![]() ![]() More important, the federal officials charged with managing the shipyards, refused to negotiate. Most of the local and national press denounced the strike, while conservatives called for stern measures to suppress what looked to them to be a revolutionary plot. On the other hand, it was becoming clear that the sympathy strike was not working. Big strikes in the past had usually led to big violence, but this one remained completely peaceful, and in doing so provided a model for later mobilizations. "Nothing moved but the tide," remembered a striker years later. ![]() ![]() On the second day, the Mayor threatened to declare martial law and two battalions of US Army troops took up position in the city, but the unions ignored the threat and calm prevailed. An unarmed force of labor's "War Veteran Guards" patrolled the streets, urging calm, urging strikers to stay at home. The teamsters union saw to it that supplies reached the hospitals, that milk and food deliveries continued. Thousands were fed each day at impromptu dining stations staffed by members of the culinary unions. An elected Strike Committee had taken responsibility for coordinating essential services. While the mayor and business leaders huddled at City Hall, eight blocks away the four-story Labor Temple, headquarters for the Central Labor Council and 60,000 union members, hummed with activity. And most of the remaining work force stayed home as stores closed and streetcars stopped running. The city's AFL unions, 101 of them, had voted to walk out in a gesture of support and solidarity. 25,000 other union members had joined 35,000 shipyard workers already on strike. On the morning of February 6, 1919, Seattle, a city of 315,000 people, stopped working. It is part of the Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium based at the University of Washington. The Seattle General Strike Project is a multimedia website exploring this important event. The Seattle General Strike of February 1919 was the first 20th-century solidarity strike in the United States to be proclaimed a “general strike.” It led off a tumultuous era of post-World War I labor conflict that saw massive strikes shut down the nation's steel, coal, and other industries and threaten civil unrest in a dozen cities. In the following decades, the labor movement worked to extend coverage of the law to all workers and prevent employers from forcing employees to engage in unpaid work.Excerpt from Witness to the Revolution: The Story of Anna Louise Strong a film by Lucy Ostrander. With the Great Depression’s severe unemployment, the labor movement revived the idea of reducing work hours and pushed for passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing an eight-hour day and forty-hour week. The backlash from the Haymarket affair set the movement for a shorter workday back for decades. One resulting protest, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, led to a large police intervention and deaths on both sides. Organized workers around the country answered the call. Over a half-century later, on May 1, 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a national strike demanding an eight-hour workday. In 1835, the Philadelphia carpenters again led another movement for a shorter workday by organizing America’s first city-wide general strike. This strike began the American working class’ long struggle to reduce their work hours from the twelve-hour agricultural norm of sun up to sun down. In the wake of the American Revolution, Philadelphia carpenters organized the first strike for a shorter, ten-hour workday. The Eight-Hour Day Labor, Recreation, and Rest: The Movement for the Eight-Hour Day ![]()
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