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#workingclass

22 posts9 participants0 posts today

#Trump’s #tariffs – and retaliatory tariffs being imposed on American exports by #US trading partners – will be paid by #America's #workingclass and #poor.
The people who will benefit most from another giant Trump #taxcut are America’s wealthy.
Tariffs are in effect #taxes on imported products. They’re paid by Americans.
Walmart’s CEO said it will raise prices in response to Trump’s tariffs in order to protect its profits.
It will be a giant upward transfer of wealth. theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · Trump’s tariffs will be paid by the poor – while his tax cuts help the richBy Robert Reich

Today in Labor History March 15, 1917: The U.S. Supreme Court approved the 8-hour workday under the threat of a rail strike. Philadelphia carpenters struck for the 10-hour day in 1791 and by the 1830s, it had become a general demand of workers. In 1835, Philadelphia workers organized the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers, in the struggle for a 10-hour day. However, by 1836, labor movement publications were calling for an 8-hour day. In 1864, the 8-hour day became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. In 1867, a citywide strike for the 8-hour day shut down the city's economy for a week before falling apart. During the 1870s, eight hours became a central demand of the U.S. labor movement, with a network of 8-Hour Leagues forming across the nation.

In 1872, 100,000 workers in New York City struck and won the eight-hour day. On May 1, 1886 Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue in the first modern May Day Parade, with workers chanting, "Eight-hour day with no cut in pay." Within days, 350,000 workers went on strike nationwide for the 8-hour day. On 3 May 1886, anarchist August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Newspaper), spoke to 6,000 workers. Afterwards, they marched to the McCormick plant in Chicago to harass scab workers. The police arrived and opened fire, killing four and wounding many more. On May 4, workers protested this police violence at a meeting in Haymarket Square. An unknown assailant hurled a bomb at the police. The authorities rounded up hundreds of labor activists and anarchists. They convicted 8 in a kangaroo court and executed four of them, including Parsons and Spies.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American currently works 8.8 hours every day. This, of course, does not include commute time which, for many Americans, can add another two or more hours a day to the time they give away for free to their bosses. Nor does it include work we take home. The scam of being a “salaried” employee is commonly exploited by bosses, who argue that we are paid based on the responsibilities completed, regardless of how long it takes to complete them.

Read my full article on Lucy Parsons, which goes deeper into the Haymarket affair and the struggle for the 8 hour day: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/

Today in History, March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein was born. In addition to being one of the most significant physicists of all time, he was also a pacifist. Yet his letter to President Roosevelt warning of the Nazi progress on atomic weapons research was arguably key to the U.S. implementation of the Manhatton Project, a decision he later lamented. In 1955, well after the Cold War and nuclear arms race had begun, he and ten other intellectuals and scientists, including other Nobel Prize laureates, like Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling, wrote a manifesto warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Einstein also participated in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, calling racism America’s “worst disease.” Later in his life he began to support socialism, and he criticized the Bolsheviks for their barbarism. Einstein was also a Zionist, and supported Jews’ right to return to Palestine. However, he did not support a Jewish state, or an Arab state, to replace Mandatory Palestine. Rather, he wanted a free, bi-national Palestine in which Jews and Arabs shared sovereignty, living peacefully and equally with each other.

Today in Labor History March 14, 1954: Salt of the Earth premiered. The film depicted the 1951 strike of Mexican-American workers at the Empire Zinc mine, in New Mexico. The film was one of the first to portray a feminist political point of view, particularly through Actress Rosaura Revueltas’s role as Esperanza Quintero. When the Company uses the new Taft-Hartley Act (which also bans General Strikes) to impose an injunction preventing the men from picketing, their wives go walk the picket line in their places. LGBTQ and labor activist Will Geer also played in the film. Writer Michael Wilson, director Herbert Biberman and producer Paul Jarrico had all been blacklisted for their alleged communist ties. Only 13 of the 13,000 theaters in the U.S. showed the film.

Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.

