Thought Portal

Marion Massacre

an article from 2003 that shows just what giant corporations are willing to do to destroy workers rights to bargain collectively.

Brian Merchant on the Luddites and their view on technology and work.

not having to work in a factory as a child

Michigan Lawmakers Vote To Repeal State’s ‘Right To Work’ Law https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michigan-right-to-work-repeal_n_6410eb1ee4b00c3e6070aa1b

The Racist Roots of right to work https://www.afscme.org/blog/the-racist-roots-of-right-to-work

https://aflcio.org/

History of Right to Work Laws

Join your local IWW https://www.iww.org/

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies", is an international labor union that was founded in Chicago in 1905. The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain.[5] IWW ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist,[6] syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements.

In the 1910s and early 1920s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American West, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries.  At their peak in August 1917, IWW membership was estimated at more than 150,000, with active wings in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia.[7] The extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated at 133% per decade) makes it difficult for historians to state membership totals with any certainty, as workers tended to join the IWW in large numbers for relatively short periods (e.g., during labor strikes and periods of generalized economic distress).[8]

Membership declined dramatically in the late 1910s and 1920s. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which regarded the IWW as too radical, while the IWW regarded the AFL as too conservative and opposed their decision to divide workers on the basis of their crafts.[9] Membership also declined due to government crackdowns on radical, anarchist, and socialist groups during the First Red Scare after World War I. In Canada the IWW was outlawed by the federal government by an Order in Council on September 24, 1918.[10]

Probably the most decisive factor in the decline in IWW membership and influence was a 1924 schism in the organization, from which the IWW never fully recovered.[9][11]

The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union", and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy.[12] It is known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their own managers[13] and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented. The IWW does not require its members to work in a represented workplace,[14] neither does it exclude membership in another labor union.[15]

Luddites

Podcast about the early history of women in the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union in the United States, in conversation with Heather Mayer, author of Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the IWW in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924.

Get Heather’s book here: amzn.to/2DqONVc Episode 6 of our podcast gives an introduction to the IWW in the US so we recommend listening to that before this unless you are well acquainted with IWW history and terminology already.

Louis Jones is a Keeper, a Field Archivist at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit. For 27 years, Dr. Jones has been building and caring for the largest labor archive in North America. Home to numerous union and labor collections from around the country, the Reuther Library also actively collects material documenting Detroit’s civil rights movement, women’s struggles in the workplace, the LGBTQ Archive of Detroit and much much more. 

The grandson of a Pullman Porter, Louis Jones takes us through these remarkable archives with stories of the United Auto Workers, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, A. Philip Randolph, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Utah Phillips and the Wobblies, the Civil Rights Movement, the 1967 Detroit uprising and how archivists are examining and re-imagining their roles as collectors and preservationists in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement and the dismantling of historical monuments across America.

Louis Jones: Field Archivist, Detroit, was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton for The Keepers. Paulina Hartono was the story intern.

Funding for The Keepers comes from The National Endowment for the Humanities and Listener Contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.

Take the talking point about wages: We know that agricultural laborers for the bishop of Winchester in England were taking home daily wages of about 5.12 denarii — the Latin term for English silver pennies worth 1/240 of a pound sterling — on average when the Black Death first reached the kingdom in 1348. By the late 15th century, this had risen to 7.22 denarii.

And wages didn’t keep increasing. The Winchester laborers were making the same 7.22 denarii per day from about 1380 through 1479. It’s not exactly an ongoing success story about the triumph of the common man.

the Renaissance was something that happened to rich people. The fact that a few outrageously wealthy individuals in Florence could buy a nice painting had absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the masses. The agricultural laborers making a few more coins a day would never see a Leonardo da Vinci sketch, much less a finished work.

And just because a few affluent people were commissioning great art doesn’t mean that life was any better as a whole. Even in celebrated Florence, as historian Ada Palmer notes a precipitous drop in life expectancy in Florence during the Renaissance period. Florentine Captain General Ercole Bentivoglio urged Machiavelli to write on the difficulties of the era, saying,“Without a good history of these times, future generations will never believe how bad it was.”

As a discipline, history attempts not just to commemorate but also to make sense of past events. I always joke that the reason I study medieval history is that we are still too emotionally invested in anything more modern to analyze it. We write off the suffering of medieval people during the Black Death and point to the advantages it gives us now because it happened 700 years ago. If medieval people had to die so that we can look at Renaissance-era prints, it is an abstract concept rather than a painful calculation that has an immediate effect on us.

These interruptions remained a fixture of the industry, and they explain, in part how the false idea of Detroit as a kind of worker’s paradise took root. Historians have assumed, as did many economists in the 1950s, that annual earnings for autoworkers could be calculated closely enough by multiplying the hourly wage by a 40-hour week, 50 weeks a year. In reality, layoffs continued to be so common that there was little correlation between hourly earnings and monthly or annual incomes. Macroeconomic data can be a poor indicator of how ordinary workers are faring; hourly wage rates meant nothing to people who were out of work.