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This Week in Labor History - November 5

Eugene V. Debs, labor leader, socialist, three-time candidate for president and first president of the American Railway Union, born - 1855
 
Everett, Wash., massacre, at least seven Wobblies killed, 50 wounded and an indeterminate number missing - 1916
 
Some 12,000 television and movie writers begin what was to become a 3-month strike against producers over demands for an increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD and for a bigger share of the revenue from work delivered over the Internet - 2007

This Week in Labor History - November 5

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This Week in Labor History - November 1

In the nation’s first general strike for a 10-hour day, 300 armed Irish longshoremen marched through the streets of Philadelphia calling on other workers to join them.  Some 20,000 did, from clerks to bricklayers to city employees and other occupations.  The city announced a 10-hour workday within the week; private employers followed suit three weeks later – 1835
(Strikes Around the World: Are strikes going out of fashion or are they an inevitable feature of working life? This is a longstanding debate. The much-proclaimed ‘withering away of the strike’ in the 1950s was quickly overturned by the ‘resurgence of class conflict’ in the late 1960s and 1970s. The period since then has been characterized as one of ‘labor quiescence’. Commentators again predict the strike’s demise, at least in the former heartlands of capitalism.)

This Week in Labor History - November 1