During the historic gathering of 3 #UnitedStates presidents last night, pro- #Palestinian protesters interrupted the event. Again, instead of ignoring their protestations, the presidents addressed the concerns.
All 3 men remarked on the #Israel#Hamas#war in #Gaza, reflecting on the difficulty of trying to solve intractable challenges such as #MiddleEast#peace as #POTUS. #Biden said there have been “too many innocent victims, Israeli & Palestinian,” in the conflict.
American economic pessimism has been bafflingly persistent despite major indicators showing that the economy is actually strong. Unemployment is low, #inflation is significantly down, #wages are up, the stock #market is hitting new all-time highs, & it looks like TheFed might keep the US out of a #recession.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.
Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.
Today in Labor History March 18, 1970: The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the U.S. Postal Service began on this date in New York City. The walkout was illegal, giving President Richard Nixon the excuse to send in federal troops to sort the mail. But the strike succeeded in forcing Congress to raise wages and reorganize the postal system and marked a new militancy among postal employees.
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 February 26, 1941: 14,000 workers struck at Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna mill in Buffalo, New York. As a defense contractor, the company had $1.5 billion worth of armament orders, but refused to pay the minimum wage mandated for government contracts. Furthermore, they had recently fired 1,000 workers, blaming their last work stoppage for damaging some coke ovens. The pickets effectively stopped scabs from getting in. After less than 2 days, the company agreed to rehire the fired men and began talks on a raise and union recognition. However, a month later, they reneged.
Today in Labor History February 15, 1910: The ILGWU declared the Uprising of Twenty Thousand shirtwaist strike officially over. The garment workers strike began September 27, 1909, in response to abysmal wages and safety conditions. The majority of striking workers were immigrant women, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews (75%) and Italians (10%), and mostly under the age of 20. Five women died in the strike, which the union won, signing contracts with 339 manufacturing firms. However, 13 firms, including Triangle Shirtwaist Company, never settled. One of the demands had been for adequate fire escapes and for open doors to the streets for emergencies. In 1911, 146 girls and women were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
Proposed Wage Theft Legislation Would Strip Violators of Their Ability to Do Business in #NewYork
“We did not have the data to understand the scale of the issue in New York State until the ProPublica and Documented series came out last year,” state Sen. Jessica Ramos said.
Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:
"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."
As Hubbell says, this news, of course, puts Trump and the Republicans in a bind, since they want to slam Biden by claiming the economy is rotten — when it's not. Ditto for the media who have done all but stand on their heads to feed the narrative of a bad economy to help Republicans.
We'll still hear complaints on social media from a lot of folks who claim to be "progressive" but who look for any way they can to tear Biden down.
Today in Labor History January 26, 1886: In Decazeville, France, miners attacked the home of the mine engineer, Watrin, after he slashed their wages by 10%. He died when they threw him from his window. Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, who wrote about the strike in June of 1886, considered the strike to be one of the seminal moments for French socialists over the past 15 years.
Read #QuinnNorton about #whiteness:
"The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin #privilege is that you don’t have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn’t. In places with black #slavery, the whites suffered terribly.
"There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else’s experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black #wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history."