On this day in labor history, the year was 2000.

That was the day meatpackers at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota staged a seven-hour sit-down strike for health and safety.

They protested assembly line speed-up, being forced to work while injured and the dreaded “gang-time,” supervisors used to avoid paying overtime.

Remarkably, the organizing drive came after the workers took action on their own behalf.

The United Food and Commercial Workers had organized the plant briefly in the early 1990s.

They quickly lost ground when the company pressed a successful decertification campaign after refusing a first contract.

This time, workers found that as the assembly line pace increased, so did the rate of injuries.

Workers came into the plant that morning, resolved to make a stand.

Management bullied them for hours throughout the day to give up.

Finally they were forced to concede to many of the workers concerns, including observation of line speed changes and uniform hours of work.

Workers eagerly signed UFCW cards, while the company unleashed its propaganda campaign to scare workers away from the union.

Management claimed workers would have to pay outrageous sums in union dues, that they’d lose their medical benefits and that their names would be turned over to the federal government.

The undocumented among the workers, some of whom were the best union fighters in the plant, were unshaken by these threats.

Then the company began targeting the strike leaders with firings and endless job transfers.

Workers stood intransigent and the UFCW overwhelmingly won the NLRB election a month later.

The union successfully weathered years of continued harassment, threats and decertification campaigns, but could not survive the closing of the plant in 2014.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1921.

That was the day one of the worst race riots in American history began in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In a frenzy of anti-black violence, a white mob destroyed virtually the entire black neighborhood of Greenwood.

Over the course of two days, as many as 300, mostly black residents were killed. ‘Black Wall Street’ had been burned to the ground, leaving 10,000 homeless.

The day before, Dick Rowland, a young black man tripped as he boarded an elevator at his job.

He fell against the young white woman elevator operator.

When she shrieked, nearby department store employees assumed she had been assaulted.

Rowland was arrested and newspapers fanned the flames of race violence and vigilantism.

On this day, white racist mobs surrounded the Tulsa County Courthouse where Rowland was being held and demanded he be turned over to them.

Returning black veterans had become increasingly assertive about their rights as citizens.

They marched to the courthouse, armed in an attempt to prevent Rowland’s lynching.

When the vets refused to disarm in the face of demands by the white mob, gunfire ensued, touching off 16 hours of fighting that literally decimated the community black workers and professionals had built up over the course of decades.

The National Guard was called out, mainly to disarm and round up black residents of Greenwood. Witnesses reported that Greenwood was bombed from the air by police and by Sinclair Oil company planes.

The history of the riot was buried for more than half a century.

It would take until 1997 for the Oklahoma State Legislature to set up a commission to uncover the bloody details, produce a 200 plus page report and recommend millions in reparations.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1937.

That was the day known as among the darkest days for Labor, the Memorial Day Massacre.

For days, strikers had suffered arrests and severe beatings at the hands of Chicago police, who physically prevented them from establishing picket lines at South Chicago’s Republic Steel.

Joined by supporters from practically all walks of life, strikers decided late in the afternoon to march to the gates, determined to picket.

For Michael Dennis, author of The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy,“Southeast Chicago became a crucible in which a wide spectrum of social and political alternatives became possible…

The Little Steel Strike was propelled by the realization that workers lived in a country dedicated to democratic freedom, but worked under conditions of near autocracy.”

Men, women, and children, black, white and Mexican workers all chanted “CIO! CIO!” as they marched down Green Bay Avenue.

The Chicago Police waited for them, armed with revolvers, nightsticks and blackjacks.

Strikers defended their right to picket as police once again formed a solid line, preventing their passage.

The police soon launched tear gas canisters and began firing into the crowd.

The picketers turned away in a futile attempt to escape the staggering brutality.

When the dust settled, ten were killed, thirty more shot, twenty-eight others hospitalized with eight suffering permanent disability and another 20-30 injured.

Virtually all those shot had wounds in the back or side.

Michael Dennis notes that the massacre “cast the die for the strike…

Collaboration between municipal officials, corporate leaders and the military in suppressing the strike would go uncontested by federal authorities and cheered by middle-class opinion.”

The campaign to organize Little Steel had suffered a crushing blow.