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.
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
The Manongs Called the Strike: Delano, September 8, 1965
On the morning of September 8, 1965, roughly a thousand Filipino farmworkers walked off ten Delano-area vineyards. Larry Itliong called the strike. The standard telling of the Delano Grape Strike begins eight days later, with Cesar Chavez. That telling is wrong.
1965-09-08
For Jobs and Freedom: The Twenty-Two-Year March
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom happened on August 28, 1963. A. Philip Randolph had first called it in 1941. A gay Black socialist Quaker named Bayard Rustin organized the day in eight weeks on a budget of sixty-five thousand dollars. The AFL-CIO declined to endorse it. Two hundred fifty thousand people came anyway. The country took the freedom part most of the way home. The jobs part is still in front of us.
1963-08-28
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