Aug. 3, 1981: Air Traffic Controllers Strike

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond.
Role play on the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
Lesson engages students in a lively simulation that helps them experience some of the pressures that lead workers to organize.

Teaching Guide. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 1988. 184 pages.
Role plays and writing activities project high school students into real-life situations to explore the history and contemporary reality of employment (and unemployment) in the U.S.

Spies from the Pinkerton Detective Agency and striking steelworkers engaged in a major battle as part of the Homestead Strike.

Miners in Coeur d’Alene held a strike and took on the Pinkertons.

More than 1,000 streetcar workers went on strike in New Orleans.

Rubber workers began a sit-down strike at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio.

Tenayuca was known as “La Pasionaria de Texas” for her commitment to justice for Mexican American laborers.

Over 1,100 sanitation workers strike and march for better wages, conditions, and safety with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.

Reagan appealed to the “George Wallace-inclined voters” and to white supremacy in his stump speech at the Neshoba County Fair, mere miles away from where three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan in 1964.

The Wisconsin Workers strike involved as many as 100,000 protesters opposing the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10.