Today in Labor History October 10, 1912: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) struck in Little Falls, New York. The strike lasted into January and involved primarily immigrant workers. It started at the Phoenix Knitting Mill, but spread to the Gilbert Knitting Mill, also in the Mohawk Valley. In November, the Little Falls Council voted to authorize a contingent of special police, which escalated tensions. Later that month, the AFL created United Textile Workers local #206 to compete with the Wobblies for members and press attention. But when the AFL announced it had reached a settlement between with mill owners, later that month, the workers refused it, siding with the Wobblies and demanding greater concessions.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #strike #union #textiles #immigrant #newyork #wobblies #immigrants

Today in Labor History October 10, 1933: 18,000 cotton workers struck in Pixley, California. Four were killed in the struggle, which ultimately won them a raise. The Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU) led the strike by Mexican pickers. The union was demanding a wage of $1.00 per hundred pounds of cotton picked, recognition of the union and abolition of contract labor. The union led 24 strikes, involving 37,500 union members, in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s. During the cotton strikes of 1933, striking workers were evicted from company housing. Growers and managerial staff were deputized by the police. The owners employed bankers, merchants, ministers and Boy Scouts to attacks the workers. A local sheriff said, "We protect our farmers here in Kern County. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs."

#workingclass #LaborHistory #cotton #strike #california #mexican #union #police #policebrutality #racism

Today in Labor History October 10, 1980: The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front was founded in El Salvador. The FMLN, which fought a long civil war to overthrow the rightwing dictatorship, was named after Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Marti (1893-1932). Marti, a comrade of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader, helped found the Central American Communist Party. In 1932, he helped lead an uprising that, for ten days, was the first Soviet in the western hemisphere. The rebellion was crushed by the dictator Maximiliano Martinez, who slaughtered over 30,000 peasants, indigenous people and communists in the Matanza. Martinez had once proclaimed, “America is great because it eradicated its Indians. For El Salvador to become great, so must we.” Martinez was also one of the first world leaders to recognize Adolf Hitler. He also believed in the “court of invisible doctors.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #elsalvador #FarabundoMarti #communism #soviet #Revolutionary #imperialism #fascism #genocide #indigenous #FMLN #Nicaragua #Sandinista

#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 9, 2025:
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Today in Labor History October 9, 1980: The Plowshares movement began when Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others (the "Plowshares Eight") trespassed onto the General Electric Re-entry Division, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where Mark 12A reentry vehicles for the Minuteman III missile were made. They beat on the reentry vehicles with hammers and poured blood on documents and prayed for peace. In 1983, Plowshares activists entered AVCO Systems Division in Wilmington, Massachusetts, where MX and Pershing II missiles were made, and damaged plans and equipment there. There were several other similar Plowshares actions. Many of the activists were imprisoned, including the Berrigan brothers. The longest Plowshares sentence was 18 years, given to activists for entering a Minuteman II missile silo in 1984. The Berrigan brothers’ legal battle was depicted in Emile de Antonio's 1982 film “In the King of Prussia,” which starred Martin Sheen and featured appearances by the Plowshares Eight as themselves. Ploughshares actions have continued into the 21st century with the April 30, 2008, action in Blenheim, New Zealand, where activists damaged the ECHELON signal interception program, causing $1.2 million in damages; with the 2009, action at the U.S. Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, where Trident nuclear weapons are stored or deployed on Trident submarines; with the 2012 action at the U.S. Department of Energy's Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which forced a temporary closure of the weapons facility; and the 2018 action at King’s Bay Naval Submarine Base.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #ploughshares #directaction #civildisobedience #danielberrigan #film #nuclear #bombs #imperialism #missiles #peace

Today in Labor History October 9, 1967: Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured and summarily executed in Bolivia, at the age of 39. His capture was orchestrated by Cuban exile, Felix Rodriguez, a CIA operative and Bay of Pigs veteran. It has been alleged the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie, who was living in Bolivia at the time, also helped orchestrate Guevara’s capture. Felix Rodriguez also participated in the Phoenix Program, in the war against Vietnam; met regularly with Vice President George H.W. Bush, during the illegal arming of the Nicaraguan Contras; and participated in the assassination of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #cheguevara #cuba #bolivia #nazis #bayofpigs #cia #felixrodriguez #warcrimes #operationphoenix #vietnam #dea #nicaragua #contras #assassination #communism

Today in Labor History October 9, 1936: A lettuce strike had recently ended in Salinas, California. However, when red flags went up throughout town, the authorities feared communist agitators had returned and removed the red flags, only to find out later that they were part of a traffic check being done by the state highway division.

