Organized Labor

Where we stand

“I’ve been a union man since I was a union boy, and I will be a union man until the day I die. If you came here to spit on the workers of the world, or to make excuses for someone who does, you are in the wrong place.

Latest history · New Deal

Ten Workers on a Prairie: The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, Chicago police shot and killed ten striking steelworkers and family members outside Republic Steel's South Chicago mill. A Paramount newsreel caught it all. A studio buried the film. A coroner's jury called it justifiable homicide. Five years later the workers who survived signed a union contract.

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This week · June 15, 2026

Stonewall Was a Workers' Riot

The people at the front of the Stonewall crowd were sex workers, bar staff, and homeless queer kids whose labor the state had criminalized. The bar was a Mafia bottle club because New York refused to license it. The cops took a cut, and raided it anyway. That is a labor story.

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