Union City Radio: Your Rights at Work: Thu, April 1, 1pm – 2pm
WPFW 89.3 FM or listen online (map)

Arlington Dems Labor Caucus: Thu, April 1, 6pm – 7pm
Meeting of Arlington union members and community allies.

Labor Committee for Affordable Housing: Fri, April 2, 3pm – 4pm
Meeting to promote tenant organizing, housing justice, and affordable housing.

Coalition to Repeal "Right to Work": Fri, April 2, 7pm – 8pm
Coalition of more than 50 organizations fighting for worker rights to organize unions.

Celebrating the life of Anne Feeney: Sat, April 3, 3pm – 6pm
Register here

Missed last week’s Your Rights At Work radio show, focusing on music by and about working women? Catch the podcast here.

THIS JUST IN: UMWA goes on strike at Alabama’s Warrior Met Coal
Unless the parties can reach a last-minute agreement, the Mine Workers (UMWA) union is launching its largest strike since the 1990s. UMWA President Cecil Roberts lambasted the company yesterday in a press release announcing the strike at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama. The company is demonstrating “perhaps some of the worst labor-management relations we’ve seen in this industry since the days of the company town and company store,” said the UMWA.

Tweetstorm to #ProtectMDWorkers
Supporters of the Essential Workers Protection Act staged another tweetstorm yesterday demanding passage of the Maryland legislation that will give employees the right to refuse dangerous work without fear of retaliation. Email your legislator here.

Warner targeted with PRO Act cake campaign
Maybe he just wants more cake. For the second straight week, Northern Virginia labor activists delivered a cake Wednesday morning to U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D., VA) with a message in icing not only asking him to co-sponsor the PRO Act, but graphing the correlation between union density and inequality. The PRO Act would empower workers to organize and bargain, as well as hold corporations accountable for union-busting. Warner is the only DMV-area senator who hasn’t yet signed on. “We will be here until he does!” tweeted Painters DC 51, one of the half-dozen unions and allies participating in the “Wednesdays with Warner” action.
photo: UFCW 400 member Bertha McKiver with the union-made cake.
See also: Virginia Public Sector Workers Are Organizing to Make Their New Bargaining Rights a Reality

Get in the game with COVID vaccine

“Thursday of this week there will be a baseball game in Nats Park,” said UNITE HERE Local 23 member Mike Cobb on Tuesday after getting the COVID vaccine at an event with DC mayor Muriel Bowser. “So me being a shop steward (at Nats Park), I’m gonna go in there and encourage everyone to have this done.”

Fighting to save school librarians
“Why are DC Public School librarians being fired?” That’s the question Christopher Stewart is asking. Stewart is a 4th-year school librarian in DCPS, serving the Columbia Heights Education Campus/Bell High School community in Ward 1. In an online petition tweeted out by WTU 6, Stewart says that DCPS is "excessing" their school librarians, creating a crisis for all D.C students. “Predominately Black areas of the District of Columbia - Wards 7 and 8 - have been left with gaping educational holes because they lack school librarians,” he says.

Today's Labor Quote: John L. Lewis

“It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.”

The United Mine Workers of America dedicated the John L. Lewis Mining and Labor Museum at Lewis’ boyhood home in Lucas, Iowa on this date in 1990.

TODAY'S LABOR HISTORY

This week’s Labor History Today podcast: The Hardhat Riot.Last week’s show: We Were There; Pins and Needles; Dust for Blood.

San Francisco laundry workers strike for wage increases and an eight-hour day - 1907

More than 2,000 workers strike the Draper Corp. power loom manufacturing plant in Hopedale, Mass., seeking higher wages and a nine-hour workday. Eben S. Draper, president of the firm -- and a former state governor -- declares: "We will spend $1 million to break this strike" and refuses to negotiate. The strike ended in a stalemate 13 weeks later - 1913

Unionized miners at West Virginia’s Coal River Colliery Co. (CRC) strike for union scale. CRC was an investment venture of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), with shares owned by BLE members - 1924 (Source: Conflict at Coal River Collieries: The UMWA Versus the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, by Thomas J. Robertson & Ronald L. Lewis)

Strike of cotton mill workers begins in Gastonia, NC. During the strike, police raided the strikers’ tent colony; the chief of police was killed. The strike leaders were framed for murder and convicted, but later freed - 1929

400,000 members of the United Mine Workers strike for higher wages and employer contributions to the union’s health and welfare fund. President Truman seizes the mines - 1946

40,000 textile workers strike in cotton and rayon mills of six southern states, seeing higher pay, sickness and accident insurance, and pensions - 1951

Longest newspaper strike in U.S. history, 114 days, ends in New York City. Workers at nine newspapers were involved - 1963

Major league baseball players begin what is to become a 13-day strike, ending when owners agreed to increase pension fund payments and to add salary arbitration to the collective bargaining agreement - 1972

Eleven-day strike by 34,000 New York City transit workers begins, halts bus and subway service in all five boroughs before strikers return to work with a 17 percent raise over two years plus a cost-of-living adjustment - 1980

Players begin the first strike in the 75-year history of the National Hockey League. They win major improvements in the free agency system and other areas of conflict, and end the walkout after 10 days - 1992

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