Labor unions today: "we'll help you organize and take the legal steps to get fair treatment."
Labor unions in 1912: "take this rifle. If your boss doesn't comply with our demands, shoot him and blow up his mansion."
One of these two approaches gets immediate results.
Imagine how fucking awesome a movie about the battle of Blair Mountain would be. Union busting, armed revolt, assassination, people like Mother Jones and Bill Blizzard.
Apparently a local sheriff and some miners got into a gunfight with a bunch Pinkertons who had been illegally evicting people, and then when the sheriff showed up for his court date the pinkerton's just lit him up before the trial started. And shit only got crazier from there.
My great grandfather actually was a coal mine who took up arms around the time of the ludlow massacre, and fought the Colorado national guard. It's kind of a wild family story and even more wild that the next two generations of his descendents were almost entirely composed of libs lol
The no strike clause debacle gives me zero faith in the IWW to accomplish anything.
You get out what you put in with them. They will explain all the nuts and bolts to getting organized. But I wouldn't want them negotiating my contracts.
How do you expand the organization beyond the people who wear thrifted denim jackets and read Luxemburg under the shade of a tree after riding their penny farthing to gather mushrooms for supper?
I mean that’s the question isn’t it? How do we show workers that it’s in their best collective interest to organize together?
Besides the IWW, do you have any recommendations for other unions like it? I’m more midwestish if that matters.
unfortunately they're worse
(cw: rape) https://okcfox.com/news/local/norman-councilperson-says-she-was-intended-target-after-neighbor-is-raped
The cop "union" is not an actual union because cops are not actual workers. The pig "union" is just a group of fascists who haven't been mowed down yet.
cops are not actual workers
It's a thin line, as they're exposed to all the same neoliberal undercurrents as the rest of us. Cop unions are simply the organizations that survived from an era when public sector unionization was the norm. And they've been the most difficult to dissolve because they are so vital to the function of capitalism.
Neoliberals would love nothing more than to abolish unions and turn policing into another Gig Economy job. Then the water gets even more muddy.
I hope the neoliberals successfully do that to the pigs. A weakened state apparatus is useful for us.
It's weaker for individual cops. I don't know if it's meaningfully weaker for the capitalists.
To quote Jay Gould: "I Can Hire Half the Working Class To Fight the Other Half"
Hardly a victory for Leftism if NextDoor starts farming out the job of state-sanctioned violence to insecure racist middle-class suburbanites.
I feel robbed not being taught the history of US workers movements in school. Instead we learned about ancient history and the civil war and WW2 exclusively.
More and more people are saying it folks. Direct action is the best action. Any means necessary they say. Can you believe that?
Labor unions in 1912
Literally coasting off the massive military surplus and trained regiments created in the midst of American imperial expansion.
One of these two approaches gets immediate results.
One relies on a police and surveillance state that's a century behind the modern curve, as well as a population that hadn't been subject to a lifetime's worth of anti-violence propaganda and vilification against armed rebellion.
