Today in Labor History March 31, 1883: Cowboys in the Texas panhandle began a 2-and-a-half-month strike for higher wages. Investment firms from the East Coast and Europe were taking over the land and cutting benefits that cowboys had accustomed to, like keeping some horses for themselves and holding some of the land for their own small farming. New ranch owners were more interested in expanding holdings and increasing profits, forcing their hands to work entirely for wages, and maintaining all livestock entirely for the profit of the owners.

Media from as far away as Colorado accused the cowboys of being incendiaries, threatening to burn down the ranches, attacking ranchers, and indiscriminately killing cattle.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #cowboy #strike #texas #wages #books #nonfiction #author #writer @bookstadon

Ex-payroll officer sparks outrage over ‘intentional’ salary delays

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://interaksyon.philstar.com/trends-spotlights/2026/03/31/311328/ex-payroll-officer-outrage-salary-delays/

All aboard, Trump leads US to the #19thcentury on the #RegressiveExpress - #tarriffs #wars & #worker insecurity

More from @rbreich about the Regressive Express :
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/honestly-now-whos-better-at-the-economy

#jobs #inflation #wages

I saw someone explaining tech companies' C-suite execs insisting on massive LLM / token use as "because companies would rather pay other companies under contract than give money to their labourers" and damn if that hasn't stuck with me for the last 24 hours.

#LLM #capital #wages #labour #labor #executives

Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #union #AFSCME #PATCO #strike #atlanta #CivilRights #sanitation #blackpower #wages #poverty #reagan

Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #memphis #union #strike #racism #MartinLutherKing #assassination #PoliceBrutality #WorkplaceDeaths #police #tennessee #wages