Organized Labor

The long fight

History

Deep dives into the strikes, laws, and people that built every worker protection you have today. Nothing was given. Everything was taken.

Gilded Age

Haymarket 1886: They Hanged Four Men for a Bomb Nobody Proved They Threw
A bomb went off at a peaceful rally for the eight-hour day. The state put eight labor organizers on trial, convicted them without evidence, and hanged four of them. The rest of the world made May Day.
1886-05-04

New Deal

Bloody Thursday and the Union It Built
On July 5, 1934, San Francisco police shot two strikers in the back on the Embarcadero. One was a longshoreman and World War I veteran. The other was a Greek immigrant cook who volunteered at the strikers' soup kitchen. Four days later, the city walked silently behind their coffins. What they built on that ground became the ILWU.
1934-07-05
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.
1937-05-30

Postwar

Charleston, 1969: One Hundred and Thirteen Days for Recognition as Human Beings
For 113 days in the spring and summer of 1969, hundreds of Black women struck two public hospitals in Charleston for a wage increase and a union. South Carolina answered with more than a thousand National Guardsmen, armored personnel carriers, a curfew, and roughly a thousand arrests. The workers came back with a raise, a grievance procedure, and every one of the twelve fired organizers reinstated. The union was not recognized. Rosetta Simmons, one of the twelve, said what they had won: 'We gained recognition as human beings.'
1969-06-27

Neoliberal

Terminal Island: The Women Who Built the Tuna Canneries, and the Three Hammers That Took Them Out
For sixty years the tuna canneries of Fish Harbor ran on the hands of immigrant women. First Japanese, until the government removed them in 1942. Then Mexican, Yugoslav, Portuguese, and Filipino, until the companies moved to American Samoa in 1984. Every time those women built real power, a bigger hammer came down.
2026-05-04