On This Day in Working Class History

On this day, 8 June 1861, eight coalminers working in the Redbank mine in Queensland, Australia, went on strike demanding an extra shilling per ton in pay. The strikers' names were Thomas Jones, George Smith, Edward Davis, Hugh Carter, John Coleman, William Griffith, Abel Alford, and Thomas Stafford. While the strike was an important event in Australian labour history, some sources erroneously des...

On this day, 7 June 1948 Chinese indentured phosphate miners on Nauru protested when a ship came to take them back to China, but they demanded part of their pay. The workers charged that Chinese interpreters who controlled the community funds would not pay out their share of contributions. Police attempted to arrest one Chinese worker, after which the other miners barricaded themselves into their...

On this day, 6 June 1988, a general strike was declared in South Africa by Black unions and anti-apartheid groups. Up to three million took part in the stoppage, in protest at the two-year-old state of emergency and further proposed restrictions on the right to strike. The strikers held out against police, who opened fire on crowds in townships, until 8 June. More information, sources and map: htt...

On this day, 5 June 2001, rioting broke out in the Harehills area of Leeds in response to a heavy-handed police search on an Asian man who had been wrongfully arrested over his car's 'suspicious' tax disc. Unrest broke out later that evening as a multiethnic crowd of around 200 Black, Asian and white people burning cars and attacking police, leaving two injured. More information, sources and map:...

On this day, 4 June 2003 after five weeks of strike action, workers in the Faroe Islands won a pay increase of 9% over the next two years, as well as other improvements. Around 12,000 workers organised in the Færøernes Arbejderforeninger walked out on strike in May – almost a third of the entire working population. Most of the strikers were dockworkers or workers in the fish processing industry. T...

On this day, 3 June 1977, police in India opened fire on a workers' demonstration, killing 12. Thousands of workers from the Bhilai Steel plant and mines had been demonstrating at the police station where strike leader Shankar Guha Niyogi was being held following his arrest the previous day. As the steel plant was a joint Soviet-Indian project, the Communist Party denounced Niyogi as a CIA agent....

On this day, 2 June 1975, 100 sex workers occupied the church of Saint Nizier, Lyon, refusing to leave unless their convictions for soliciting were rescinded. They were evicted after a week, but a precedent-setting legal judgement cancelled the workers’ imminent prison sentences shortly thereafter.  Books and more about sex workers and their struggles available here: https://shop.workingclasshisto...

On this day, 1 June 1981, just over 700 production workers at the Schlitz Brewing Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, walked out on strike after contract negotiations broke down, when workers were offered far inferior settlements to Miller workers in the same town. Schlitz had been struggling financially since the late 1970s, partly due to a change to the recipe which was made to save money but was d...

On this day, 31 May 1989, CLR James, Trinidadian Marxist and author of The Black Jacobins, the definitive history of the Haitian Revolution, as well as other texts on class, colonialism and cricket, died aged 88 in Brixton, London.  As a young man he joined the movement against British colonialism, and later moved to England and became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, forerunner...

On this day, 30 May 1968 in Senegal at 6 PM, unions announced plans for an indefinite general strike to begin at midnight in protest at police brutality against a school and university student uprising. Despite police repression, workers held firm until 12 June when the government caved in and offered a 15% increase in wages. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.c...

On this day, 29 May 1941, animators for Disney in Los Angeles walked out on strike when 16 union cartoonists were fired for demanding union recognition, including Goofy creator Art Babbitt.  Disney workers held a mass meeting the previous day where an assistant to Babbitt put forward a motion to strike, which was approved. On May 29, hundreds of men and women set up picket lines outside Disney stu...

On this day, 28 May 1936, 32,000 workers occupied the Renault plant in Paris. 100,000 more workers soon occupied every major engineering factory around the city. Over the following month a strike wave swept the whole country from the factories to non-unionised shops, involving 2 million workers in 12,000 strikes and occupations. To stop the upheaval, employers and the government had to agree wage...

