On Saturday February 27, 1943, an explosion in the mines killed 75 miners working at Smith Mine # 3, located near Red Lodge, MT.
On Saturday March 6, 1913, Joe Hill’s song “There is Power in a Union” first appeared in Little Red Song Book. The IWW song booklet has been re-printed over 30 times since its first publication in 1905.
On the same day in 1984, a year long British coal strike began.
On Sunday March 7, 1860, six thousand shoemakers and twenty thousand other New England workers struck in Lynn, Massachusetts. The largest strike to take place before the Civil War, the male and female strikers won wage increases for the poorly paid workers. The strike was the fruition of a number of forces, including the publication since 1830 of a radical newspaper, the Awl, which vociferously pushed for labor rights.
On the same day in 1932, police fired at a hunger march in Detroit. They killed four people, hungry people.
Monday March 8 is International Women’s Day. On this day in 1908 thousands working in the New York needle trades demonstrated for higher wages, shorter workdays, the right to vote and an end to child labor.
Information gleaned from “Solidarity Forever: Worker Resistance in Hard Economic Times,” the 2010 calendar of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
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