.
(Compiled by David Prosten, founder Union Communication Services)