The first effective organizing in the Salinas Valley began in 1933, with the mostly female lettuce trimmers demanding equal pay to the men. The Filipino field workers supported the women’s demands. In 1934, members of the Filipino Labor Union (FLU) struck the lettuce farms. So, the farmers brought in Mexican and Anglo scabs. They used vigilante mobs and the cops to violently attack the strikers and arrested their leaders. When the Filipino Labor Union and the Mexican Labor Union joined forces, a mob of vigilantes burned their labor camp down and drove 800 Filipinos out of the Salinas Valley at gunpoint. The 1934 strike ended soon after, with the growers recognizing the FLU and offering a small raise. This violence inspired John Steinbeck to write “In Dubious Battle” and “Grapes of Wrath,” for which he won both Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #salinas #union #strike #filipino #mexican #racism #communism #police #policebrutality #vigilante #author #books #writer #johnsteinbeck #novel #fiction #novelprize #pulitzer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 9, 1874: Mary Heaton Vorse was born. Vorse was a labor journalist who participated in and wrote eyewitness accounts of many of the significant labor battles of her day. In the 1910s, she was the founding editor of the “Masses,” as well as an activist in the suffrage and women’s peace movements. In 1912, she participated in and wrote about the Lawrence textile strike. She helped organize the Wobblies’ unemployment protest in New York, 1914, and was good friends with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In 1916, she reported on the IWW Mesabi Range strike. And in 1919, she worked as a publicist for the Great Steel Strike. She also wrote the novel, "Strike!" about the 1929 textile mill strike, in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was made into a film in 2007.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #MaryHeatonVorse #strike #union #IWW #ElizabethGurleyFlynn #gastonia #feminism #peace #writer #author #fiction #books #journalism #novel @bookstadon

#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 8, 2025:
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Today in Labor History October 8, 1969: SDS Weathermen launched "Days of Rage" in Chicago, as a protest against the Vietnam War and the uselessness of national elections. One of their slogans was: "The Elections Don't Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street". During the protests, a few hundred activists attacked over 1,000 cops and local businesses. Six unarmed activists were shot. Over 60 were arrested. They blew up a statue commemorating the police involved in the 1886 Haymarket tragedy bombing, which resulted in the execution of innocent anarchists. The statue was replaced and blown up again in 1970.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #weathermen #weatherunderground #daysofrage #police #vietnam #antiwar #anarchsm

Today in Labor History October 8, 1969: Disguised as a funeral procession, the leftist Uruguayan Tupamaro urban guerrilla organization occupied the town of Pando, robbing three banks of over 40 million pesos. Numerous other robberies followed. They distributed the stolen food and money among the poor in Montevideo. The Tupamaros, named for the revolutionary Túpac Amaru II, who led a major indigenous revolt against the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1780, were active in the 1960s and ‘70s. They also committed political kidnappings and assassinations, including the murder of FBI and CIA agent Dan Mitrione, who had been advising and training Uruguayan police in torture and counterinsurgency. José Mujica, who later became president of Uruguay, had been a member of the Tupamaros.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #communism #guerrilla #tupamaro #tupac #uruguay #cia #fbi

Today in Labor History October 8, 1965: The Indonesian military, led by future dictator Suharto, began torturing and massacring thousands of "suspected" Communists, leading ultimately to the overthrow of leftist President Sukarno. Other targets of the murders were members of the Gerwani women’s movement, trade unionists, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, teachers, students, and alleged leftists in general. The U.S. embassy provided the death squads with the names of suspected “communists.” Intelligence agencies from the U.S., U.K., and Australia provided anti-communist propaganda, as well as military and logistical aid. Overall, the genocide (1965-1966) led to 500,000 to 1.2 million civilian deaths and 1.5 million imprisoned. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 called the massacres "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s." Nevertheless, Western media either downplayed the events, or celebrated them. Suharto remained in power until 1998, continuing to imprison, torture and slaughter workers and civilians. He also presided over the East Timor Genocide of up to 300,000 people in the 1970’s.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #genocide #indonesia #suharto #coldwar #communism #anticommunism #torture #easttimor #cia

#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 7, 2025:
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Today in Labor History October 7, 1944: Uprising at Birkenau extermination camp (associated with Auschwitz). Jewish Sonderkommando, mostly from Greece and Hungary, attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire and threw their Oberkapo into a furnace. Sonderkommando were Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis, on threat of their own deaths, to dispose of gas chamber victims). After escaping, the rebels reached Rajsko, where they hid in the granary, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire. By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the Sonderkommando were still alive and 451 had been killed.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #holocaust #nazis #resistance #uprising #birkenau #auschwitz #fascism #antisemetism #rebellion

Today in Labor History October 7, 1977: Environmentalist activist Eric McDavid was born. He is green anarchist, convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage corporate and government property, as a member of the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI had used Zoe Elizabeth Voss, a paid FBI informant, to infiltrate the group and act as an agent provocateur. She provided the activists with bomb-making plans, the money to buy the materials, transportation and a cabin to work in. She exploited McDavid’s attraction to her to build trust and provoke increasingly radical and provocative actions. She taught the group how to make the bombs. After spending nearly 9 years in prison, McDavid was released in 2015, after the prosecution admitted that the FBI had withheld thousands of pages of potentially exculpatory evidence, including love letters between McDavid and Voss and proof that she had been exempted from an FBI polygraph test.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #environmentalism #earthliberationfront #FBI #agentprovocateur #police #elf

