On This Day in Working Class History

On 24 July 2019 ferry workers in Ketchikan, Alaska, walked out on strike as part of a contract dispute during the busiest time of year.
Around 400 members of the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific rejected a new one-year contract which included a wage freeze. After nine days of strike action, employers agreed to a three-year contract including 3% pay increases and health coverage during the winter off-season.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7893/alaska-ferry-workers-strike

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On this day, 23 July 1918, the Japanese rice riots began against high prices, a revolt up to then unparalleled in the country’s history in terms of scope, size and violence, which eventually led to the fall of Prime Minister Terauchi’s government. As well as multiple riots across the country, the revolt also involved strikes by miners, shipyard and factory workers.
This movement is commemorated by our July T-shirt of the Month, made by a workers' cooperative supporting grassroots unions in Asia: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/search?q=Rice+riots

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On this day, 22 July 2005, civil servants in the Kingdom of Tonga went on strike for 60-90% pay rise. The strike shut down the government and grew to include many other public sector employees and ending up being the most significant challenge to the island's monarchy in its history. The striking workers won their pay rise and forced the government to begin reforming itself. 
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9488/civil-servants-in-tonga-strike

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On this day, 21 July 1945, members of the Irish Women Worker’s Union staged a laundry strike demanding a second week of paid holiday, affecting many of Dublin’s hotels. Hospital laundry workers were exempt from the strike action. The strike lasted 14 weeks and ended in victory for the women, and the following year the government conceded to giving two weeks paid holiday to all workers. 
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9387/laundry-women-strike

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On this day, 20 July 1979, Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier escaped from Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution, in California, with two other detainees, one of whom, Bobby Gene Garcia, was shot to death by a guard. Peltier, a leading member of the American Indian Movement, had been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. He had been warned by fellow Native American prisoner Standing Deer (a.k.a. Robert Wilson) that there was contract on his life in the prison.
Peltier’s original trial was riddled with inconsistencies and distortions. Fo...

On this day, 19 July 1984, the Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike began in Dublin, Ireland. Shop worker Mary Manning refused to check out a customer's South African fruit, as members of her union, Idatu, had voted to not handle South African goods. Manning was then suspended, and she and 11 of her colleagues went on strike in protest. The stoppage went on for three years, ending when the Irish government introduced a ban on South African products.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9108/dunnes-stores-strike

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At midnight on 16 July 2015, 140 workers at the state-owned Qulliq Energy company in Nunavut, Canada, walked out on strike demanding pay increases to keep up with rising prices. The strike, by members of the Nunavut Employees Union who maintained power lines and plants in the region, continued for three weeks until the local government offered them a new three-year pay deal which included pay rises of 2% in the first year and 1.5% in each of the subsequent years, which the workers accepted.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7352/nunavut-power-workers-strike

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On this day, 15 July 1966, national rail operator British Rail scrapped a "colour bar" preventing Black workers from higher paid employment at Euston station in London. At the time the bar was supported by unions but a Black train guard, Asquith Xavier, campaigned to overturn the bar, eventually finding some support in Parliament. 
Xavier was a member of the Windrush Generation who moved to Britain after World War II. In 2019 many of those who moved with him were to be criminalised and deported by the government. 
Despite the success of his campaign, when Xavier was promoted he faced racist ab...

On this day, 14 July 1966 a group of US GIs were given the order to deploy to Vietnam. James Johnson Jr., David A. Samas, and Dennis Mora refused and became the Fort Hood Three: the most high profile US refuseniks to date. They were court-martialled and each jailed for five years. But they helped spark a militant anti-war GI movement which brought an early end to the conflict. Learn more about the GI resistance to the war in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e10-the-gi-resistance-in-vietnam-part-1/

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On this day, 13 July 1917, thousands of workers joined a spontaneous strike in São Paulo following the police killing of a 21-year-old shoemaker, José (or Antonio) Martínez, at a demonstration against the high cost of living two days previously. The stoppage soon became a general strike, and workers could only be persuaded to return to work three days later after being given a 10% pay increase. 
More information and sources: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8481/s%C3%A3o-paulo-general-strike
The strike wave at this time is commemorated by this T-shirt of the Month, made by a workers' co-operative and...

On this day, 12 July 1994, around 4,000 workers at Bridgestone-Firestone tyres in Decatur, Illinois, Akron, Ohio, Noblesville, Indiana, Des Moines, Iowa and Oklahoma City walked out on strike. Workers were protesting against the introduction of 12-hour shifts, pay and healthcare cuts, cuts to unemployment and injury benefits and a two-tier workforce. The workers, members of the United Rubber Workers union, joined 1,600 URW members who had already walked out at Dunlop in Alabama. To fight back, Bridgestone-Firestone hired 2,300 permanent scabs to replace the strikers. After 10 months, the strike was defeated, and many of the strikers were not rehired.
More information, sources and...

