Actors’ Equity is founded by 112 theater actors meeting in the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City. A strike six years later, during which membership increased from 3,000 to 14,000, loosened the control on performers’ lives by theater owners and producers - 1913

10,000 IWW dock workers strike in Philadelphia - 1913

20,000 textile mill strikers in Paterson, NJ gather on the green in front of the house of Pietro Botto, the socialist mayor of nearby Haledon, to receive encouragement by novelist Upton Sinclair, journalist John Reed and speakers from the Wobblies. Today, the Botto House is home to the American Labor Museum - 1913

More than 2,000 workers strike the Draper Corp. power loom manufacturing plant in Hopedale, Mass., seeking higher wages and a nine-hour workday. Eben S. Draper, president of the firm -- and a former state governor -- declares: "We will spend $1 million to break this strike" and refuses to negotiate. The strike ended in a stalemate 13 weeks later - 1913

Joe Hill’s song “There Is Power In A Union” appears in “Little Red Song Book,” published by the Wobblies - 1913

Pres. William Howard Taft signs legislation creating the Department of Labor. Former United Mine Workers Secretary Treasurer William B. Wilson is named to lead the new department - 1913

Postal workers granted 8 hour day - 1913

Jimmy Hoffa born in Brazil, Indiana, son of a coal miner. Disappeared July 30, 1975, declared dead seven years later – 1913

Fifteen thousand rubber workers strike in Akron, Ohio, protesting speed-up - 1913

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones is arrested while leading a protest of conditions in West Virginia mines. She was 83 years old at the time - 1913

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man launched the 1955 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott and the birth of the civil rights movement, is born in Tuskegee, Ala. - 1913

25,000 Paterson, NJ silk workers strike for eight-hour work day and improved working conditions. 1,800 were arrested over the course of the six-month walkout, led by the Wobblies. They returned to work on their employers’ terms - 1913