Actor Henry Winkler will be among the participants in the 2023-24 William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage Series bringing the literary world’s best writers to Cleveland.
Say “labor” and “Akron” and the likely response will be “rubber.” That’s as it should be, but in “Labor in Akron, 1825-1945” the historian John Tully reaches back far earlier, even as far back as the founding of the city.
The laborers who dug the Ohio & Erie Canal, mostly Irish immigrants seeking opportunity after a famine and cholera epidemic, were paid a pittance and vulnerable to rattlesnakes and diseases like malaria. There were a few unorganized strikes, but conditions did not improve.
Other early labor activities included the forming of a carpenters’ union in 1837 and a factory workers’ strike in 1845. Akron was important in women’s rights, with early suffrage efforts and the momentous 1851 “Ain’t I A Woman” speech by Sojourner Truth.