On this day, 27 May 1935 in Canada, employers at Ballantyne Pier locked out members of the Vancouver and District Waterfront Workers' Association in an attempt to break workers' organisation on the docks. After breaking a previous union, employers had set up the VDWWA as a tame company union, but the attempt to pacify the workers was unsuccessful. Workers responded by going on strike for months, b...

On this day, 26 May 1824, the first recorded factory strike in US history took place when 102 women and girls working at the Slater Mill in Pawtucket picketed their factory.  Two days prior, the mill owners in the town had decided to increase working hours by one hour a day for everyone with no additional pay, and cut the pay of power-loom weavers by 25%. The weavers affected were all women and gi...

On this day, 25 May 1901, 27 unions around Argentina gathered and together formed the the revolutionary anarchist union the Federacion Obrera Argentina (later renamed the FORA). It was committed to the methods of workers’ organisation and direct action as principal weapons in the struggle against the state. In October, the FOA organised its first general strike, a 24-hour strike in solidarity with...

On this day, 24 May, 1919, thousands of coalminers in Alberta, Canada walked off the job in a dispute over pay, the cost of living, and conditions. They were organised in the One Big Union: a revolutionary union which planned to organise all workers together and take control of society. 13 mine companies in Drumheller refused to negotiate and hired returning war veterans, arming them with clubs an...

On 23 May 2020, thousands of miners at the Tenke Fungurume mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo went on strike. The workers at the majority-Chinese owned firm were demanding the payment of a special allowance of $600 to each of 6000 workers who had been quarantined for two months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite being quarantined, the workers had to continue to go to work. After a one-day...

On this day, 22 May 1992 the Royal Oak Mines company locked out members of the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers (CASAW) union at its Giant Mine in Yellowknife, Canada. CASAW members had been due to go on strike the following day after rejecting a contract which would tie their pay to fluctuations in the price of gold. Management swiftly escalated tensions by hiring scab replaceme...

On this day, 21 May 1913, a bomb exploded at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, set by suffragettes. The blast caused no casualties, although some blood was found at the scene, presumably from the perpetrator, but it did crack the masonry of the west tower, damage the floor and break some windows. The Dalkeith Advertiser reported the following day: 'The perpetrators left behind them a l...

On this day, 20 May 1963, 1350 Black workers at the Havelock mine in what is now Eswatini walked out on strike. They were demanding a nearly quadrupling of their minimum pay, as well as the dismissal of several managers, and better housing, sanitation and food. All 150 white workers at the facility scabbed on the strike and kept working. The Swazi King sent a telegram to the workers condemning the...

On this day, 19 May 1920, a shootout took place in the town of Matewan, West Virginia between striking miners and the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who had arrived in town to evict miners’ families from their mountain encampment, in what would become known as the infamous Battle of Matewan.  What made the situation in Matewan so unique was that the sheriff, Sid Hatfield (pictured, left), support...

On this day, 18 May 1980, workers and students in Gwangju, South Korea, rose up against their brutal US-backed dictator, Chun Doo-hwan.  Peaceful protesters were fired upon, with many shot and others beaten and stabbed to death by paratroopers. This sparked an uprising across the city, as local residents raided local armouries and police stations, seized weapons and eventually succeeded in driving...

On this day, 17 May 1968, the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic Activists, went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland to protest the US Occupation of Vietnam.  Entering the Selective Service office, the nine took 378 draft files from cabinets, took them outside, and burned them in the parking lot with a batch of homemade napalm. Learn more about resistance to the Vietnam war in the US in...

On this day, 16 May 1967, the All Circles Struggle Committee (ACSC) was established in Hong Kong in the wake of violent police repression of a strike of plastic flower factory workers.  On May 6, British colonial police violently beat picketing workers and bystanders, causing mass outrage. Protests against and clashes with police began breaking out across the city. After the ACSC was set up to coo...

On this day, 15 May 1942, the body of 60-year-old waterfront worker and member of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union, Matti Valentinpoika Huhta (better known as T-Bone Slim), was found floating in New York's Hudson River. Living for years as a transient worker travelling around the USA looking for work, Slim was also an accomplished author, poet and songwriter. A member of the...