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March, 1886. Strike begins when a member of the Knights of Labor is fired for initiating a company meeting in Texas. In St. Louis, strikers of the Knights of Labor board a train and intentionally kill the engine.
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On May 4, 1886, a labor protest rally near Chicago’s Hay market Square turned into a riot after someone threw a bomb at police. At least eight people died as a result of the violence that day.
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The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. [http://www.history.com/topics/homestead-strike]
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Pullman workers went on strike because of the way they were treated.
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On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building.
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Half a million textile workers went on a 22 day strike for higher pay and better working conditions.
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Wagner Act, this bill was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 5, 1935. It established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers in the private sector.
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At 8 p.m. on December 30, 1936, in one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. The autoworkers were striking to win recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the only bargaining agent for GM’s workers; they also wanted to make the company stop sending work to non-union plants and to establish a fair minimum wage scale, and grievance system.
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The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, record keeping, and youth employment standards affecting full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments.
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The United Steelworkers of America went on a strike that lasted 116 days.