The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #breadandroses #policebrutality #union #elizabethgurleyflynn #bigbillhaywood #strike #picket #immigrants #poetry #novel #books #fiction #writer #author #uptonsinclair @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 12, 1967: Suharto took power from Sukarno in Indonesia. He ruled Indonesia as an authoritarian, kleptocratic dictator for 31 years, and is widely considered one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators of the 20th century. During that time, he amassed a fortune worth $38 billion. Suharto rose to power under Sukarno during the 1965-1966 genocide. During that ostensibly anti-Communist purge, Suharto’s troops murdered 1-3 million communists, labor activists, peasants and ethnic minorities. During that genocide, he received support military and economic from both the U.S. and the U.K. In 1974, the Suharto regime, with approval of U.S. president Gerald Ford, invaded East Timor, killing over 200,000 Timorese. Another 75,000-200,000 died from starvation and disease. The current Indonesian government is considering awarding him the posthumous honor of National Hero.

Today in Labor History March 12, 1928: The St. Francis Dam failed in Los Angeles, California, killing 431 people. It is the second deadliest disaster in California, after the 1906 earthquake, and one of the worst U.S. civil engineering disasters ever. A defective foundation and design flaws caused the failure. Yet, the inquest absolved chief engineer, William Mulholland, of all criminal responsibility, and he continued to earn a salary from the Bureau of Public Works (though his career was effectively ended). The authorities continued to find the remains of victims of the flood until the mid-1950s. Many of the victims were washed out to sea. Some washed ashore as far south as Mexico. Mulholland was also the designer of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, which sucks water from the Owens Valley and is a major cause of the depletion of the fragile Mono Lake. As its water levels continues to decline, it threatens the world’s second largest gull rookery, home to up to 50,000 birds. The aqueduct’s construction, and the shady methods Mulholland used to acquire the water rights, led to the California Water Wars between L.A. County and Owens Valley farmers. Many of those same Anglo farmers (or their predecessors) usurped the land from Piute people during the 1863 Owens Valley Indian War, which was precipitated, in part, by the vast loss of human and cattle lives, and the displacements, caused by the Megaflood of 1861, which inundated much of the West, from Idaho and Oregon, down to northern Baja California. The corruption related to the construction of the aqueduct has been portrayed in the film Chinatown, and in the nonfiction book, “Cadillac Desert.”

For more on the Megaflood of 1861, please read my article, “Worse Than the Big One”: michaeldunnauthor.com/2023/01/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #flood #dam #mulholland #monolake #owensvalley #disaster #nativeamerican #indigenous #piute #ecology #chinatown #indianwar #habitatdestruction #books #nonfiction #author #writer #losangeles @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 11, 1811: Luddites attacked looms near Nottingham, England, because automation was threatening their jobs. At the time, workers were suffering from high unemployment, declining wages, an “endless” war with France and food scarcity. On March 11, they smashed machines in Nottingham and demonstrated for job security and higher wages. The protests and property destruction spread across a 70-mile area of England, reaching Manchester. The government sent troops to protect the factories and made machine-breaking punishable by death.

Today in Labor History March 11, 1850: French anarchist Clément Duval was born. His theory of individual reclamation, which justified theft, and other crimes, as both educational and legitimate ways to redistribute the wealth, influenced the Illegalists of the 1910s, including Jules Bonnot, of the Bonnot Gang. According to Paul Albert, "The story of Clement Duval was lifted and, shorn of all politics, turned into the bestseller Papillon."

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #illegalism #prison #deportation #wealth #BonnotGang #papillon #individualism #novel #fiction #writer #author #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 9, 1902: Actor Will Geer was born. Best known for his role as Grandpa Walton in the long-running series, “The Waltons,” Geer also appeared in the groundbreaking film, “Salt of the Earth,” which portrayed the struggle of Mexican American workers at the Empire Zinc Mine. Because of his activism on labor and political issues, he was blacklisted in Hollywood for many years. In 1934, he became a member of the Communist Party. He also met LGBTQ activist Harry Hay that year and they became lovers. Together, they supported the 1934 San Francisco General Strike and demonstrated against fascism and for workers’ rights. Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first major gay rights group in the United States, and the Radical Faeries, an anarcho-pagan queer spiritual-political movement.

Today in Labor History March 9, 1911: Frank Little and other free-speech fighters were released from jail in Fresno, California, where they had been fighting for the right to speak to and organize workers on public streets. Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” 1917, he helped organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana. Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle. Prior to Little’s assassination, Author Dashiell Hammett had been asked by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to murder him. Hammett declined.

