On this day, 4 February 1924, around 175 radical Industrial Workers of the World union members took on the Ku Klux Klan, patrolling the streets of Greenville, Maine, after the KKK tried to threaten IWW union organisers.
Logging workers in the area were organising for better pay and conditions when around 40 Klansmen had visited a boardinghouse where IWW members (known as Wobblies) were staying and ordered them to leave. Local wobbly organiser Bob Pease charged that the KKK was doing the bidding of lumber companies, and told the local Press Herald that they opposed the IWW “because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks".
The IWW was also ordered to leave the town by local authorities, but they defied both the government and the KKK, and instead organised and took to the streets, declaring “We are going to stick, and if the Klan wants to start something, the IWW are going to finish it”.
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On this day, 5 February 1981, the 240 mostly women workers at the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock, Scotland, occupied their workplace upon learning that it was due to be closed and production moved elsewhere. They barricaded the doors with chairs, and two of them climbed onto the roof and down a drainpipe to buy 240 portions of fish and chips and Irn Bru. They kept up the occupation for seven months, when management caved and agreed to a buyout, giving the jobs back to all 140 workers still occupying the plant.
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