This Day in History
(from WorkingforChange.com)

1913: Paterson (New Jersey) silk workers' strike. 800 employees of Doherty Silk Mill quit work in protest of firing a workers' committee trying to talk to management about eliminating the four-loom system, returning to two-looms per worker. The new system meant faster, harder work for less pay. The strike became industry-wide within a month. The IWW was called in to help and 25,000 -- virtually all the silk workers in the city -- went on strike. Lasts six months, ending when ribbon workers negotiate separately. Negotiations broke down, shop by shop. The workers had become impoverished and weakened during the long strike.

1951: First U.S. nuclear weapons test conducted at what would become the Nevada Test Site.

1957: For the second time in a year, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s home is bombed.

1967: Outer Space Treaty signed by U.S., U.S.S.R. and Britain. Yes, Dubya's Star Wars plans violate it.

1969: A group of Detroit African-American auto workers known as the Eldon Avenue Axle Plant Revolutionary Union Movement leads a wildcat strike against racism and bad working conditions. Since the 1967 Detroit rebellion, African American workers have organized militant groups in several Detroit auto plants. The most famous of these was the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, or DRUM. Combining Black-Power nationalism and workplace militancy, these young militants compare factories to plantations and white supervisors to brutal overseers. Shutting down inner-city plants in more than a dozen wildcat strikes, they criticize both the seniority system and grievance procedures as racist. United Auto Workers (UAW) union leaders quickly denounce the protests, calling the dissidents (quote) "black fascists." The revolutionary groups will leave a permanent imprint on the Detroit labor movement. Most inner-city UAW locals will soon be headed by African Americans, some of them veterans of the insurgency.

1973: Vietnam Peace Treaty signed in Paris

1987: Soviet General Secretary Mikahil Gorbachev signals new era of "Glasnost" (openness), proposing economic and social reforms.

1999: Pope John Paul II urges Catholics to oppose death penalty.