This Day in Labor History: July 20, 1885. The British crown gave royal assent to the Chinese Immigration Act in Canada, which placed a $50 tax on Chinese workers and which reinforced the general global oppression of migrating Chinese workers around the world at this time!

This Day in Labor History: July 19, 1972. The AFL-CIO announced its decision not to endorse George McGovern for president. This decision helped doom the already floundering McGovern campaign, helping to guarantee another victory for Richard Nixon. Let's talk about George Meany being terrible!

This Day in Labor History: July 18, 1899. New York newsboys went on strike over newspaper companies forcing them to pay for their unsold papers. The Newsies Strike got national attention, both because of its target and for exposing the terrible poverty of the young boys forced to sell papers!!

This Day in Labor History: July 17, 1944. A munitions explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California killed 320 soldiers, mostly African-Americans loading munitions onto ships. This spurred them to demand improved conditions and mutiny charges!! Let's talk race, labor, and the military!

This Day in Labor History: July 16, 1931. A white mob murdered the black sharecropper organizer Ralph Gray in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. Let's talk about communist organizing in rural Alabama and the white violence used to crush it!

This Day in Labor History: July 15, 1959. The United Steelworkers went on strike to protect their contract and show their power against employers who still loathed the idea of unionized workers. Let's talk about this amazing event!

This Day in Labor History: June 14, 1877. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 begins in a revolt against the railroad industries that spread well beyond the strikers themselves. The government responded with state violence, using the Army to kill strikers!

This Day in Labor History: July 12, 1917. The forces of order in Bisbee, Arizona rounded up anyone they thought was a member of the IWW, put them on train cars, and dropped them in the New Mexico desert. The government did nothing. Let's talk about the Bisbee Deportation!

This Day in Labor History: July 11, 1934. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union formed when eleven white farmers and seven black farmers met in Tyronza, Arkansas to form a union of sharecroppers to fight for poor farmers’ rights. Let's talk about sharecroppers and their fight during the Depression!

This Day in Labor History: July 10, 1989. Soviet coal miners struck over their low wages and unsafe conditions. This was the most important internal labor uprising contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union!

This Day in Labor History: July 9, 1971. Paperworkers at Fraser Paper Company, in Madawaska, Maine went on strike. Let's talk about this dramatic strike over contempt from Protestants over French speaking workers and attempts to bully the union out of existence! A fascinating moment and place!

This Day in Labor History: July 8, 1966. The International Association of Machinists voted to go on strike against five major airlines. 35,000 members struck, slowing down the airline industry for months and changing the trajectory of the government’s relations with the airlines!!

Could the Swiss coach possibly look more Eurotrash?

This Day in Labor History: July 7, 1903. Mary “Mother” Jones launched the Children’s Crusade in support of a Philadelphia textile strike and to raise awareness about the need to end child labor. They marched to Theodore Roosevelt's home in New York to demand a meeting. But TR refused!!!

This Day in Labor History: July 6, 1892. In one of the Gilded Age’s most notorious anti-labor acts of violence, 300 Pinkerton detectives, working for Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel, cracked down on thousands of strikers, leading to a gunfight that killed three Pinkertons and seven strikers!!!

This Day in Labor History: July 5, 1935. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. This created real labor law and allowed unions to survive. Let's talk about the most important labor law in American history!

It's complete coincidence but spending July 4, 2026 in a town called Lolol seems perfect to me. The town is in Chile, but it still works.

This Day in Labor History: July 4, 1892. The People’s Party held its first convention in Omaha, Nebraska. Building upon two decades of rural labor’s deep dissatisfaction with the Gilded Age, the Populists articulated a powerful challenge to the unregulated capitalism of the day!!!

This Day in Labor History: July 3, 1835. Children employed in Paterson, New Jersey’s textile mills went on strike, demanding an 11 hour day and 6 day week. Let's talk about one of the first major strikes in American history!

This Day in Labor History: July 2, 1822. Denmark Vesey, a free African-American living in Charleston, South Carolina, was executed for his role in leading a purported slave rebellion. Let's talk about slavery as labor and the white violence to keep it under control!

Kill me

This Day in Labor History: July 1, 1922. the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 begins. Also known as the Railway Shopmen’s Strike, this action was the largest railway strike in the United States since the Pullman Strike in 1894. At least 10 died before the government and corporate America crushed it!

I love drinking a delicious Manitoba, truly North America's center of both fine dining and brewing.

This Day in Labor History: June 30, 1928. Alabama reluctantly ended the leasing of convicts to mine coal. One of the most controversial practices in southern labor history, this was a significant step toward human and labor rights in a state that too often was actively hostile toward those ideas!

This Day in Labor History: June 28, 1946. The CIO’s Operation Dixie campaign to organize the textile mills of Kannapolis, North Carolina began. It was a complete failure. We need to look at why and why labor has never organized the South in large enough numbers to make it a union region!

This Day in Labor History: June 27, 1905. The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago. The IWW would play a major role in the industrial warfare of the early twentieth century, scare the employer class, and capture the imaginations of late 20th century and early 21st century radicals!

This Day in Labor History: June 26, 1894. The American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs, called a nationwide boycott in solidarity with their striking members at Pullman, Illinois. This turned a small strike into a challenge over corporate control over America. The government crushed it!

This Day in Labor History: June 25, 1938. FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. This groundbreaking piece of legislation set the standards of labor that defined post-war America, including minimum wages, overtime pay, and the banning of most child labor. Like everything, it was also incremental.

This Day in Labor History: June 24, 1867. Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad across Sierra Nevada went on strike over the horrific conditions of their work for the Central Pacific Railroad. Let's talk about their brave, if failed struggle and how awful the railroads were!!

This Day in Labor History: June 23, 1855. A 19 year old slave woman named Celia murdered her master rather than allow him to rape her. She then attempted to burn his body, nearly succeeding in erasing all traces of the crime. Let's talk about the horrors of sex slavery in the antebellum South!!