Read my full bio of Frank Little here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #strike #freespeech #indigenous #nativeamerican #cherokee #franklittle #civilrights #nonviolence #racism #vigilantes #lynching #author #writer #fiction #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 9, 1841: The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that freed the remaining 35 survivors of the Amistad mutiny. In 1839, Portuguese slave traders had illegally transported 52 Mende people from west Africa to Cuba, on the Amistad, in violation of European treaties against the slave trade. Joseph Cinque led his fellow captive Africans in a mutiny, killing the cook and captain, and forcing the remaining crew to return them to Africa. The crew tricked them and sailed up the Atlantic coast, presuming they would be intercepted by the U.S. Navy, which captured the ship near Montauk, Long Island. President Martin Van Buren wanted to send the prisoners back to Spanish authorities in Cuba to stand trial for mutiny. However, the Court recognized the mutineers’ rights as free citizens. Abolitionists raised funds for the mutineers’ defense. Former President John Quincy Adams, who opposed slavery, represented them in court.

’La Voz de la Mujer was a paper written by women for women, it was an independent expression of an explicitly #feminist current within South #America’s #labour #movement and was one of the first recorded instances of the fusion of feminist ideas with a #revolutionary and working-class orientation.

As with #EmmaGoldman, #LouiseMichel and #VoltairinedeCleyre, it differed from the mainstream #feminism by being a #workingclass movement which placed the #struggle...'

libcom.org/article/no-god-no-b

La Voz de la Mujer
libcom.orgNo God, no boss, no husband: The world’s first anarcha-feminist groupAn account of the first anarchist-feminist group in Argentina during the 1890s.

Today in Labor History March 8, 1908: Thousands of workers in the New York needle trades (mostly women) launched a strike for higher wages, shorter hours and an end to child labor. They chose this date in commemoration of the 1857 strike. In 1910, German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed to the Second International, that March 8 be celebrated as International Women’s Day to commemorate this strike and the one in 1857.

“What I want is for every dirty, lousy tramp to arm himself with a revolver or knife on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out.”

This was what Lucy Parsons, then in her 80’s, told a crowd at a May Day rally in Chicago, at the height of the Great Depression. The way folk singer Utah Phillips tells the story, she was the image of everybody’s grandmother, prim and proper, face creased with age, tiny voice, hair tied back in a bun. She died in Chicago, Illinois, on this date in Labor History, March 7, 1942.

Little is known about Lucy Parson’s early life, but various records indicate that she was born to an enslaved African American woman, in Virginia, sometime around 1848-1851. She may also have had indigenous and Mexican ancestry. Some documents record her name as Lucia Gonzalez. In 1863, her family moved to Waco, Texas. There, as a teenager, she married a freedman named Oliver Benton. But she later married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate officer from Waco, who had become a radical Republican after the war. He worked for the Waco Spectator, which criticized the Klan and demanded sociopolitical equality for African Americans. Albert was shot in the leg and threatened with lynching for helping African Americans register to vote. It is unclear whether her initial marriage was ever dissolved, and likely that her second marriage was more of a common-law arrangement, considering the anti-miscegenation laws that existed then.

In 1873, Lucy and Albert moved to Chicago to get away from the racist violence and threats of the KKK. There, they became members of the socialist International Workingmen's Association, and the Knights of Labor, a radical labor union that organized all workers, regardless of race or gender. They had two children in the 1870s, one of whom died from illness at the age of eight. Lucy worked as a seamstress. Albert worked as a printer for the Chicago Times. These were incredibly difficult times for workers. The Long Depression had just begun, one of the worst, and longest, depressions in U.S. history. Jobs were scarce and wages were low. Additionally, bosses were exploiting the Contract Labor Law of 1864 to bring in immigrant workers who they could pay even less than native-born workers.

In 1877, Lucy and Albert Parsons helped organize protests and strikes in Chicago during the Great Upheaval. The police violence against the workers there was intense. One journalist wrote, “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” During the Battle of the Viaduct (July 25, 1877), the police slaughtered thirty workers and injured over one hundred. Albert was fired from his job and blacklisted, because of his revolutionary street corner speeches.

