On This Day in Working Class History

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...

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...

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 N...

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 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 l...

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. Britis...

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 cro...

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...

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 impleme...

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, hu...

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 follow...

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...

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...

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 peo...

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...

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 i...

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 Sept...

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 i...

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://sto...

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...

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....

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 es...

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 burnin...

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 increa...

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...