Missed this week’s Your Rights At Work radio show? Catch the podcast here. This week's show: AFL-CIO Communications Director Tim Schlittner on the PRO Act Digital Day of Action today; Moment of Silence for WTU 6 president Liz Davis; latest labor news headlines, including peeing in bottles at Amazon and our new Bad Bosses feature.

Warner urged to "Stand with Working Peeple"
In addition to the usual cake, Virginia labor activists on Wednesday delivered a pro-PRO Act diorama made by UAW member Michelle Woolley’s son Alec, featuring Peeps carrying signs like “Stand with Working Peeple” and “No Justice, No Peeps; PRO Act Now” and telling Warner “history has its Peepers on you”. In addition to the auto workers, turning out were the Painters, Bakers, Newspaper Guild, Musicians, Electrical Workers and Teachers. “We did deliver the cake and the diorama so hopefully he will enjoy them,” reports NoVA Labor’s Ginny Diamond.

Gandhi’s labor quote (not)
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” So said Mahatma Gandhi. Or did he? According to Snopes, the fact-checking website, it was actually union advocate Nicholas Klein, in a speech to clothing workers in 1914, who told a story about people who came out to see the first test of a locomotive. They all said it would never work, and then when it did, they all shouted “You can’t stop it!” “And, my friends,” said Klein, “in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.” photo: striking clothing workers in 1910

Today's Labor Quote: Frances Perkins

“I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.”

Born on April 10, 1880, Perkins was Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first woman to hold a cabinet-level office. She was featured in a recent Washington Post Retropolis column and her Kalorama home, a national landmark, has just been added to the online DC Labor Map.

TODAY'S LABOR HISTORY

This week’s Labor History Today podcast: Canal workers, gays & miners, Gandhi’s labor quote. Last week’s show: The Hardhat Riot.

April 9

IWW organizes the 1,700 member crew of the Leviathan, then the world’s largest vessel - 1930

April 10

133 people, mostly women and girls, are killed when an explosion in the loading room tears apart the Eddystone Ammunition Works in Eddystone, Pa., near Chester. Fifty-five of the dead were never identified - 1917

Birth of Dolores Huerta, a co-founder, with Cesar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers - 1930

Dancers from the Lusty Lady Club in San Francisco’s North Beach ratify their first-ever union contract by a vote of 57-15, having won representation by SEIU Local 790 the previous summer. The club later became a worker-owned cooperative - 1997

Tens of thousands of immigrants demonstrate in 100 U.S. cities in a national day of action billed as a campaign for immigrants’ dignity. Some 200,000 gathered in Washington, D.C. - 2006

April 11

Ford Motor Company fires UAW union organizers, sparking a 10 day sit down that finally led Ford to start contract talks. - 1941

Jackie Robinson, first black ballplayer hired by a major league team, plays his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbetts Field - 1947

United Mine Workers President W. A. "Tony" Boyle is found guilty of first-degree murder, for ordering the 1969 assassination of union reformer Joseph A. "Jock" Yablonski. Yablonski, his wife and daughter were murdered on December 30, 1969. Boyle had defeated Yablonski in the UMW election earlier in the year -- an election marred by intimidation and vote fraud. That election was set aside and a later vote was won by reformer Arnold Miller - 1974

34,000 New York City Transit Authority workers, eleven days into a strike for higher wages, end their walkout with agreement on a 9 percent increase in the first year and 8 percent in the second, along with cost-of-living protections - 1980

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issues regulations prohibiting sexual harassment of workers by supervisors in the workplace - 1980

Police in Austin, Minn. tear-gas striking Hormel meatpacking workers. Seventeen strikers are arrested on felony riot charges - 1986

photo: Minneapolis Star Tribune via MNOPEDIA

Some 25,000 marchers in Watsonville, Calif. show support for United Farm Workers organizing campaign among strawberry workers, others - 1997

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