Today in Labor History September 6, 1869: The Avondale fire killed 110 miners, including several juveniles under the age of 10. It led to the first mine safety law in Pennsylvania. Avondale is near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River flows nearby. The mine had only one entrance, in violation of safety recommendations at the time. In the wake of the fire, thousands of miners joined the new Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, one of the nation’s first large industrial unions (and precursor to the United Mineworkers). My book, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” opens with this fire. My main character, Mike Doyle, joins the bucket brigade trying to put out the flames shooting out of the mineshaft.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #coal #avondale #disaster #WorkplaceDeaths #WorkerSafety #union #HistoricalFiction #novel #books #author #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History September 3, 1911: Six miners were killed in a cage accident in the Butte Superior mine.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceDeaths #mining

Today in Labor History September 2, 1991: 25 workers were killed by a fire at the nonunion Imperial Foods poultry processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Bosses had locked the doors in violation of the law, leaving the workers no escape.

https://youtu.be/ktIdmO4ZXeU

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceDeaths #NorthCarolina #WorkerSafety #union

Today in Labor History July 7, 1931: Construction began on the Hoover dam. 16 workers and camp residents died from heat exhaustion during a single month of construction. Temperatures routinely soared over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Several strikes led to nominal improvements in working conditions. Thousands of men were employed in the highly segregated project. Only 30 African Americans were allowed to work at any given time and Chinese workers were officially excluded. The Wobblies (IWW) tried to organize the men and sent in 11 organizers who were promptly arrested. Eugene Nelson, a Wobbly hobo, writes about it in his wonderful biographical novel, “Break Their Haughty Power.”

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #organizing #HooverDam #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceDeaths #racism #immigration #segregation

Today in Labor History May 19, 1928: A coal-mine exploded in Mather, Pennsylvania, killing 195. It was the seventh worst mining disaster in U.S. history and the second worst in Pennsylvania history. The disaster was likely caused by a methane and dust explosion triggered by an arc from a battery-powered locomotive.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #disaster #WorkplaceDeaths #disaster #pennsylvania

Today in Labor History April 26, 1942: The Honkeiko mine exploded in Benxi, China. The #explosion killed between 1,549 and 1,572 miners. It was deadliest mining disaster ever.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #WorkplaceDeaths #WorkerSafety #mining #coal #china

Today in Labor History April 24, 2013: An eight-story garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. The disaster killed 1,129 workers and injured 2,515. A day earlier, someone noticed cracks in the structure. However, factory officials, who had contracts with Benneton and other major U.S. labels, insisted the workers return to the job.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #WorkplaceDeaths #bangladesh #GarmentWorkers

Today In Labor History April 8, 1911: 128 convict miners, mostly African-Americans jailed for minor offenses, were killed by a massive explosion at the Banner coalmine near Birmingham, Alabama. While the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which occurred just two weeks earlier, elicited massive public attention and support for the plight of immigrant women working in sweatshop conditions, the Banner explosion garnered almost no public sympathy, probably due to racism and the fact that they were prisoners.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #prison #PrisonLabor #racism #coal #mine #immigrants #prisoner #WorkplaceDeaths #slavelabor

Today in Labor History April 5, 2010: Twenty-nine coal miners were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. In 2015, Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was convicted of a misdemeanor for conspiring to willfully violate safety standards and was sentenced to one year in prison. He was found not guilty of charges of securities fraud and making false statements. Investigators also found that the U.S. Department of Labor and its Mine Safety and Health Administration were guilty of failing to act decisively, even after Massey was issued 515 citations for safety violations at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2009, prior to the deadly explosion.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #explosion #massey #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceDeaths #coal #WestVirginia

Today in Labor History March 30, 1930: Three thousand workers, mostly African-American, began construction on the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. The employer cut costs by failing to provide safety equipment. Additionally, bosses forced the men to work 10-15-hour days, often at gunpoint, without breaks and without masks to protect themselves from the silicon dust. Consequently, hundreds of workers died of silicosis. Possibly over 1,000 people, one-third of the entire workforce, died from silicosis, in one of America’s worst cases of mass workplace mortality.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #WorkplaceInjury #WorkplaceDeaths #HawksNest #racism #silicosis #ForcedLabor #slavery

Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #memphis #strike #racism #MartinLutherKing #assassination #PoliceBrutality #WorkplaceDeaths

Today In Labor History March 26, 1912: A mining disaster at Jed, West Virginia, killed 83 workers.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #WorkplaceDeaths #disaster #WestVirginia

Today In Labor History March 26, 1896: The Brunner Mine exploded near Greymouth, New Zealand, killing 65 coal miners, in the country's worst industrial accident.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #disaster #NewZealand #WorkplaceDeaths

Today in Labor History March 25, 1947: A coal mine exploded in Centralia, Illinois killing 111. American folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote and recorded a song about the Centralia disaster called “The Dying Miner.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4pShnMe6Rk

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #centralia #WoodyGuthrie #mining #coal #WorkplaceDeaths

Today in Labor History March 25, 1911: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed 146 people, mostly immigrant women and young girls who were working in sweatshop conditions. As tragic as this fire was for poor, working class women, over 100 workers died on the job each day in the U.S. in 1911. What was most significant was that this tragedy became a flash point for worker safety and public awareness of sweatshop conditions.

The Triangle workers had to work from 7:00 am until 8:00 pm, seven days a week. The work was almost non-stop. They got one break per day (30 minutes for lunch). For this they earned only $6.00 per week. In some cases, they had to provide their own needles and thread. Furthermore, the bosses locked the women inside the building to minimize time lost to bathroom breaks.

A year prior to the fire, 20,000 garment workers walked off the job at 500 clothing factories in New York to protest the deplorable working conditions. They demanded a 20% raise, 52-hour work week and overtime pay. Over 70 smaller companies conceded to the union’s demands within the first 48 hours of the strike. However, the bosses at Triangle formed an employers’ association with the owners of the other large factories. Soon after, strike leaders were arrested. Some were fined. Others were sent to labor camps. They also used armed thugs to beat up and intimidate strikers. By the end of the month, almost all of the smaller factories had conceded to the union. By February, 1910, the strike was finally settled.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #TriangleShirtwaistFire #WorkplaceDeaths #strike #union #immigrant #sweatshop #ChildLabor

Today in Labor History March 10, 1906: Coal dust exploded at the Courrieres mine in France. 1,099 miners died. It was the second worst mining disaster of the 20th century. (1,549 miners died in the Benxihu accident in China, in 1946). As a result of the Courrieres disaster, 45,000 miners went on strike, protesting the ongoing unsafe working conditions. The authorities sent in the military, which quashed the strike.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #strike #WorkplaceDeaths #UnsafeWorkplace

Today in Labor History February 24, 1919: U.S. Congress passed a new Child Labor law. However, in 1924, the courts declared it unconstitutional. A similar law passed in 1917. The Supreme Court ruled that one unconstitutional, too. It wasn’t until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that modern child labor laws were enforced in the U.S. However, the law never banned child labor in agriculture. Consequently, 500,000 children pick roughly 25% of all the food harvested in the U.S. They often still work 10 or more hours a day. They are exposed to dangerous pesticides and die at a rate five times higher than kids in other industries. Barely half the kids working in agriculture ever finish high school.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #children #ChildLabor #ChildAbuse #FarmWorkers #WorkplaceDeaths #WorkplaceInjury #school #education #SCOTUS

Today in Labor History December 29, 1970: President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law. Ever since, successive administrations have whittled away at the efficacy of this agency, which was designed to protect workers. Nevertheless, a study in 2012, published in the journal “Science,” found a 9.4% reduction in workplace injuries and a 26% reduction in the cost of workplace injuries since 1970. They also found that these reductions came at no additional cost to business or consumers. A 2020 study by the “American Economic Review” found that President Obama’s press releases that named and shamed companies that were violating OSHA had the same effect on improving compliance by other companies as having 210 inspections.

#osha #nixon #worker #workingclass #LaborHistory #workplacedeaths #workplaceinjuries

Today in Labor History December 19, 1907: 239 workers died in a coal mine explosion in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania, known as the Darr Mine Disaster. It was the third major U.S. mine disaster in December 1907 (the deadliest mine fatality month in US history).

#LaborHistory #workingclass #union #history #solidarity #working #workers #laborers #mining #disaster #workplacedeaths