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The Fugitive Slave Act
A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. Helped to convert many previously indifferent northerners to antislavery. -
Civil War
The war fought in the United States between northern (Union) and southern (Confederate) states from 1861 to 1865, in which the Confederacy sought to establish itself as a separate nation. Southern states seceded from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln. -
Haymarket Riot
A labor protest rally near Chicago's Haymarket 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. It stopped unions for a certain amount of time. -
Pullmans Strike
It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railroads, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. Turning point for the labor law -
Mckees Rock Strike
5,000 and 8,000 mostly immigrant workers from some 16 nationalities created railway cars. It was the greatest labor fight in all of history. -
ILGWU Strike
Rising of the twenty thousand" in the New York shirt-waist industry was the first mass strike of women workers in American history. The weak ILGWU left much of the day-to-day administration of the strike in the hands of rank-and-file workers, laborite-feminist activists from the Women's Trade Union League, and woman volunteers from the Socialist Party (SP).. One of the largest labor unions. -
Adamson Act
A United States federal law passed in 1916 that established an eight-hour workday, with additional pay for overtime work, for interstate railroad workers. -
Congress for Industrial Organization
The CIO (Congress for Industrial Organization) was founded on November 9, 1935, by eight international unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor. In its statement of purpose, the CIO said it had formed to encourage the AFL to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial union lines. Unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival labor federation. -
World War ll
A war fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — and the Allies, including France and Britain, and later the Soviet Union and the United States. Gave rise to a global movement focused on human rights protections. -
Taft Hartley Act
An act of the U.S. Congress (1947) that supersedes but continues most of the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act and that, in addition, provides for an eighty-day injunction against strikes that endanger public health and safety and bans closed shops.It restricts the power of labor unions. -
The Battle of Cripple Creek
The Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894 was a five-month strike by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in Cripple Creek, Colorado, USA. It resulted in a victory for the union and was followed in 1903 by the Colorado Labor Wars.
