Today in Labor History March 28, 1871: Over 200,000 people turned out at the Paris City Hall to see their newly elected revolutionary officials of the Paris Commune. The red flag, emblematic of the Commune, was raised over all public buildings.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1849: French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was sentenced to three years in prison for anti-government writings. Famous for the saying, “Property is Theft,” many believe that he was the first person to call himself an anarchist.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.
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 28, 1892: French anarchist, Ravachol, was arrested for blowing up the homes of two government officials. His attentat was in response to the police murders of 9 workers, who had been demonstrating for the eight-hour-day, on May 1, 1891, and for the Clichy Affair, that same day, when anarchists were arrested and tortured by police.
@MikeDunnAuthor
you can't end poverty with wages.
The wage system is one of the causes of poverty (the other one being violence).
If you want to end poverty, you have to end private property of land.
Today In Labor History March 27, 1866: President of the United States of America Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. However, Congress overrode his veto and passed the bill, the first time this had occurred over any major legislation. The bill was the first in the U.S. to define citizenship, and to affirm equal rights under the law for all citizens, including African Americans. Johnson’s rationale for the veto was that the law “discriminated” against whites in favor of blacks.
Today In Labor History March 27, 1993: The London office of the anarchist website and journal, Freedom, was bombed by fascists. Freedom, which started as a newspaper in 1886, was created by volunteers that included Peter Kropotkin.
Today In Labor History March 27, 1964: The magnitude of 9.2 Good Friday earthquake struck Southcentral Alaska, killing 125 people and inflicting massive damage to the city of Anchorage. It was the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history. 600 miles of fault fractured at once, moved up to 60 feet and released 500 years of pent-up stress. 200 miles away, in Kodiak, some areas were permanently raised 30 feet. Parts of Anchorage dropped by 8 feet. The quake generated tsunamis that wiped out many small Alaskan villages, and others that damaged Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii and Japan. In Hawaii, a 12.5 foot tsunami hit Hilo, causing relatively minor damage. However, just 4 years prior, the great Chilean Quake of 1960 (9.5 magnitude) generated a tsunami that destroyed much of Hilo and killed 61 people. And on April 1, 1946, an 8.6 quake in Alaska caused Hawaii’s worst ever tsunami (some waves were over 50 feet high), killing over 160 in Hilo. A 100-foot tsunami wiped out a village in Alaska.
Today In Labor History March 27, 1912: Start of the 8-month Northern railway strike in Canada by the IWW. Over 8,000 construction workers, led by the IWW, walked off the job at Northern Railway workcamps Wobblies picketed employment offices in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Tacoma and Minneapolis in order to block the hiring of scabs.
Fellow workers pay attention to what I'm going to mention,
For it is the fixed intention of the Workers of the World.
And I hope you'll all be ready, true-hearted, brave and steady,
To gather 'round our standard when the red flag is unfurled.
CHORUS:
Where the Fraser River flows, each fellow worker knows,
They have bullied and oppressed us, but still our union grows.
And we're going to find a way, boys, for shorter hours and better pay, boys
And we're going to win the day, boys, where the river Fraser flows.
For these gunny-sack contractors have all been dirty actors,
And they're not our benefactors, each fellow worker knows.
So we've got to stick together in fine or dirty weather,
And we will show no white feather, where the Fraser river flows.
Now the boss the law is stretching, bulls and pimps he's fetching,
And they are a fine collection, as Jesus only knows.
But why their mothers reared them, and why the devil spared them,
Are questions we can't answer, where the Fraser River flows.
(Lyrics by Joe Hill, 1912, to the tune of “Where the River Shannon Flows.”)