JANUARY 13TH
1874 – The original Tompkins Square Riot. As unemployed workers demonstrated in New York's Tompkins Square Park, a detachment of mounted police charged into the crowd and beat men, women and children with batons.
1924 – As the nation debates a constitutional amendment to curb the widespread practice of brutal overwork of children in factories and fields, U.S. District Judge GW McClintic is instead voicing concern about children's inaction.
JANUARY 14TH
1993 – Clinton-era OSHA enacts confined space standards to prevent more than 50 deaths and 5,000 serious injuries annually to workers who enter confined spaces.
1995 – Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules bosses can fire workers for being gay.
2003 – About 14,000 General Electric employees are striking for two days to protest the company's mid-contract decision to pass an average of $400 in additional health insurance co-pays to each worker.
2014 – A 15-month lockout by the Minnesota Orchestra against members of the Twin Cities Musicians' Union, Local 30-73, will end if the musicians agree to a 15 percent pay cut (management wanted up to 40 percent) and increased health care cost sharing. They won a revenue-sharing contract based on the performance of the orchestra's endowments. It was the longest-running contract dispute over a concert orchestra in the country.
JANUARY 15TH
1919 – Seventeen area workers die when a large molasses storage tank in Boston's North End neighborhood bursts, sending a 40-foot wave of molasses through the streets at an estimated speed of 35 miles per hour. A total of 21 people died and 150 were injured. The incident is known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, the Great Molasses Flood, and the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy.
1938 – The CIO miners' union in Grass Valley, California, is striking for higher wages, union recognition and the eight-hour day. The strike was crushed when vigilantes and police officers drove 400 miners and their families from the area.
1946 – About 174,000 members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) union went on strike at General Electric and Westinghouse after the energy companies with record profits offered only a half-cent hourly raise. After nine weeks, the strike was resolved with a wage increase of 18.5 cents per hour.
JANUARY 16TH
1920 – Thousands of Palmer Raid detainees gain the right to meet with and represent attorneys at deportation hearings. “Palmer” was Alexander Mitchell Palmer, US Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson. Palmer believed that communism was “eating its way into the homes of American workers” and that socialists were causing most of the country's social problems.
JANUARY 17TH
1915 – Radical Labor organizer and anarchist Lucy Parsons leads hunger march in Chicago; IWW songwriter Ralph Chaplin wrote “Solidarity Forever” for the march.
1962 – President John F. Kennedy signs Executive Order 10988, guaranteeing federal employees the right to join unions and bargain collectively.
JANUARY 18TH
1909 – The US Supreme Court decides Moyer vs. Peabody that a state governor and National Guard officers can detain anyone – in this case, striking miners in Colorado – without good cause “in a time of insurrection” and deny the person's right to appeal.
1978 – “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck is performed by billboard magazine as the most popular song in the US
JANUARY 19TH
1915 – Twenty strikers at the American Agricultural Chemical Co. in Roosevelt, New Jersey, were shot, two fatally, by factory guards. She and other strikers had stopped an incoming train looking for strikebreakers when the guards opened fire.
1920 – About 3,000 members of the Filipino Federation of Labor strike on the plantations of Oahu, Hawaii. Their number grows to 8,300 as members of the Japanese Trade Union Federation join them.
1973 – In Yuba City, California, labor contractor Juan V. Corona was convicted of murdering 25 itinerant farm workers he employed in 1970 and 1971.
1986 – Bruce Springsteen makes an unannounced appearance at a charity event for laid-off 3M workers in Asbury Park, New Jersey
(Compiled by David Prosten, founder of Union Communication Services)