Today in Labor History - September 3

September 03
African-American cotton pickers organize and strike in Lee County, Texas, against miserably low wages and other injustices, including a growers’ arrangement with local law enforcement to round up blacks on vagrancy charges, then force them to work off their fines on select plantations.  Over the course of September a white mob put down the strike, killing 15 strikers in the process - 1891
 
Some 300 musicians working in Chicago movie houses strike to protest their impending replacement by talking movies - 1928
 
Twenty-five workers die, unable to escape a fire at the Imperial Poultry processing plant in Hamlet, N.C. Managers had locked fire doors to prevent the theft of chicken nuggets. The plant had operated for 11 years without a single safety inspection - 1991