SEPTEMBER 11
1897 – Some 75,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia end a 10-week strike after winning an eight-hour day, semi-monthly pay, and the abolition of overpriced company-owned stores, where they had been forced to shop.
2001 – More than 3,000 people died when suicide hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Among the dead in New York were 634 union members, the majority of them New York City fire fighters and police on the scene when the towers fell.
2009 – Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life Norma Rae of the movies, dies at age 68.

SEPTEMBER 12
1918 – Eugene V. Debs, Labor leader and socialist, sentenced to 10 years for opposing World War I. While in jail Debs received one million votes for president.
1932 – Jobless workers march on grocery stores and seize food in Toledo, Ohio.
1934 – National Guardsmen fire on “sullen and rebellious” strikers at the Woonsocket (Rhode Island) Rayon plant, killing one and injuring three others.  A correspondent said the crowd of about 2,000 “went completely wild with rage.”
1940 – A total of 49 people are killed, 200 injured, in explosion at the Hercules Powder Company plant in Kenvil, N.J.
1998 – New York City’s Union Square, the site of the first Labor Day in 1882, is officially named a national historic landmark.

SEPTEMBER 13
1926 – The Post Office Department orders 25,000 railway mail clerks to shoot to kill any bandits attempting to rob the mail.
1971 – Eleven AFSCME-represented prison employees, 33 inmates die in four days of rioting at New York State’s Attica Prison and the retaking of the prison.

SEPTEMBER 14
1901 – The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers union calls off an unsuccessful three-month strike against U. S. Steel Corporation subsidiaries.
1933 – A striker is shot by a bog owner (and town-elected official) during a walkout by some 1,500 cranberry pickers, members of the newly-formed Cape Cod Cranberry Pickers Union Local 1.
1959 – Congress passes the Landrum-Griffin Act. The law expands many of the anti-Labor provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, increasing union reporting requirements and restricting secondary boycotting and picketing.

SEPTEMBER 15
1845 – Some 5,000 female cotton workers in and around Pittsburgh, Pa., strike for a 10-hour day. The next day, male trade unionists become the first male auxiliary when they gather to protect the women from police attacks. The strike ultimately failed.
1962 – President Kennedy signs off on a $900 million public works bill for projects in economically depressed areas.
1970 – More than 350,000 members of the United Auto Workers begin what is to become a 69-day strike against General Motors.

SEPTEMBER 16
1945 – More than 43,000 oil workers strike in 20 states, part of the post-war strike wave.
2004 – A player lockout by the National Hockey League begins, leading to cancellation of what would have been the league’s 88th season.
2009 – Richard Trumka is elected president of the AFL-CIO at the federation’s convention in Pittsburgh.

SEPTEMBER 17
1862 – Seventy-five workers die in an explosion at Allegheny Arsenal, Pittsburgh, Pa.
1868 – At a New York convention of the National Labor Congress, Susan B. Anthony calls for the formation of a Working Women’s Association.
1900 – One-hundred-thousand Pennsylvania anthracite coal miners go on strike. Their average annual wage is $250. They are paid by the ton, defined by Pennsylvania as 2,400 pounds, but which mine operators have increased to as much as 4,000 pounds.
1917 – National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) formed at a convention in Washington, D.C. In 1999 it became part of the Int’l Association of Machinists (IAM).
1963 – A Southern Pacific train loaded with sugar beets strikes a makeshift bus filled with 60 migrant workers near Salinas, Calif., killing 32. The driver said the bus was so crowded he couldn’t see a the train coming.
2011 – The Occupy Wall Street movement is launched with an anti-Wall Street march and demonstration that ended up as a two-month encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

(Compiled by David Prosten, founder Union Communication Services)