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SF LaborFest launches today
The San Francisco LaborFest starts today and runs throughout the month. While most of the events take place in San Francisco, some are online. Many of the events focus on labor history, arts and culture; this year the LaborFest – which began in 1994 -- is commemorating the 90th anniversary of the historic San Francisco General Strike and the West Coast Maritime Strike in 1934. This strike not only won a union hiring hall for the longshore workers but also led to hundreds of thousands of workers joining unions not just San Francisco but in Northern California. Another general strike as well took place by Teamsters in Minneapolis in the same year that was successful in organizing thousands of Teamsters.
The last general strike in the US was in 1946 when workers in Oakland went on strike to support 400 striking women department workers at Hastings & Kahn. This rich history will be an important part of LaborFest in walks and education programs.
"Today with workers trying to organize at Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Google, and many other companies, the right of working people to have a union is still an ongoing struggle," says the LaborFest Organizing Committee. "Workers like the IBU ILWU Alcatraz workers and Starbuck’s workers have voted for a union and are still fighting for a contract against bosses that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for union busting lawyers rather than accepting the right of workers to join a union." This year's LaborFest will also look at the danger of AI and robotics to all working people.
LaborFest also includes an annual maritime boat trip on July 28 with musicians, historians and unionists "who will talk about their struggles and how we can support them. We will learn about our history and the struggles, and voices of working people."
Reminder that both the LHF newsletter and our radio show (the Labor Heritage Power Hour) will be on hiatus this week and next (though you can catch up on previous Power Hours here on our podcast); look for our next edition on July 15.
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NoVa Labor Book Club: The Hammer
Tuesday, July 2, 2024, 7:30 PM until 5:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada) (UTC-05:00)
Discussion The Hammer, a timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics today, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan.
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LaborFest Writers Group – Reading at Bird and Beckett
Wednesday, July 03, 2024, 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM local (PDT) time
653 Chenery St, San Francisco, CA
Readers from the group share poetry, memoir, fiction and nonfiction during a live event at the renowned San Francisco bookstore – Bird and Beckett. Your chance to hear rabble-rousers, activists, leftist radicals, union members, immigrants, native-born and plain old trouble-makers read from their work.
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American Dreams – by SF Mime Troupe
Thursday, July 4, 2024, 2:00 PM until 4:00 PM local (PDT) time
Mission Dolores Park, 19th & Dolores, San Francisco, CA
The American Dream. It used to mean a job, a house, a car, a spouse, 2.5 kids, and a .4 dog. But what does it mean now? For Gabriel Pearce, a Black man tired of liberal failures, on the day after the presidential election it means victory! Giving up on progressivism wasn’t easy, but casting his vote for a Conservative who promise to be grateful could mean a dream come true. However, for his daughter Paine – a teacher at a university caught between protesting students and threats to funding – it’s a nightmare! Or was the lost election just a dream? Or will A.I. catch fire, like Oliver sees in his nightmares? Do androids dream of electronic voting? Can we create the utopia of justice activist student Emma hopes for, or is the present just a dream within a dream within a dream. But whether you’re asleep or Woke what some see as nightmares others see as… American Dreams.
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Bloody Thursday Walk
Friday, July 05, 2024, 12:00 PM until 2:00 PM local (PDT) time; FREE
Ferry Building – Harry Bridges Plaza, The Embarcadero & Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA
Walk with Gifford Hartman (about 2 hours). Ninety years ago (1934), a great battle took place between striking workers and the police and National Guard along the waterfront alongside the piers of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. We will look at the causes of the 1934 General Strike, why it was successful, and how the issues from that strike are still relevant to working class people today. The current movement against police murder of black and brown people can draw lessons from the way strikers invited black workers into their ranks to prevent racist exclusion from breaking their strike. We explain how an 83-day West Coast Waterfront Strike exploded into the 4-day General Strike that paralyzed all commerce in San Francisco. This tour will visit the sites of those events.
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90th Anniversary of 1934 Big Strike
Friday, July 05, 2024, 7:30 PM until 10:00 PM local (PDT) time; FREE
518 Valencia St., San Francisco, CA 94110
Ninety years ago. San Francisco’s class relations were transformed by the General Strike. This commemorative event “Bloody Thursday” (this year it’s on Friday), when police shot more than five dozen and killed two strikers, catalyzing a spontaneous work stoppage that paralyzed most of the Bay Area. (the “official” General Strike only lasted 4 days). Learn how the 34 strike canoes through history and the International Longshore and warehouse Union. This represents an essential example of 20th century labor history, Automation, multi-tiered and solidarity among waterfront workers continue to shape our work today, whether port workers, UPS and us in between and at either end of this complex system.