Today in Labor History October 7, 1879: Radical labor organizer and song writer Joe Hill was born in Gavle, Sweden. Hill was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). He was arrested and convicted on trumped up murder charges in Utah. He claimed innocence and the evidence against him was flimsy. However, because of his radical associations, they still convicted and executed him. President Wilson, Hellen Keller (also an IWW member) and the Swedish ambassador all asked for clemency. His famous last words to IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood were “Don’t mourn. Organize.” Some of Hill’s most famous songs were Rebel Girl, There is Power in the Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones-Union Scab. Joe Hill's song "The Preacher & the Slave" first appeared in the IWW’s Little Red Song Book. The song is a parody of the hymn, “Sweet By and By,” often song by the Salvation Army (who the IWW called the Starvation Army), which would try to drown out the union’s street-corner labor organizing with their hymns. The Wobbly bard, Haywire Mac, is believed to be the first person to sing this song in public. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips also covered the song. Joe Hill’s ashes were supposedly sprinkled in every state of the union, except Utah, because he had said, "I don't want to be found dead in Utah." However, it is said that the IWW still keeps a small vial of some of his remaining ashes.

Watch Paul Robeson singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” to striking Scottish miners, 1949: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0bezsMVU7c

You can read my bio of Haywire Mac here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/03/16/the-haywire-mac-story/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #joehill #PreacherAndTheSlave #IWW #union #strike #anarchism #deathpenalty #RebelGirl

#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 6, 2025:
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Today in Labor History October 6, 1969: Shortly before the Days of Rage, the Weather Underground blew up a statue in Haymarket Square, Chicago commemorating the policemen who died in the Haymarket affair of 1886. It was rebuilt in 1970, only to be blown up again by the Weather Underground. After being rebuilt again, Mayor Daley posted a 24-hour armed police guard, at a cost of over $67,000 per year. But it was eventually moved to an enclosed area of Police Headquarters. The statue was erected in 1889. In 1927, on the 41st anniversary of the Haymarket affair, a streetcar jumped its tracks and crashed into the monument because the driver was "sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised." In 1968, on the 82nd anniversary of the Haymarket affair, activists vandalized it with black paint in protest of police brutality against the antiwar movement.

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. to demand the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, anarchists Albert and Lucy Parsons led a peaceful demonstration of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. It was the world’s first May Day/International Workers’ Day demonstration—an event that has been celebrated ever since, by nearly every country in the world, except for the U.S. Two days later, another anarchist, August Spies, addressed striking workers at the McCormick Reaper factory. Chicago Police and Pinkertons attacked the crowd, killing at least one person. On May 4, anarchists organized a demonstration at Haymarket Square to protest that police violence. The police ordered the protesters to disperse. Somebody threw a bomb, which killed at least one cop. The police opened fire, killing another seven workers. Six police also died, likely from “friendly fire” by other cops.

The authorities went on a witch hunt, rounding up most of the city’s leading anarchists and radical labor leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies. The courts ultimately convicted seven anarchists of killing the cops, even though none of them were present at Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown. They executed four of them in 1887, including Albert Parsons. After her husband’s execution, Lucy continued her radical organizing, writing, and speeches. In 1905, she cofounded the IWW, along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Conolly and others.

You can read my more about the Haymarket anarchists, Lucy Parsons, and the fight for the 8-hour day here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/24/lucy-parsons/

Read more about the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #haymarket #anarchism #police #policebrutality #chicago #weatherunderground #eighthourday #lucyparsons #IWW #mayday #internationalworkersday

Today in Labor History October 6, 1934: The Catalan republic was declared following the workers' uprising in Asturias, and other worker uprisings taking place throughout Spain. Workers were trying to overthrow the right-wing regime. In Asturias, they murdered a large number of police and religious leaders with dynamite and machine guns and took control of the region. In Catalan, they declared an antifascist state. By 1936, Catalonia was fully under the control of the workers, led predominantly by the anarchosyndicalist union, CNT, and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #spain #CivilWar #fascism #antifascism #socialism #communism #cnt #FAI #asturias #catalonia

Today in Labor History October 6, 1900: English anarchist author Ethel Mannin was born in London. Her memoir of the 1920s, Confessions and Impressions was one of the first Penguin paperbacks. Her 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described as “an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society.” Mannin protested imperialism in Africa during the 1930s. She was also very active in anti-fascist movements, including the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism, and she supported the military actions of the Spanish Republic.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #antifascism #author #writer #memoir #novel #poetry #fiction #nonfiction #books @bookstadon