On this day in Labor History the year was 1894. That was the birthday of the long-time leader of the AFL-CIO.

George Meany grew up in the Bronx, with his Irish Catholic family.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1971. That Sunday, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a speech that preempted the popular television show, Bonanza. His subject? The state of the economy. The speech was timed before the stock markets opened on Monday morning.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1936.

That was the day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.

The act was a key piece of the President’s “New Deal” a series of federal programs responding to the ravages of the Great Depression.

Social Security would provide an income for retirees and the disabled, to ensure they did no slide into complete destitution.

On signing the bill, President Roosevelt, known for delivering memorable speeches, addressed the press.

He said, “Today, the hope of many years’ standing in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, had tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what will their lot when they come to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long that job will last. This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 50 million of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”

He went on to say, “The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and inflation. It is, in short, a law that will care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”

Over the past few decades, politicians, have increasingly sounded the alarm that Social Security will not remain viable as the large baby boomer generation retires and draws benefits.

Yet despite those who seek to attack Social Security, it remains a bedrock of the social safety net for millions of Americans.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1892.

That was the day miners in Tracy City, Tennessee rebelled against the state’s convict lease system.

Miners had been forced to work side by side with convict labor.

The convicts, overwhelmingly African-American, were forced to live in deplorable stockade conditions.

Their presence in the mines served to minimize paid labor, keep wages low and stunt union organizing throughout the state.

Miners demanded that Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad give them the same hours of work as the convicts.

When they refused, the miners marched on the stockades where convicts were housed.

They released the convicts and marched them onto trains bound for Nashville, burning the stockades to the ground.

The revolt at Tracy City followed armed uprisings of thousands of miners the previous year in nearby Briceville and Coal Creek.

Here it is thought that Knights of Labor leaders led miners to surround stockades, disarm guards, and release convicts onto Knoxville bound trains over the course of several days.

By August 1892, hundreds of miners would confront state forces in armed shootouts across Grundy, Marion and Anderson counties, releasing convicts when they could onto trains bound for Nashville.

Miners were eventually arrested and convicted.

But these revolts would lead the Tennessee General Assembly to end its convict lease system four years later, making it one of the first Southern states to do so.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1955.

That was the day Teamsters organizer, 28-year old William Grami was kidnapped and beaten.

Grami had arrived in Sebastopol, California to help organize about 350 workers in local canneries, drying plants and fruit sheds.

The Teamsters had been on campaign footing for months, in an attempt to win union recognition, higher wages and benefits.

They had lost a union representation election the previous fall, after Sebastapol Apple Growers moved quickly to lay off union supporters.

By January, cannery workers at Oscar Hall and Sons voted for union representation, though workers at Barlow Company would vote against the union just two months later.

But by early August, the strike wave hit.

Workers walked off the job at the Sebastopol Cooperative Cannery.

More at seven other area canneries joined them on strike in the days that followed.

Grami would later testify that he had heard reports weeks earlier of a grower threatening to have him killed within three hours, should any strike actually take place.

During the strike that would ultimately prove victorious, three men kidnapped Grami outside the union hall.

He was driven along a rural road, tied to a pole, gagged and beaten with a bicycle chain.

Left for dead, he was found the next day and hospitalized immediately.

But the union and the strikers remained undeterred.

Before the strike was over, scab trucks attempting to haul apples to market were vandalized or burned, and scab drivers were beaten.

Eight months later, the apple industry finally came to the negotiating table.

By May 1956, area apple growers signed with the Teamsters.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1937.

That was the day the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union was founded.

After the victorious strike of 1934 that established the union hiring hall,

West Coast union leaders embarked on an inland campaign to organize the thousands of warehouse workers who handled shipped goods.

But West Coast dockworkers overwhelmingly chose to join the CIO after it was expelled from the AFL earlier that year.

They found the ILA planned to abandon the warehouse workers they had worked so hard to organize.

