Today in Labor History June 3, 1900: The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was founded. In 1909, they led the Uprising of 20,000, a 14-wk strike sparked by a walkout at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, that led to a General Strike. Management used thugs to brutally beat the women, while police looked the other way. In 1910, they led an even bigger strike, The Great Revolt, of 60,000 cloak-makers. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in 1911, prompted many more women to join the union. In 1919, many members left to join the Communist Party. Many of those who remained were anarchists with dual membership in the radical IWW. They challenged the autocratic leadership of the ILGWU. The 1920s was marred by sectarian battles between left- and right-wing factions and violence by hired gangsters. Ironically, it was Arnold Rothstein (the Jewish gangster behind the Chicago Black Sox scandal, and who mentored mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano) who got the gangsters to withdraw from the union.
Today In Labor History April 8, 1911: 128 convict miners, mostly African-Americans jailed for minor offenses, were killed by a massive explosion at the Banner coalmine near Birmingham, Alabama. While the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which occurred just two weeks earlier, elicited massive public attention and support for the plight of immigrant women working in sweatshop conditions, the Banner explosion garnered almost no public sympathy, probably due to racism and the fact that they were prisoners.
Today in Labor History April 1, 1929: Textile workers struck at the Loray Mill, in Gastonia, N.C. Textile mills started moving from New England, to the South, in the 1890s, to avoid the unions. This escalated after the 1909 Shirtwaist strike (which preceded the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire), the IWW-led Lawrence (1912) and (1913) Patterson strikes, which were led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca. The Gastonia strike was violent and bloody. Dozens of strikers were imprisoned. A pregnant white woman, Ella Mae Wiggins, wrote and performed songs during the strike. She also lived with and organized African American workers, one of the worst crimes a poor white woman could commit in the South. The strike ended soon after goons murdered her. Woody Guthrie called Wiggins the pioneer of the protest ballad and one of the great folk song writers.
Wiley Cash wrote a wonderful novel about Ella Mae Wiggins and the Gastonia strike, “The Last Ballad.” Jess Walter wrote a really great novel about the Spokane free speech fight, featuring Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, called “The Cold Millions.” Other novels about the Gastonia strike include Sherwood Anderson’s, “Beyond Desire,” and Mary Heaton Vorse’s, “Strike!”