On this day in labor history, the year was 1933.

That was the day President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.

The act created the TVA as a federal corporation and was tasked to address the resource development of the region, one of the poorest in the United States.

These included flood control and improved travel along the Tennessee River.

It also meant improved forestry to address soil erosion and facilitation of agricultural production.

Control of water resources required a series of dams, designed to navigate the river and reduce flooding.

Though Wilson Dam had been completed before the establishment of the TVA, the authority had embarked on the construction of sixteen more dams.

During the Depression, the TVA hired tens of thousands of workers for conservation, construction and development.

Historian Erik Loomis notes that though the TVA was one of the region’s largest employers of black workers, the authority also maintained rigid lines of segregation in its workforce.

He adds that though 14 AFL unions eventually worked on dam construction, the agency initially refused to recognize unions.

Workers would wait until 1940 to sign first contacts in the anti-union South.

Today the authority is most well known for its supply of electricity to nearby communities.

It is the nation’s largest public power company and serves about 80,000 square miles in the southeastern United States.

TVA capacity to generate electric power includes some 29 hydroelectric dams, 11 coal fired plants, 3 nuclear plants and several combustion-turbine installations.

It also has several solar and wind installations.

The authority produces more than 130 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.

The TVA played a critical role in transforming the South by constructing infrastructure necessary for modernization and industrialization.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1980.

That was the day 4000 strikers and their supporters gathered for the March for Dignity and Respect in Laurel, Mississippi.

Over 200 mostly black women members of International Chemical Workers Union Local 882 had been on strike against Sanderson Farms chicken processing plant for 15 months.

Trade unionists from as far away as Cincinnati, Memphis and North Carolina came to march in support.

Sanderson Farms had cleared $58 million in profits but paid workers just $3 an hour.

The women demanded a contract that included more control over assembly line speed, overtime pay, and insurance.

They complained of desperately low wages, inhumane working conditions, and even the inability to use the bathroom when necessary!

Workers were given only gloves and an apron once a month, and a file to sharpen their often dull and rusty scissors and knives.

They often referred to the processing plant as the plantation, where sexual harassment was rampant.

Women workers often found themselves given dangerous assignments or even fired if they didn’t put up with sexual advances of their foremen.

Workers maintained that strikebreakers from the community were desperately poor and threatened with violence if they quit, by local Ku Klux Klansmen who worked as supervisors at the plant.

Some were known as having been involved in the murder and/or intimidation of civil rights workers in decades past.

The plant had been organized in 1972, but was extraordinarily weak.

Nonetheless, women strikers understood that the union still served as an invaluable resource in the midst of a largely unorganized South.

By the following February, the NLRB ruled that Sanderson had to resume contract negotiations and allow strikers to return to their jobs.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1934.

That was the day Minneapolis Teamsters walked off the job.

It was an historic strike that coincided with the pivotal Toledo Auto-Lite and West Coast Waterfront strikes.

Local Teamsters, many of whom later founded the Socialist Workers Party, had been riding a wave of success, having organized the coal yards in February.

Especially important was the development of the ‘Cruising Picket Squad.’

It became a standard in later CIO battles.

That spring, union leaders were determined to organize all the truck drivers and warehouse workers in Minneapolis.

By May, Local 574 had over 5000 members.

The trucking bosses refused to deal with the union and so they walked.

The flying pickets toured the city and shut down all trucking.

Strikers enlisted the support of the unemployed councils.

They also provided the structure for a Women’s Auxiliary that produced important strike literature and bulletins, ran soup kitchens that fed thousands of strikers daily, fought scabs and police on the picket lines and drove picket trucks.

Historian Bryan Palmer, author of Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934,notes that strike leaders looked to the example of Illinois’ Progressive Miners of America when it came to building the women’s auxiliary.

They too sought to make women an integral part of the strike, thus “encroaching on the male world of waged work.”

Strike headquarters were established and as Palmer describes, was a beehive of activity on the eve of the strike “as union carpenters and plumbers installed stoves, sinks and serving counters. Union electricians installed communications wiring.”

Donations of money, food, vehicles, and gas rolled in as the strike revved up.

Local 574 was poised to make Minneapolis a union town.