Some 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts participated in a general strike on all military work in the area to protest the use of open-shop (a worksite in which union membership is not required as a condition of employment) builders. The strike held on for a week in the face of threats from the U.S. War Department - 1917

165 Wobblies indicted for protesting World War 1

National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) formed at a convention in Washington, D.C. In 1999 it became part of the Intl. Assoc. of Machinists (IAM) - 1917

Palmer raids on all Wobbly halls and offices in 48 cities in U.S. Alexander Palmer, U.S. Attorney General, was rounding up radicals and leftists - 1917

Some 2,000 United Railroads streetcar service workers and supporters parade down San Francisco’s Market Street in support of pay demands and against the company’s anti-union policies. The strike failed in late November in the face of more than 1,000 strikebreakers, some of them imported from Chicago - 1917

One hundred "platform men" employed by the privately owned United Railroads streetcar service in San Francisco abandon their streetcars, tying up many of the main lines in and out of the city center - 1917

After organizing a strike of metal miners against the Anaconda Company, Wobblie organizer Frank Little is dragged by six masked men from his Butte, Mont. hotel room and hung from the Milwaukee Railroad trestle. Years later writer Dashiell Hammett would recall his early days as a Pinkerton detective agency operative and recount how a mine company representative offered him $5,000 to kill Little. Hammett says he quit the business that night - 1917

50,000 lumberjacks strike for eight-hour day - 1917

Bisbee, Ariz. deports Wobblies; 1,186 miners sent into desert in manure-laden boxcars. They had been fighting for improved safety and working conditions - 1917

AFL President Sam Gompers and Secretary of War Newton Baker sign an agreement establishing a three-member board of adjustment to control wages, hours and working conditions for construction workers employed on government projects. The agreement protected union wage and hour standards for the duration of World War I - 1917

260 die in Butte mine disaster; 14,000 strike against unsafe conditions – 1917

Spectator mine disaster kills 168, Butte, Mont. – 1917