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Contracting Out, Union Busting & Privatization In Southern Africa
Saturday, July 06, 2024, 10:30 AM until 12:30 PM local (PDT) time; FREE; ONLINE VIA ZOOM
The destruction of workers in Southern African including in South Africa and Namibia is escalating. Workers are being forced into contract labor which was the type of labor under apartheid conditions. These panelists will report on the fight against union busting and also the role of contract labor in destroying unions and working conditions.
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Labor History Bike Tour
Saturday, July 6, 2024, 12:00 PM until 4:00 PM local (PDT) time; $25 donation; RSVP required
Tour starts at 518 Valencia St. near 16th St. (about 4 hours of tour) Tour ends at Spear and Market, San Francisco, CA
Labor History Bike Tour by Chris Carlsson. From the pre-urban history of Indian Slavery to the earliest 8-hour day movement in the U.S., the ebb and flow of class war is traced. SF’s radical working-class organizations are shaped in part by racist complicity in genocide and slavery, but from the 1870s to the 1940s there are dozens of epic battles between owners and workers, culminating in the 1934 General Strike and its aftermath. This is an entirely different look, during a four hour bike tour, at San Francisco labor history.
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Racism, Labor And White Supremacy
Saturday, July 6, 2024, 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM local (PDT) time; FREE
ILWU Local 10, Henry Schmidt Room, 400 North Point St., San Francisco, CA
This panel will look at the historic struggle against white supremacy in the labor movement and the growth of fascism in the US today. There has been an escalation of hanging noose incidents and racist attacks in the workplace and community. It will look at how unions like the ILWU have fought systemic racism by direct action and the jobs and the growing threat of a fascist government and what unions and working people need to do to confront this deadly danger and the threat of civil war.
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Sweden, Worker Rights & The Struggle At Tesla
Sunday, July 7, 2024, 2:30 PM until 5:00 PM local (PDT) time; FREE
San Francisco North Beach Library, 850 Columbus St., San Francisco, CA
Today the Tesla service workers in Sweden who are members of IF Metall union have been on strike since October 2023 against the billionaire union buster Elon Musk. Their union sees the struggle as a fundamental and existential struggle to defend union rights in Sweden and the Netherlands. Many other workers including metal workers, dockers and even postal workers are refusing to deliver cars and even mail.
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1934 & Now, Connections of the Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934: Art Exhibition
Open daily; Cargill Gallery, Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55401
Participating artists: Mike Alewitz, Rachel Breen, Keith Christensen, Olivia Levins Holden, Juxtaposition Arts youth, Carolyn Olson, Mike Rivard, and Brooks Turner. Organized by Keith Christensen in conjunction with members of the Remember 1934 Collective
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We Are One – Honoring Immigrant Garment Workers
Through August 24, 2024; Wed-Sat, 1-4 pm & by appointment.
American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark, Haledon, NJ 20,000 members of Local 23-25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union – most of them Chinese immigrant women – walked off the job in protest in 1982, staging a brief, successful strike. Historic photographs and artifacts salute the extraordinary outpouring of energy of women.
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Collective Action: Labor Activism in 21st Century Baltimore
Through December 31, 2024; Baltimore Museum of Industry, Baltimore, MD
A bold new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Industry exploring the historic and contemporary organized labor movement.
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NOTE: There are dozens of labor arts events across the country on our updated website; check them out, let us know what you think, and send details on any events we should know about to info@laborheritage.org | |
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July 1, 1929: Some 1,100 streetcar workers strike in New Orleans, spurring the creation of the po’ boy sandwich by a local sandwich shop owner and one-time streetcar man. "Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming," Bennie Martin later recalled, "one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy.’" Martin and his wife fed any striker who showed up.
This week’s Labor History Today podcast: “The Port of Missing Men”: This week, in an encore of a show we first aired on July 10, 2022, labor history takes a deep dive into "True Crime" `. Billy Gohl (photo) was called "The Ghoul of Grays Harbor" in the early 20th Century when he was accused of being the murderer who dumped several bodies into the canals around Aberdeen in Washington State. Was he one of America's first serial killers? Or was he just another in a long line of labor activists framed by the bosses? CLICK HERE TO LISTEN!
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"The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too."
Please CLICK HERE NOW to pledge your financial support to our 2024 program, which includes our annual Solidarity Forever Award, the Great Labor Arts Exchange, the DC Labor FilmFest and much more (check out our website for details!).
Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
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