Detroit public school teachers go on strike for the first time in seven years after negotiations between the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the school district fail to address their concerns around wages, hours, and working conditions. The strike continued through September when a contract was reached that the teachers accepted.
U.S. labor leader and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno is born in Guatemala. Moreno was active in organizing tobacco, sugar cane, and cannery workers and founded The Spanish-Speaking Peoples Congress in 1938 to bring together all Spanish-speaking people residing in the U.S. around issues of immigration, employment, and civil rights. Targeted for her politics, Moreno was deported in 1950 when she refused to testify against International Longshore and Warehouse Union leader Harry Bridges in exchange for citizenship.
Striking sheep shearers in New South Wales, Australia, burn and scuttle the paddle steamer Rodney, which had been transporting scab labor. Later that day, Billy McClean, a union shearer, was shot and wounded in an altercation with scabs. He and five others were charged with rioting and sentenced to three years’ hard labor. McClean was released after eighteen months because he was dying from the bullet wound and died on March 22, 1896.
Police open fire and attack with tear gas 2,000 garment workers who block a highway in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for three hours to demand that they be paid overdue wages. In 2010, the garment industry in Bangladesh raked in $12 billion, but the minimum wage for garment workers – working 10 to 16 hours a day under hazardous conditions, six days a week – was $24 a month.
Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff addresses a list of 150 demands by the Margaridas (“Daisies”) – an organization advocating for the rights of women rural workers – and agrees to establish healthcare facilities and centers to enforce health and safety regulations in rural areas, finance more family-owned farms, and to create a national program on sustainable agriculture to help women in rural communities.
South African police open fire on a large crowd of men who had walked out on strike at the British-owned Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana, killing 34 workers. The miners – who earned roughly $400 a month – were on strike over wages. In contrast, Lonmin’s annual profits for shareholders in 2011 was $273 million, and its CEO was paid nearly $2 million a year.
English artist and book illustrator Walter Crane is born in Liverpool. He was part of the Art Workers Guild, which promoted the unity of all of the arts. Following the Haymarket bombing, Crane made multiple trips to the U.S., where he spoke in defense of the men accused of the bombing.
Workers and the Canadian Pacific Railway police engage in a protracted gun battle during a strike by 700 non-union freight handlers – immigrants from Greece and Italy – in Thunder Bay, Ontario. A federal conciliation board settled the strike, but in 1910, the Canadian Pacific Railway fired 400 of those workers.
The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations – a central labor organization in Philadelphia that was formed after building trades workers lost a strike for the ten hour day – organizes the Working Men’s Party, determined to promote “the interests and enlightenment of the working classes.”
During construction repair work at the Titan II Launch Complex outside Searcy, Arkansas, a flash fire sucks the oxygen out of the silo, killing 53 of the 55 workers inside. The Air Force blamed the fire on human error; the surviving workers said that a mechanical fault started the fire.
Today in Labor History 