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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2x5vMEE:
dontbearuiner:
terminalpolitics:
terminalpolitics:
Tim Wise forgets that the last time WV coal miners got too demanding about working conditions:
Mine owners and local law enforcement assassinated activists, used a private airforce to drop WWI surplus mustard gas bombs on them, and the USAF had spotter planes feed the union-busters targeting information.
We don’t talk about the West Virginia Coal Wars much even though they were the largest “armed insurrection” in this country since the Civil War, but some legacies of those days still haunt us such as the figure of Mother Jones – a real person and a militant pro-labor activist whose name has been stolen by a labor-punching neoliberal corporate media rag.
If you want to understand the lengths that big business (with the backing of our government) will go to in supressing labor movements, you should read a bit about the Battle of Blair Mountain [x][x].
Nobody wants to be a coal miner…
But people are born into a system specifically-created so that coal mining is their only option. In the past, this kept the mines full even as the workers dropped like flies. Today, it is producing a generation with no way to escape a moribund industry.
When people cry out that their “way of life” is dying, it’s easy for us to laugh and snark at them. But we forget that a “way of life” is the means by which they live. For some people, there is no replacement, no other option. When their way of life dies, so do they.
And if they get too loud when “demanding something better” – we bomb them and erase them from history.
image source:[x]
August 25-September 2 is the anniversary of The Battle of Blair Mountain.
Don’t let America forget its labor history.
Happy Labor Day, everyone.
dontbearuiner:
terminalpolitics:
terminalpolitics:
Tim Wise forgets that the last time WV coal miners got too demanding about working conditions:
Mine owners and local law enforcement assassinated activists, used a private airforce to drop WWI surplus mustard gas bombs on them, and the USAF had spotter planes feed the union-busters targeting information.
We don’t talk about the West Virginia Coal Wars much even though they were the largest “armed insurrection” in this country since the Civil War, but some legacies of those days still haunt us such as the figure of Mother Jones – a real person and a militant pro-labor activist whose name has been stolen by a labor-punching neoliberal corporate media rag.
If you want to understand the lengths that big business (with the backing of our government) will go to in supressing labor movements, you should read a bit about the Battle of Blair Mountain [x][x].
Nobody wants to be a coal miner…
But people are born into a system specifically-created so that coal mining is their only option. In the past, this kept the mines full even as the workers dropped like flies. Today, it is producing a generation with no way to escape a moribund industry.
When people cry out that their “way of life” is dying, it’s easy for us to laugh and snark at them. But we forget that a “way of life” is the means by which they live. For some people, there is no replacement, no other option. When their way of life dies, so do they.
And if they get too loud when “demanding something better” – we bomb them and erase them from history.
image source:[x]
August 25-September 2 is the anniversary of The Battle of Blair Mountain.
Don’t let America forget its labor history.
Happy Labor Day, everyone.