They also opposed dues assessments to fight the CIO and disagreed with the ILA’s hostility to minimum wage laws, social security and unemployment insurance.

Radicals like Harry Bridges and others had established themselves not only as workers leaders but also led attacks on Jim Crow racism in the ranks and in the industry.

The success of the 1934 strike was due in part to the welcoming of blacks into the ranks of the union.

In his Workers on the Waterfront, historian Bruce Nelson notes that, “the ILWU’s well-known opposition to racial discrimination was an important factor in the union’s expansion into Hawaii, not only on the waterfront but among sugar and pineapple plantation workers. The triumph of the ILWU in Hawaiian agriculture brought about a degree of fraternization across racial lines that few had thought possible.”

Since then, the union has beat back numerous Taft–Hartley and McCarthy era attacks.

More recently, the ILWU has been in the forefront of broader social justice struggles, leading walkouts and work stoppages for various political causes.

Today it represents close to 60,000 workers, including those locals that initially refused to affiliate.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1922.

That was the day 1300 workers from the four railroad brotherhoods walked off the job in Joliet, near Chicago.

The walkout threatened to paralyze freight service for steel mills in nearby Gary and other regional industries.

Four hundred thousand railroad shopmen had been on strike across the country for nearly seven weeks.

Newspaper headlines that day warned a general strike of two million trainmen loomed on the horizon.

Brotherhood leaders promised sympathy strikes in response to threats made against their members by troops on duty at railroad centers and yards.

There were also real concerns about the health and safety of trainmen, given rolling stock was no longer being maintained.

In Joliet, workers stayed away under threats from troops.

Additionally, Illinois Central trainmen faced threats from striking miners throughout Kentucky and Illinois, who warned:

“Stop transporting non-union coal or suffer the consequences.”

Resentment had been building against state guard troops stationed in Illinois yards.

Earlier in the week, striking shopmen had engaged in a fatal confrontation with Joliet sheriffs that left a striker and railroad detective dead and scores injured.

Riot orders were called when authorities sought to arrest striking shopmen who had stormed the home of a scab.

Brotherhood workers refused to return to work unless troops were removed.

Warren Stone, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers stated: “We are not going to have our men shot up or beaten up or threatened by armed guards at railroad shops and yards.

When the men cannot go to work without having irresponsible armed guards endangering their lives, they may go home and stay there.

There will be 100 more cases soon if conditions are not changed.”

On this day in labor history, the year was 1965.

That was the day fifty-three construction tradesmen were killed in a fire at the Titan II ICBM launch complex near Searcy, Arkansas.

It is considered one of the worst industrial accidents at a U.S. nuclear weapons facility. The complex was one of four sites containing Titan II missiles. Each missile weighed 340,000 pounds, measuring 103 feet in length and 10 feet in diameter.

President Johnson had just committed more troops to the Vietnam War. The Air Force hoped to strengthen the silo against a possible Soviet attack.

They had contracted with Peter Kiewit and Son of Colorado to bring in electricians, carpenters, millwrights, painters and pipefitters for a number of tasks.

Crews worked to shore up the silo, improve the blast doors, adjust hydraulics and install emergency lighting.

52 of 55 workers on all nine levels of the silo were almost immediately asphyxiated when it suddenly filled with smoke and heat.

The Air Force determined a welder on level 2 accidentally pierced a high-pressure hydraulic line, igniting the fire.

Investigators also concluded the silo lacked adequate ventilation, alternative exits and independent power sources.

The contractor was held responsible for numerous safety violations, contributing to unsafe working conditions.

The welder was found drowned in hydraulic fluid.

Two survivors suffered burns and smoke inhalation. They contested the Air Force’s findings. One worker insisted no one had been welding on level 2.

The other survivor stated he saw flames burst from the diesel engine just before the power went out. Both men insisted the fire started from below.

By 1981, two more deadly accidents involving Titan II missiles would prompt President Reagan to order their deactivation.