On this day, 11 July 1989, a huge strike began of miners in the Soviet Union demanding better food supplies, cleaner working conditions, adequate housing, better care of the environment in mining areas, and rights to share management of the mines.
In March, two brief strikes occurred at the Lidiieka and Kirov mines in Donbass, Ukraine. In July a much bigger strike began in both the Donbass and the Kuznetsky basin in Western Siberia. Within a few days, the strike had grown to 100,000 workers, and threatened to become a general strike when sympathy strikes began.
Most miners had returned to...

On this day, 10 July 1949, Black Industrial Workers of the World dockworker activist Ben Fletcher died at his home in Brooklyn, aged 59.
Fletcher was the leading organiser in Local 8 of the union, which organised the multiracial workforce on the Philadelphia docks in the early part of the 20th-century, and he was one of dozens of IWW members imprisoned during World War I.
His funeral was attended by old comrades who praised his lifetime of activism, his sense of humour, his effectiveness as a speaker and more. Sam Weiner said:
“Ben, we won’t forget the great part you play...

On this day, 9 July 1919, bartenders in Allentown, Pennsylvania, went on strike to impress on citizens the "horrors" of prohibition which was due to be introduced. There was a working class movement of hundreds of thousands called "No beer, no work" which aimed to stop prohibition with strike action. However this is the only actual strike we are aware of.
We have produced items commemorating the No beer no work movement, using their original artwork, here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/no-beer-no-work

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On this day, 8 July, 1908, Black and white coal miners in Birmingham, Alabama, walked out on strike together against an attempt from bosses to eliminate the union. The strike grew quickly to a majority of workers in the area, including those who had previously been scabs. Bosses used evictions, armed thugs, scabs from the North, and forced convict labour to try to break the strike, and the press advocated vigilante attacks and tried to rouse white residents against the multiracial union. Eventually the Governor declared martial law and sent in the army against the workers, breaking the strike and marking a...

On this day, 7 July 1864, Filipino labour leader Isabelo de los Reyes was born in Vigan. He became a journalist and opponent of Spanish colonial rule, for which he was jailed and tortured. He was then deported to Spain and held in the infamous Montjuic Castle in Barcelona, alongside many anarchist political prisoners.
In 1901 he was allowed to return to the Philippines, and he brought with him a library of books by socialists like Karl Marx and anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin. He founded the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina, and helped organise several strikes.
See our timeline of hi...

On this day, 6 July 1934, 800 workers from two plantations in Couva, Trinidad, demonstrated in front of the warden's office complaining at the lack of work. Violence erupted when police attempted to keep protesters away from businesses, to which workers responded by looting. Unrest spread to other plantations, two bosses were attacked and one company headquarters was stoned and set on fire. British colonial police arrested 12 demonstrators. 
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10627/trinidad-plantation-riot

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On this day, 5 July 1777, the word ‘scab’, meaning ‘strikebreaker’, was used in print for the first time. One of the most important words in the working class vocabulary! 
By the late 16th century the word "scab" had come to be used as an English insult, somewhat akin to "lowlife" or "scoundrel". But at some point it began to be used by workers in industrial disputes as a label for workers who crossed picket lines and worked while their colleagues were striking for better pay or conditions. 
It first appeared in print in the Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, dur...

On this day, 4 July 1998, best friends Lin "Spit" Newborn, 24, a Black skinhead and singer, and Daniel Shersty, 20, a white US air force serviceman - both members of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) - were murdered in the desert outside Las Vegas by a gang of white supremacists. 
Newborn's friend, PJ Perez, described him as "a madman. A poet. A motherfucker whose good side you'd want to stay on. He was a father, a son, a passionate and dedicated fighter for what's right." Shersty was born to a working class family in Florida, and joined the air force in order to fund c...

On this day, 3 July 1918, a general strike began on the British dependency, the Isle of Man. Sailors, dockers, school workers, transport workers, shop assistants and others walked out on strike demanding that the price of bread remain at 9p – the same price it was in the UK, where flour was subsidised by the state. Previous agitation on the Isle of Man had pressured the local government to implement a subsidy as well for six months to match the price, amidst rising prices during World War I. But that subsidy just expired and the price was scheduled to be increased to 1 sh...

