Throughout much of our history, so inhumane and utterly deplorable were working conditions that workers frequently had to resort to the strike—a strategy that remains labor’s most effective and underutilized tool to this day. In the past, companies routinely hired armed thugs to prevent workers from meeting and organizing unions. Despite the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, workers did not have the legal right to form unions until Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal.’ Belonging to a union could cost you everything. Not belonging to a union assured one’s fate as an indentured servant of the company. The notorious Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency has a long history of terrorizing workers on behalf of the company bosses. Intimidation, threats, beatings, lynchings and shootings were commonplace during the industrial revolution. Those who demanded the eight hour work day, better wages and the right to form unions faced grave and palpable danger. Organizers often lived short but intense lives. It required courage to stand up to the company thugs and to fight for justice. Those who did were called reds and communists by their capitalist oppressors.
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Whatever Happened To Courage?
Posted on Wednesday, March 08 at 13:16 by 4CanadaContributed By
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Dio <br />
Some stuff that happened in Canada<br />
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<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2006-08%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=Vancouver+depression++riots">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2006-08%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=Vancouver+depression++riots</a><br />
<a href="http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=13549">http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=13549</a><br />
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/emithsilas/depressionhistory.html">http://www.geocities.com/emithsilas/depressionhistory.html</a><br />
<a href="http://www.vancourier.com/issues03/095103/news/095103nn1.html">http://www.vancourier.com/issues03/095103/news/095103nn1.html</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.expatriate-online.com/about/Memoirs/Early_Years/great_depression.cfm">http://www.expatriate-online.com/about/Memoirs/Early_Years/great_depression.cfm</a><p>---<br>to realise our knowledge is ignorance is a noble thought.<br />
To regard our ignorance as knowledge-<br />
This is mental illness<br />
Lao-Tzo
There are some interesting links there. Also nice to know there were some fiesty women involved all along. Too bad that some of the things angering people even in the 30s are still relevant today! It leaves me to ponder when will people ever change?
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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche
We had come a long way from my grandfather working a brutally hard job at age 8 to my “died and went to heaven” days at university some fifty years later. You question their character. They were the most courageous people on the planet simply because they did what they had to. They built a dream from the miserable dog holes of the Appalachia coalfields and they would live to see it happening.
I say there is no where else where this could regularly happen. It is the magnet that attracts the people of the world. They get 4 times as many legal immigrants as the next country in line. They also get as many door crashers as legals so they probably get eight times what the second choice gets. That really says something profound whether you admit it or not.
Today unions are among the biggest backers of open boarders (a guarantee that North America’s cheap labor market never dries up) joining Vicente Fox the man responsible for the virulently anti-worker NAFTA agreement (ordinary Mexicans are doing worse than even before NAFTA). There have been no new United Mine Workers contracts signed in southern W. Va. Since Reagan was president. Labor has sold out so often it’s embarrassing. I think that says a lot about today’s unions. It doesn't say beans about Americans.
It sez a helluva lot more about the willingness to be apathetic member OF those unions. American members!
My background is similar to yours, however I have remained a free-thinker.
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Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound