Labor History Database

Mildred -- Millie – Beik died on this date. A historian and librarian, she’s the author of a highly regarded book, The Miners of Windber, about the immigrants and labor struggles of coal miners in her hometown of Windber, Pennsylvania.

Liz Shuler elected first woman president of the AFL-CIO, elected by the Executive Council to complete the term of Rich Trumka, who had died August 5 of a heart attack.

Massachusetts marijuana retailer Theory Wellness is ordered by the state’s attorney to pay $300,000 in restitution and penalties to 280 employees it cheated out of legally-required Sunday and holiday premium pay. The company, which grossed $17 million during it’s first six months of operation, blamed “inadvertent payroll errors.” 2021

The Trump-majority Supreme Court votes to overturn a landmark 1975 California law that gave union organizers the right to meet with agricultural workers on company property before and after work and during lunch, no more than 30 days a year. The California Supreme Court upheld the law the year after it was passed. 2021

Twenty drag queen performers at Spokane’s Globe Bar and Kitchen walk off the job in a protest over wages and conditions. In fact there weren’t any wages: performers’ only income was whatever tips they were able to collect. 2021

Former United Auto Workers President Gary Jones is sentenced to 28 months in jail for corruption. He pleaded guilty a year earlier to embezzling more than $1 million over a nine-year period. “I failed the UAW. I let my union down,” he told the federal sentencing judge in Detroit. 2021

Untold numbers of fast food, home care and nursing home workers in 15 cities across the U.S. stage a one-day strike in support of a $15 minimum wage. 2021

John J. Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009, dies at age 86. The son of Irish immigrants — his father was a bus driver, his mother a domestic worker — Sweeney worked for the Intl. Ladies Garment Workers then the Service Employees, where he served as president, before his time at the AFL-CIO. 2021

Newly-elected President Joe Biden, on his first day in office after defeating Donald J. Trump, orders the firing of National Labor Relations Board general counsel Peter Robb. Robb had earlier worked as a union-busting lawyer and in the NLRB post “had spent three years attacking workers’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, in welcoming Biden’s action. 2021

The national board of entertainment union SAG-AFTRA votes overwhelmingly to have its Disciplinary Committee look into whether member Donald J. Trump— in the union because of his show “The Apprentice” — violated the union’s constitution when his incitement of insurrection at the nation’s capitol Jan. 6, 2021 led to the threatening and endangerment of journalists, many of whom are the union’s members. 2021

Margo St. James, a sex worker who in 1973 formed what she described as a union for prostitutes, dies at age 83 in a Bellingham, Wash. nursing home. When a newspaper reported she had been a madam, according to The Washington Post, she demanded a retraction, declaring: “I was never management.” 2021

The AFL-CIO calls for the resignation of President Donald Trump following a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol two days earlier by hundreds of his supporters. 2021