Today in Labor History—January 12

Jack London, 1903

January 12, 1876 -  Novelist Jack London was born on this date. London once wrote that a scab was "After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles." (From Workday Minnesota)

January 12, 1928 – Police raided the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) Hall, in Walsenburg, Colorado. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 12, 1932 – 12,000 marchers from Father Cox's Shantytown in Pittsburg arrived in Washington, D.C. The shantytown, near St. Patrick's Catholic Church in the Strip District of Pittsburgh, lasted from 1929 to 1932, and was the staging base for the Reverend James Cox's unemployed army. On December 1931, 60,000 unemployed workers had rallied at Pitt Stadium in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 12, 1933 – The anarchist uprisings which began on January 8 in Spain were brutally suppressed. In Andalusia, police and army buildings were attacked and the anarcho-trade unionists seized public buildings, proclaiming Libertarian Communism there. However, in the governmental repression that followed, villagers in Casas Viejas were burned alive and assassinated. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 12, 1962 – President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, guaranteeing federal workers the right to join unions & bargain collectively. (From the Daily Bleed)