Tag: IWW
Oct 02 2011
Occupy Wall Street 10.01.11
Jan 31 2010
Land and Liberty
On January 29, 1911, a small band of 18 revolutionaries marched into Mexicali and seized the town, practically without firing a shot. Thus began one of the most unusual and controversial episodes in Mexican history.
These revolutionaries were not the typical warlords that Mexico was used to seeing. These revolutionaries had American volunteers, but not the sort of filibusters that Baja California was already very familiar with. In fact, this revolutionary movement had little in common with anything Mexico had experienced before or since.
These revolutionaries weren’t interested in just overthrowing the corrupt and repressive government, they wanted to overthrow society as well.
Jul 07 2009
July 7, 1903: “March of the Mill Children”
Labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones led the “March of the Mill Children” over 100 miles from Philadelphia to Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed “The Wail of the Children” speech. Roosevelt refused to see them.
Apr 08 2009
1000 Words, 1000 Years
It’s been awhile since my last entry in my series on the New Deal. I’ve dipped into the motherlode of picture archives – the FSA pix from the Library of Congress, and got lost amongst the rich legacy therein for a time. Starting with Dorothea Lange, with some 4000 entries. This picture of hers is one of the most iconic from the period:
A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? And everyone thinks they know what this picture’s about. But consider the caption that goes with:
Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Destitute in pea picker’s camp, Nipomo, California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the twenty-five hundred people in this camp most of them were destitute.
Permanently changed my understanding of the picture. Throughout the diary, text in italics is direct quotes from the photographers notes
Cross-posted from Daily Kos
Jan 15 2009
UAW accepts government ban on strikes
Original article, by Jerry White, via World Socialist Web Site:
It has come to light that the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler approved last month by the Bush administration with the support of the incoming Obama administration includes a stipulation that effectively bans strikes or work stoppages by autoworkers.
Jan 10 2009
Unskilled workers and the unemployed: organise, or die on your feet slowly
Original article, by Hamish McLaren, via Socialist Appeal (UK):
2008 makes for a sad story, and in 2009, the working class will begin really paying for it. Some of the worst to be affected will be young unskilled workers; cleaners, shop-workers and caterers, like myself. Minimum wage workers at the best of times, we have, during the period of boom (which apparently was the last 10 years, although no one told us) eked out an existence, hovering from one place to the next for as long as moral holds out. Most I have worked with were young, often migrants, demoralised but unorganised and so usually without contracts of employment and subject to very poor working conditions.
Jan 07 2009
Ready for the union
Original article, a comment subtitled Adam Turl looks at what unions can do for young workers–and what youth could do for organized labor, via socialistworker.org:
A RECENT study, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Young Workers,” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) confirms that the need to join unions couldn’t be a more pressing issue for those coming of age today.
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