After the Great Upheaval, they both moved away from electoral politics and began to support more radical anarchist activism. Lucy condoned political violence, self-defense against racial violence, and class struggle against religion. Along with Lizzie Swank, and others, she helped found the Chicago Working Women's Union (WWU), which encouraged women workers to unionize and promoted the eight-hour workday.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, she wrote numerous articles, including "Our Civilization, Is it Worth Saving?" and "The Factory Child. Their Wrongs Portrayed and Their Rescue Demanded." In 1884, she helped edit the radical newspaper The Alarm. She wrote an article for that paper, "To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited and Miserable," which sold of over 100,000 copies. In that article, she advocated using violence against the bosses. In 1885, she published "Dynamite! The only voice the oppressors of the people can understand," in the Denver Labor Enquirer. During this period, Lucy gave numerous fiery speeches on the shores of Lake Michigan. Hundreds of people routinely attended. Mother Jones thought her speeches advocated too much violence. The Chicago Police Department called her “more dangerous than 1,000 rioters.”

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. to demand the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, Albert and Lucy led a peaceful demonstration of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. It was the world’s first May Day/International Workers’ Day demonstration—an event that has been celebrated ever since, by nearly every country in the world, except for the U.S. Two days later, another anarchist, August Spies, addressed striking workers at the McCormick Reaper factory. Chicago Police and Pinkertons attacked the crowd, killing at least one person. On May 4, anarchists organized a demonstration at Haymarket Square to protest that police violence. The police ordered the protesters to disperse. Somebody threw a bomb, which killed at least one cop. The police opened fire, killing another seven workers. Six police also died, likely from “friendly fire” by other cops.

The authorities, in their outrage, went on a witch hunt, rounding up most of the city’s leading anarchists and radical labor leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies. Lucy toured the country, giving speeches and distributing literature about the men’s innocence. Everywhere she went, she was greeted by police, often being barred entrance to the meeting halls where she was scheduled to speak. She was also arrested numerous times.

Despite her efforts, and those of other activists fighting to free the Haymarket anarchists, seven were ultimately convicted of killing the cops, even though none of them were present at Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown. Four were executed, in 1887, including Albert Parsons. On the morning of his execution, Lucy brought their children to see him for the last time, but she was arrested and taken to the Chicago Avenue police station, where they strip-searched her for explosives. Albert’s casket was later brought to Lucy’s sewing shop, where over 10,000 people came to pay their respects. 15,000 people attended his funeral. Several years later, the governor of Illinois pardoned all seven men, determining that neither the police, nor the Pinkertons, who testified against them, were reliable witnesses.

After her husband’s execution, Lucy continued her radical organizing, writing, and speeches. In October 1888, she visited London, where she met with the anarchists Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. In the 1890s, she edited and wrote for the newspaper Freedom, A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly. In 1892, Alexander Berkman (an anarchist comrade and lover of Emma Goldman) attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for his role in the slaughter of striking steel workers, during the Homestead Strike. Lucy published the following in Freedom: "For our part we have only the greatest admiration for a hero like Berkman."

In 1905, Lucy cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, and others. The IWW was, and still is, a revolutionary union, seeking not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends.

At the founding meeting of the IWW, Lucy said that women were the slaves of slaves. “We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them.” She called on the new union to fight for gender equality and to assess underpaid women lower union dues. She also started advocating for nonviolent protest, telling workers that instead of walking off the job, and starving, they should strike, but remain at their worksites, taking control of their bosses’ machinery and property. This was years before Gandhi started leading Indians in nonviolent protest.

 Read my entire biography of her here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/

“When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.” –Lucy Parsons

Today in Labor History March 6, 1978: President Jimmy Carter invoked the Taft-Hartley law to quash the 1977-78 national contract strike by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UMWA had been on strike since December 1977, but rejected a tentative contract agreement in early March, 1978. Carter invoked the national emergency provision of Taft-Hartley and ordered strikers back to work. They ignored the order and the government did little to enforce it. By late March, they reached a settlement. Taft-Hartley was enacted in the wake of the strike wave of 1945-1946 and was designed to prevent solidarity strikes and General Strikes. The last General Strike in U.S. history (Lancaster, PA; Stamford, CT; Rochester, NY; and Oakland, CA) occurred just prior to Taft-Hartley.