On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.
U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.
The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.
The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like "insurrection" and "Bolshevik revolution". Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General's injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.
Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.
The US miners' strikes, 1919-1922 - Jeremy Brecher
:worker
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Maybe consider defederating from lemmy.zip?
.zip domains should not exist due to the giant security flaws they introduce, and we should offer them no legitimacy.
something about executables in the URL? Spitballing idk
yeahh
honestly as someone who works in the industry and thinks they were a bad idea... who cares? what is gained by one random website defed'ing from another random website? they exist and we can't just wish them out of existence by boycotting them. Here's what the admin over there said about it: https://lemmy.zip/comment/334497