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MPR News Presents
MPR News Staff

Labor Day special: MPR documentary, 'The Strike is On'

Tear gas
Using tear gas during truckers' strike in Minneapolis from 1934.
Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society

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Back in 1934, the Minneapolis truckers' strike boiled over into a deadly confrontation in downtown Minneapolis. Police fired on striking workers, killing two of them, and wounding dozens of others. Historians consider the strike — and its violence — a turning point in U.S. labor history, which ushered in a new era of collective bargaining in Minneapolis and across America.

Former MPR producer and documentarian Mark Heisted made a documentary about the history of the labor movement in Minnesota, tracing it from the immigrant miners on the Iron Range in the 1910s and 20s, the flour milling and meatpacking unions, and through the Minneapolis Truckers' strike of May 1934. The documentary is called "The Strike is On!"

Historians say the May, 1934 Minneapolis Truckers' strike was a watershed event in U.S. labor history.

The MPR documentary, was produced in 1985 with a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society.