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July 15, 2025

Today in 1959

 Half-million steelworkers began what is to become a 116-day strike that shutters nearly every steel mill in the country. The strike occurred over management's demand that the union give up a contract clause which limited management's ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery which would result in reduced hours or numbers of employees. The strike's affects persuaded President Eisenhower to invoke the back-to-work provision of the Taft-Hartley Act. The union sued to have the Act declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the law. The union eventually retained the contract clause and won minimal wage increases. The strike led to significant importation of foreign steel for the first time in U.S. history, which replaced the domestic steel industry in the long run. 

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Who Should Say When a Workplace Is Safe? The Workers, That’s Who
Posted On: Jul 27, 2020
July 27, 2020 | OPINION | Back in April, Nelson Lichtenstein, the dean of American labor historians, wrote a piece for us arguing that states should establish workers’ councils that would decide when it was safe to return to their worksites and would have the authority to monitor those worksites for safety conditions when work resumed. While I know of no state that’s enacted anything so sensible, Los Angeles County—which, with ten million residents, is a lot bigger than a host of states—became the first jurisdiction to do so when the County Board of Supervisors passed a partial version of this idea. Noting that public-health officials were completely overwhelmed by the number of possibly unsafe workplaces, the five-member Board of Supes explicitly authorized the establishment of workers’ councils with the power to monitor workplace safety… The American Prospect
 
 
Teamsters Local 355
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