On this day, 2 July 1848, enslaved people in St Croix (now the US Virgin Islands) rebelled, burned down plantations and besieged the town of Frederiksted. The Caribbean island was at that time a Danish colony, and it had been decreed that slavery would be abolished in 1859, but the enslaved workers refused to wait. 
After revolutions in Europe led to turmoil in nearby Martinique and Guadeloupe, hundreds of rebels seized the moment and rose up. By the end of the day, only the local military garrison, Fort Frederiksværn, had not yet been overrun. 
The following day, the governor general, Pet...

On this day, 1 July 1919, prohibition of the sale of alcoholic drinks stronger than 2.75% in the United States was due to come into force. Hundreds of thousands of workers in New York and New Jersey had voted to strike on this day if the law was enforced. They wore pins declaring "No beer no work". 
Strike action was called off by union leaders, and prohibition was eventually introduced the following year. 
We have reproduced the workers' original artwork to help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/no-beer-no-work

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On this day, 30 June 1977, a riot and mass strike took place against police repression in Faridabad, India. Thousands of factory workers downed tools, shutting down local industry in protest against the death in police custody of Harnam Singh, a maintenance foreman, working in one of the leading companies of Faridabad. Violence had erupted in many parts of Faridabad and vehicles proceeding to the capital were stoned, looted and burnt. According to co-workers, Harnam Singh had been tortured to death by the police on the factory premises in the presence of the managing director, a sub-inspector of police, and some other...

On this day, 29 June 1892, workers at the Homestead Carnegie steel plant in Pennsylvania were locked out after workers refused to accept new production demands. 
Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron Steel Workers, in which skilled workers at the plant were organised. His plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, locked out the union workers, then sacked them on 2 July. The non-union, so-called "unskilled" workers then walked out on strike in protest. 
Frick brought in 300 armed Pinkerton detectives to break the strike. They did kill nine strikers, but eventually a crowd of 10,000 workers, many of them ar...

On this day, 28 June 1969, the Stonewall rebellion began in the early hours. The New York Police Department, as part of its policy of closing gay bars, raided the Stonewall Inn, which had a substantial poor and working class LGBT+ clientele. However, for the first time in the city, rather than submitting to arrest, a crowd began to gather around the police. Inside the bar, gender nonconforming people, trans women and lesbians began resisting invasive body searches. And outside, a butch lesbian fought back against police when they arrested her, calling on the crowd that had formed to “do something.” According to s...

On this day, 27 June 1905, the revolutionary union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago, Illinois.
One of the first multiracial unions in the US, the IWW advocated that all workers unite into one big union, taking control of society and abolishing capitalism.
Its founding conference lasted from June 27 to July 8, and was attended by over 200 workers, including legendary labour organisers like Mother Jones, 'Big' Bill Haywood and leading Black anarchist, Lucy Parsons.
It organised large swathes of previously unorganised workers in the US, and pioneered many innovative new types of industrial action like...

On this day, 26 June 1993, 4,000 workers took to the streets in Decatur, Illinois to protest against their employers. Workers from A.E. Staley, who had been working to rule against imposition of a new, inferior contracts, joined striking coal miners as well as Caterpillar workers who were on a go-slow across the midwest. The following day, A.E. Staley locked out its nearly 800 production workers in an attempt to force them to agree to a switch from eight to 12-hour shifts. So began a mammoth struggle which would only come to an end in December 1995 when, after betrayal by the leadership...

On 25 June 2021, oil workers employed by ExxonMobil on the Doba oilfield in Chad went on strike when the potential sale of the oilfield was announced. The workers were demanding that in the event the sale went through that they would still receive benefits and redundancy pay they were previously entitled to.
The stoppage continued for two weeks, and worker protests continued for some time. In September, Chad's government announced they would work to ensure the workers kept their jobs.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7908/doba-oil-workers-strike

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On this day, 24 June 1980, a two-day general strike began in El Salvador protesting against the US-backed military dictatorship and its counter-insurgency death squads. 85% of the economy was shut down and 80,000 people took to the streets. Police and soldiers killed two people building barricades in the suburb of Delgado.
Noam Chomsky described the crackdown of the right-wing regime which began in March 1980: "the war against the population began in force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which...

