Today in Labor History October 10, 1912: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) struck in Little Falls, New York. The strike lasted into January and involved primarily immigrant workers. It started at the Phoenix Knitting Mill, but spread to the Gilbert Knitting Mill, also in the Mohawk Valley. In November, the Little Falls Council voted to authorize a contingent of special police, which escalated tensions. Later that month, the AFL created United Textile Workers local #206 to compete with the Wobblies for members and press attention. But when the AFL announced it had reached a settlement between with mill owners, later that month, the workers refused it, siding with the Wobblies and demanding greater concessions.
Today in Labor History October 10, 1933: 18,000 cotton workers struck in Pixley, California. The authorities killed four people in the struggle, which ultimately won them a raise. The Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU) led the strike by Mexican pickers. The union was demanding a wage of $1.00 per hundred pounds of cotton picked, recognition of the union and abolition of contract labor. The union led 24 strikes, involving 37,500 union members, in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s. During the cotton strikes of 1933, owners regularly evicted striking workers from company housing. The police deputized growers and managerial staff. The owners employed bankers, merchants, ministers and Boy Scouts to attacks the workers. A local sheriff said, “We protect our farmers here in Kern County. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.”
Today in Labor History October 10, 1957: The Windscale fire was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom’s history, and one of the worst in the world. It ranks in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The British built the facility as part of their post-war atomic bomb project. The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across Europe. The radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100-240 being fatal. No one was evacuated. However, the authorities destroyed milk from about 500 square kilometers for about a month due to concerns about its exposure to radiation.
Today in Labor History October 10, 1980: The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front was founded in El Salvador. The FMLN fought a long civil war to overthrow the right wing dictatorship. The rebels named their movement after Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Marti (1893-1932). Marti, a comrade of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader, helped found the Central American Communist Party. In 1932, he helped lead an uprising that, for ten days, led to the first Soviet in the western hemisphere. The dictator Maximiliano Martinez crushed the rebellion. He slaughtered over 30,000 peasants, indigenous people and communists in the Matanza. Martinez had once proclaimed, “America is great because it eradicated its Indians. For El Salvador to become great, so must we.” Martinez was also one of the first world leaders to recognize Adolf Hitler. He also believed in the “court of invisible doctors.”