Today in Labor History June 7, 1788: Residents of Grenoble, France, tossed roof tiles and junk down upon royal troops during the Day of the Tiles. This was one of the first events of the French Revolution. Tensions had been rising because of poor harvests, poverty and hunger. To make matters worse, the aristocracy and the church continued to collect royalties from the peasants and refused to do anything to help alleviate their misery. On the morning of June 7, men and women began marching through the streets of Grenoble, with sticks and rocks, axes and metal bars. They took over the cathedral and rang the bells, which drew in peasants from the countryside. When the navy attacked a 75-year-old man, the people began ripping up the streets. They climbed to the rooftops and began throwing tiles and other projectiles at the soldiers below. They forced the politicians to flee.
Today in Labor History May 14, 1980: Salvadoran and Honduran soldiers gunned down 600 Salvadoran refugees as they tried to cross the Sumpul River from El Salvador. Soldiers from El Salvador’s notorious ORDEN paramilitary also bludgeoned people with gun butts and gored them with machetes and military knives. They also threw babies and children into the air and decapitated them with machetes. A Honduran priest who visited the site said that there were so many vultures picking at the bodies in the river that it looked like a black carpet. Typhoid cases broke out in villages down river because of the large quantity of rotting corpses. And bones from the victims could still be seen a year later.
Today in Labor History February 23, 1882: B. Traven was born on this date in Poznan, Poland. Traven’s real name was probably Ret Marut. He was active in the Bavarian uprising and the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. When the German state quashed the Republic and started arresting and executing activists, he fled to Mexico, where he began writing novels. Traven was a brilliant satirist and wrote novels sympathetic to workers and peasants, including the “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Death Ship,” “The White Rose,” as well as his Jungle Series of novel depicting the plight of Indigenous campesinos in Mexico.