On 23 June 2015 municipal workers on the French island of Saint Pierre went on strike demanding a pay increase to compensate for rising prices. The strike was initiated by Force Ouvrière, but supported by other unions, and lasted until June 25, when the local government agreed to pay increases averaging €150 per month to its workers from January 2016.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7876/saint-pierre-strike

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On this day, 22 June 1945, tens of thousands of workers in Nigeria defied the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and walked out on a general strike in protest at the British colonial administration refusing to meet workers' demands for a minimum wage of 2 shillings and sixpence and a 50% increase in the cost of living allowance. 
The TUC wanted to delay any action, but after months of agitation involving mass meetings of up to 8,000 workers at a time, the workers were not prepared to wait any longer. Railway employees, dockers and civil service workers walked out while many workers at private firms r...

On 21 June 2018, health workers in Mongolia announced that they would go on strike in a dispute over pay and conditions at state-run hospitals. The workers also began holding a sit-down protest outside the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. Doctors, nurses and other workers at 207 health facilities around the country had indicated that they would join the strike.
The strike was scheduled to begin on July 4, but it was postponed for an indefinite period after the Ministry agreed to 24 of 26 demands by workers, including a pay increase.
More information, sources and map: https://stories...

On this day, 20 June 1967, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was convicted for refusing the draft for the Vietnam war in Houston, Texas. Ali had been a vocal opponent of the US war, saying “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” 
To try to quell the escalating resistance to the war, Ali was given the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. But their efforts were unsuccessful, and the anti-war movement conti...

On this day, 19 June 1937, after employers failed to agree to oil workers' pay demands, workers at one of Trinidad's oilfields went on strike. 
British colonial authorities attempted to arrest Uriah Butler, a former oil worker-turned preacher, who was helping to lead the dispute. However, he was defended by a crowd of workers, who killed two policemen – soaking one of them with paraffin and burning them. Butler (pictured) then went into hiding. 
The strike quickly spread across all oilfields, then to the rest of the economy. A state of emergency was declared and two British warships rushed to the isla...

On 18 June 2022 firefighters working at the Providenciales International Airport on the Turks and Caicos Islands went on strike in protest at an unequal implementation of a pay award. The action shut down the airport and caused cancellations in domestic and international flights. Workers were due to receive their first pay increase in seven years, of 15%. But the workers complained that the increase was not being paid equally to all workers. After a few days, the airport authority issued a statement promising to review workers' salaries with the aim at implementing a new, fair grading scale.
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On this day, 17 June 1971, construction workers in New South Wales initiated a "green ban", refusing to build luxury houses over Kelly's Bush, the last open space in a suburb. 
Local women had been campaigning to save the park, and eventually they approached construction workers and their union, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). The workers agreed to boycott the work, in a move which became known as a "green ban". 
Despite a management threat to use scab replacement workers, the builders and residents won, and Kelly's Bush remains an open public reserve today. 
A wave of green bans sub...

On this day, 16 June 1983, workers at the Chilean state-run El Salvador copper mines launched an illegal strike in protest at General Pinochet's dictatorship jailing their union leader the previous day. More strikes were due to take place at other mines the following day, and other unions were deliberating on whether not to join the strikes. Government officials responded by sacking 550 workers at the mines, and stating they would fire any workers who took part in the strikes. Despite many right-wing figures claiming that the Western-backed regime was an economic success story, Chile was at this time in the midst of...

On this day, 15 June 1970, one of the biggest strikes in Turkish history took place after the government introduced two laws which made it more difficult for workers to change unions, in order to keep workers in the moderate Türk-İş union federation rather than joining the more militant DİSK federation. 
Up to 150,000 workers in Istanbul walked out, joined by others in Ankara, Izmir, Izmit and elsewhere. 
Police and soldiers attacked the workers, killing at least four workers, including Abdurrahman Bozkurt, Yaşar Yıldırım, Mehmet Gıdak and Mustafa Baylan and injuring nearly 200. 
The government t...

On this day, 14 June 1994, striking workers on the French colony of Wallis and Futuna rioted during a general strike demanding pay increases, cheaper transportation and the implementation of French labour laws.
The first strike by Force Ouvrière occurred in February during a visit by the French Minister of Overseas Territories. A second strike began in June by school teachers, which was then joined by Force Ouvrière on June 13.
On the night of June 14, strikers trashed government buildings and threw petrol bombs into the Territorial Assembly.
Following the riot, negotiations took place between workers' representatives and th...

On this day, 13 June 1992, around 20 mostly South Asian women workers at a metal finishing plant in Burnsall, Smethwick, walked out on strike. They were demanding union recognition, equal pay and basic health and safety. The employer retaliated by sacking all of them. There were several disagreements between the union, GMB, and the strikers about the form and nature of the strike action, with the strikers increasingly resisting the union’s attempts to take control of the strike action. Though the women had had strong community support, the strike was eventually called off after a year by union officials, who decided it...