The minimum age allowed by law for workers in mills, factories, and mines in South Carolina is raised from twelve to fourteen - (Actually Leap Year Feb. 29) 1915

The Supreme Court upholds “Yellow Dog” employment contracts, which forbid membership in labor unions. Yellow Dog contracts remained legal until 1932 - 1915

Twenty strikers at the American Agricultural Chemical Co. in Roosevelt, N.J. were shot, two fatally, by factory guards. They and other strikers had stopped an incoming train in search of scabs when the guards opened fire - 1915

Radical labor organizer and anarchist Lucy Parsons leads hunger march in Chicago; IWW songwriter Ralph Chaplin writes "Solidarity Forever" for the march - 1915

Wobblie Ralph Chaplin, in Chicago for a demonstration against hunger, completes the writing of the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever” on this date in 1915. He’d begun writing it in 1914 during a miner’s strike in Huntington, W. Va. The first verse:
When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong - 1915

A Western Federation of Miners strike is crushed by the militia in Butte, Mont. - 1914

Pres. Woodrow Wilson signs the Clayton Antitrust Act – often referred to as "Labor’s Magna Carta" – establishing that unions are not "conspiracies" under the law. It for the first time freed unions to strike, picket and boycott employers. In the years that followed, however, numerous state measures and negative court interpretations weakened the law - 1914

Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, goes to Butte, Mont. in an attempt to mediate a conflict between factions of the miner’s local there. It didn’t go well. Gunfight in the union hall killed one man; Moyer and other union officers left the building, which was then leveled in a dynamite blast - 1914

Coal mine collapses at Eccles, W.Va., killing 181 workers - 1914

Ludlow massacre: Colorado state militia, using machine guns and fire, kill about 20 people—including 11 children—at a tent city set up by striking coal miners - 1914

Unemployed riot in New York City’s Union Square - 1914

Henry Ford announced the new continuous motion method to assemble cars. The process decreased the time to make a car from 12½ hours to 93 minutes. Goodby, craftsmanship. Hello, drudgery - 1914