List of worker deaths in United States labor disputes
The following list of worker deaths in United States labor disputes captures known incidents of fatal labor-related violence in U.S. labor history, which began in the colonial era with the earliest worker demands around 1636 for better working conditions. It does not include killings of enslaved persons. According to a study in 1969, the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world, and there have been few industries which have been immune.
This list is not comprehensive. A number of factors make some of the death and injury counts uncertain.By authorities
Law enforcement and companies' militia, armed detectives and guards
- May 8, 1910 – Yukon, PA: As 25 sheriff's deputies and state police vainly searched a boarding house, a crowd of striking miners gathered and ridiculed them. The deputies then fired into the crowd, killing one and injuring 30.
- May 1910 – Export, PA: Miners who were walking home passed by coal company property, whereupon 20 sheriff's deputies and State Police attacked and severely beat them. One miner, trying to protect a child in his arms, was killed.
- May 1910 – State police stopped four immigrant miners who did not speak English to question them. A bilingual miner came by and told the four to leave, but the troopers chased, shot and killed the fifth man, allegedly in cold blood.
- July 1910 – South Greensburg: Striking miners had obtained a permit to march, but as they began, deputy sheriffs on horseback stopped them. In defiance of the local police chief, the deputies charged with their horses, swinging clubs and then firing into the crowd, killing a miner.
- A legislator's survey found that violence significantly increased after the arrival of the State Police, and that almost all acts of violence committed by state troopers were without provocation:
Execution by the state
Following an investigation 100 years after his death, John Kehoe was posthumously pardoned by the governor, who wrote, "t is impossible for us to imagine the plight of the 19th Century miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite region.... We can be proud of the men known as the Molly Maguires", whom he praised as "these martyred men of labor".p. 284| November 11, 1887 | Illinois | strike | 4 hanged on Nov. 11, 1887
1 suicide on Nov. 10, 1887 | On May 4, 1886, one day after police fired into a crowd of striking McCormick Harvesting Machine workers outside Chicago, 3000 people rallied at Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality. A bomb thrown at the rally caused police to open fire, killing at least one worker and injuring many. Blamed for the Haymarket bomb, four labor leaders were eventually hanged and one committed suicide the day before the scheduled executions. The prosecution admitted that none of eight defendants was involved in the bombing. In 1893 Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld found that "much of the evidence given in the trial was pure fabrication," and that the police had bribed and "terrorized ignorant men" or threatened witnesses "with torture if they refused to swear to anything desired." |
| November 19, 1915 | Utah | organizing | Joe Hill | Joe Hill, IWW labor organizer and songwriter, was executed by firing squad by the State of Utah for the alleged murder of a grocer, despite worldwide protests and two attempts to intervene by President Woodrow Wilson. With the backing of the IWW, his conviction was appealed to the Utah Supreme Court. Citing dozens of alleged errors in procedure and fairness, attorney O.N. Hilton called Hill's case "utterly lacking in the essential fundamentals of proof." Recent research findings support "that the circumstantial case made against the man who ultimately was executed for the crime was nowhere near as convincing as the one that could and should have been made against Wilson," who was a serial criminal well known to police, who picked him up mere blocks from the murder, detained him and then let him go. |
By vigilante, strikers, mob and hate group
