Refusing to accept a 9-cent wage increase, the United Packinghouse Workers of America initiates a nationwide strike against meatpacking companies Swift, Armour, Cudahy, Wilson, Morrell, and others. Packinghouse workers shut down 140 plants around the country.
15,000 women workers in the needle trades take to the streets of New York City on the fifty-first anniversary of the 1857 protest by women garment workers. They demanded better working conditions, suffrage, and an end to child labor. March 8 has been celebrated as International Women’s Day since 1910.
The Philadelphia Rapid Transit trolley company fires 173 workers – all members of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America – and replaces them with scabs from New York City. Street battles, demonstrations, and a general strike ensued in the city that lasted for 57 days.
The Screen Actors Guild’s first-ever strike – which began over filmed television commercials – ends when a contract is reached that covers all work in commercials.
12,000 pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas, walk off their jobs at 400 factories in what would become a three-month strike against wage cuts. The pecan-shelling industry was among the lowest paid in the country; workers made between $2-$3 a week.
18-year old Nan Freeman – a college student who responded to appeals for help by striking farm workers at the Talisman Sugar plant near Belle Glade, Florida – is struck and killed by a double trailer truck driven by a scab driver. Pickets had complained to the police about scab drivers speeding by the picket lines through stop signs at the plant gates to splash rain and mud on the striking workers. Cesar Chavez wrote of Freeman, “…she is a sister who picketed with farm workers in the middle of the night because of her love for justice…to be honored and remembered for as long as farm workers struggle for justice.”
Guards employed by the Agricultural Fertilizer Chemical Company in Chrome, New Jersey, open fire on unarmed striking workers, killing two people and wounding eighteen others. The next day, 31 deputy sheriffs were arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and held without bail. The workers eventually won a wage increase and nine of the deputies were convicted of manslaughter and received sentences of between two and ten years each.
The meatpacking industry in the U.S. effectively shuts down when both the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America go on strike over wages. Just ten days into the strike, using the War Labor Disputes Act, President Harry Truman seized control of the plants and ordered the workers back to work with the greatest single wage increase ever in the industry.
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Members of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and Amalgamated Transit Union working for the New York City Transit Authority begin what would be a successful twelve day strike. TWU leader Mike Quill and eight other union leaders were arrested for violating an injunction issued to end the strike. “I don’t care if I rot in jail,” Quill said, “I will not call off the strike.”
Autoworkers at the General Motors Fisher Body No. 1 plant in Flint, Michigan, occupy the factory and begin a sit-down strike that lasts 44 days. The strike ended in a victory for the workers on February 11, 1937, when GM signed a contract with the United Auto Workers, recognizing the union as the sole bargaining agent for the workers in all of its plants.
Today in Labor History 