(this is a repost; originally written in 2021; slightly edited) 87 years ago, longshore workers all along the Pacific coast were on strike. The strike began in May 1934, during the Great Depression. At the time, the conditions that existed were brutal. Every day,...
On June 27, 1954, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. The horrifying consequences of this action continue to weigh heavily today. The...
Let’s take time this Memorial Day weekend to remember Memorial Day 1937, when workers in Chicago were massacred by police for trying to picket against their employer, the Republic Steel Company. It all started as steelworkers for five steel companies – Bethlehem...
In March of 1968, the French student movement started in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, at a brand new university campus. The campus had been built four years earlier on a sort of “no-man’s land,” next to an Algerian workers’ shantytown. Some of these students were...
In order to prevent a steel strike in the middle of the Korean War, on April 8th, 1952, Democratic President Harry Truman ordered the temporary seizure, or nationalization, of the nation’s steel mills. Although the steel company owners decried the action as government...
