Today in Labor History March 30, 1930: Three thousand workers, mostly African-American, began construction on the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. The employer cut costs by failing to provide safety equipment. Additionally, bosses forced the men to work 10-15-hour days, often at gunpoint, without breaks and without masks to protect themselves from the silicon dust. Consequently, hundreds of workers died of silicosis. Possibly over 1,000 people, one-third of the entire workforce, died from silicosis, in one of America’s worst cases of mass workplace mortality.
Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.
Today in Labor History March 25, 1911: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed 146 people, mostly immigrant women and young girls who were working in sweatshop conditions. As tragic as this fire was for poor, working class women, over 100 workers died on the job each day in the U.S. in 1911. What was most significant was that this tragedy became a flash point for worker safety and public awareness of sweatshop conditions.
The Triangle workers had to work from 7:00 am until 8:00 pm, seven days a week. The work was almost non-stop. They got one break per day (30 minutes for lunch). For this they earned only $6.00 per week. In some cases, they had to provide their own needles and thread. Furthermore, the bosses locked the women inside the building to minimize time lost to bathroom breaks.
A year prior to the fire, 20,000 garment workers walked off the job at 500 clothing factories in New York to protest the deplorable working conditions. They demanded a 20% raise, 52-hour work week and overtime pay. Over 70 smaller companies conceded to the union’s demands within the first 48 hours of the strike. However, the bosses at Triangle formed an employers’ association with the owners of the other large factories. Soon after, strike leaders were arrested. Some were fined. Others were sent to labor camps. They also used armed thugs to beat up and intimidate strikers. By the end of the month, almost all of the smaller factories had conceded to the union. By February, 1910, the strike was finally settled.
A person walks past some 1040 cardboard coffins, symbolising the number of victims who lost their lives in a workplace last year, which are placed in Piazza del Popolo during the campaign 'Zero dead at work' organised by the Italian Labor Union (UIL) in Rome, Italy. REUTERS/Yara Nardi
Today in Labor History March 10, 1906: Coal dust exploded at the Courrieres mine in France. 1,099 miners died. It was the second worst mining disaster of the 20th century. (1,549 miners died in the Benxihu accident in China, in 1946). As a result of the Courrieres disaster, 45,000 miners went on strike, protesting the ongoing unsafe working conditions. The authorities sent in the military, which quashed the strike.
Today in Labor History February 24, 1919: U.S. Congress passed a new Child Labor law. However, in 1924, the courts declared it unconstitutional. A similar law passed in 1917. The Supreme Court ruled that one unconstitutional, too. It wasn’t until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that modern child labor laws were enforced in the U.S. However, the law never banned child labor in agriculture. Consequently, 500,000 children pick roughly 25% of all the food harvested in the U.S. They often still work 10 or more hours a day. They are exposed to dangerous pesticides and die at a rate five times higher than kids in other industries. Barely half the kids working in agriculture ever finish high school.
Today in Labor History December 29, 1970: President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law. Ever since, successive administrations have whittled away at the efficacy of this agency, which was designed to protect workers. Nevertheless, a study in 2012, published in the journal “Science,” found a 9.4% reduction in workplace injuries and a 26% reduction in the cost of workplace injuries since 1970. They also found that these reductions came at no additional cost to business or consumers. A 2020 study by the “American Economic Review” found that President Obama’s press releases that named and shamed companies that were violating OSHA had the same effect on improving compliance by other companies as having 210 inspections.
In 2022, there were 5,486 fatal workplace injuries in the U.S., a 5.7 % increase from 2021, a rate of 3.7 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.
Today in Labor History September 12, 1940: An explosion at the Hercules Powder Plant armaments factory, in New Jersey, killed 51 workers and injured over 200. To this day, the cause remains unclear. However, at the time, it was blamed variously on sabotage by the Irish Republican Army or by Nazis, or just an industrial accident.
Today in Labor History September 6, 1869: The Avondale fire killed 110 miners, including several juveniles under the age of 10. It led to the first mine safety law in Pennsylvania. Avondale is near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River flows nearby. The mine had only one entrance, in violation of safety recommendations at the time. In the wake of the fire, thousands of miners joined the new Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, one of the nation’s first large industrial unions (and precursor to the United Mineworkers). My book, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” opens with this fire. My main character, Mike Doyle, joins the bucket brigade trying to put out the flames shooting out of the mineshaft.
Today in Labor History September 2, 1991: 25 workers were killed by a fire at the nonunion Imperial Foods poultry processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Bosses had locked the doors in violation of the law, leaving the workers no escape.