Today in Labor History June 24, 1525: The Church reconquered the Anabaptist free state of Munster. The Anabaptists had created a sectarian, communal government in Munster, Germany, during the Reformation. They controlled the city from February until June 24, 1525. They were heavily persecuted for their beliefs, which included opposition to participation in the military and civil government. They saw themselves as citizens of the Kingdom of God, and not citizens of any political state. Their beliefs helped radicalize people during Germany’s Peasant War, a revolt against feudalism and for material equality among all people. Some of the early Anabaptists practiced polygamy and polyamory, as well as the collective ownership of property. The more conservative decedents of the Anabaptists include the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites.
The Munster rebellion has been portrayed in several works of fiction. My all-time favorite is “Q,” (1999) by the autonomist-Marxist Italian writing collective known as Luther Blissett. They currently write under the pen name Wu Ming. Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote an opera about it 1849, Le prophète.
LAYERS OF TREACHERY IN PARADISE—or as close to Paradise as the California coast and a whole lot of money can take you—abound in this brilliant and bitingly satirical riff on both The Stepford Wives and Herodotus. B PLUS
Celebrating a paradoxical 11/10 rating of my story The Last Philosopher by Spookyspackles on RoyalRoad 🥳
But who knows what could have been if I had only given 120% instead of the standard 110% 😂
Anyway, the story is free to read, links can be found on my profile, thanks and sorry 😁
#JustFinished jPod
I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever worked in IT. Especially, executives and managers.
Also, to anyone who has parents that are incompetent mosters (Incompemonsters TM) and need YOU to fix THEIR problems 😂
Today in Labor History June 16, 1869: In the small mining town of Ricamarie, France, troops opened fire on miners who were protesting the arrest of 40 workers. As a result, troops killed 14 people, including a 17-month-old girl in her mother’s arms. Furthermore, they wounded 60 others, including 10 children. This strike, and another in Aubin, along with the Paris Commune, were major inspirations for Emile Zola’s seminal work, “Germinal,” and the reason he chose to focus on revolutionary worker actions in that novel.
I need to reorganize my fiction bookshelves. What system has worked best for you? I'm leaning towards going by author, though that leaves the question of how to treat anthologies. Maybe anthologies could be first, or shelved by the editor's name. Alphabetical by title (preceded by numbers) might work just as well as by author.
I had been doing them by height size, except for the graphic novels, which tend not to match any standard size.
These particular bookshelves are all fiction (except for graphic nonfiction) so organizing by subject seems unwieldy.
Today in Labor History June 15, 1914: Westinghouse strike, Pittsburgh. The Allegheny Congenial Industrial Union (ACIU) struck against Westinghouse. They were demanding union recognition and protesting against the "scientific management" theories of Frederick Taylor. They also wanted an eight-hour day, reinstatement of fired workers, and higher overtime and holiday rates. Women played a major role in the strike and many of the striking workers were women. Bridget Kenny organized marches and recruited workers to join the ACIU and rose to become one of the main spokespeople for the union. She had been employed by Westinghouse but fired in 1913 for selling union benefit tickets on company grounds. The Pittsburgh Leader, one of the city’s newspapers and one that hired numerous women writers, including Willa Cather, nicknamed Kenny “Joan de Arc.” And the women in this strike provided some of the inspiration for the workingwomen characters in Willa Cather’s short fiction. The Westinghouse plant on Edgewood Avenue was one of three they possessed in the Pittsburgh region, and one of the main sights of strike activity. In late June, the company used armed thugs to intimidate the workers, leading to a violent exchange in which several workers, and the East Pittsburgh police chief, were injured.
AN EXTRAVAGANT, SPRAWLING PICARESQUE set in Zaire in the last years of the Mobutu regime is a symphony of voices from every walk of life, from tough street kids to the secret police to high society. Vivid and fascinating. B PLUS
Something a little different this week: after finishing Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, I'm pivoting hard to The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. I didn't love Tales of the City, and I think a large part of that had to do with Maupin's narration: for me, his North Carolina accent didn't translate well to a character driven story set in 1970s San Francisco. Hoping the next book will taste better (pun intended). 😂
HIGH TECH AND HOODOO and the powers of love, art, and community are mighty weapons in this unique adventure set in a near-future dystopian Massachusetts. Rich with the Afrofuturist spirit of funk and beautiful evocations of nature. B PLUS
Vā Stories by Women of the Moana edited by Lani Wendt Young, 2021
In this book you will travel across oceans and meet diverse and deep characters in over 50 rich stories from Cook Island, Chamorro, Erub Island (Torres Strait), Fijian, Hawaiian, Māori, Ni-Vanuatu, Papua New Guinean, Rotuman, Samoan and Tongan writers.
Just finished reading #HananAlShaych's 'Women of Sand and Myrrh'. It is brilliant and a tough read. This is largely because it captures something of the way that women, but actually any human, are trapped in a kind of limbo, unable to be themselves. There is no way out in a world where everything is false. It is able to explore these metaphysical themes by starting from the very particular: exile from Lebanon to a nameless gulf state emerging into an unreal capitalist modernity from an unreal nomadic past.
Today in Labor History June 8, 1917: The Granite Mountain/Spectacular Mine disaster killed 168 men in Butte, Montana. It was the deadliest underground mine disaster in U.S. history. Within days, men were walking out of the copper mines all over Butte in protest of the dangerous working conditions. Two weeks later, organizers had created a new union, the Metal Mine Workers’ Union. They immediately petitioned Anaconda, the largest of the mine companies, for union recognition, wage increases and better safety conditions. By the end of June, electricians, boilermakers, blacksmiths and other metal tradesmen had walked off the job in solidarity.
Frank Little, a Cherokee miner and member of the IWW, went to Butte during this strike to help organize the miners. Little had previously helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He had participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” On August 1, 1917, vigilantes broke into the boarding house where he was staying. They dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car and then hanged him from a railroad trestle.
Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a striker breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing.
THE WORLD OF 1950s BOMBAY comes alive in this story of twin sisters trying to follow their own dreams and meet the expectations of their very proper Punjabi family, still unsettled by the violence of Partition. Lovely, rich saga. A MINUS
Today in Labor History June 7, 1929: Striking textile workers battled police in Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Loray Mill Strike. Police Chief O.F. Aderholt was accidentally killed by one of his own officers during a protest march by striking workers. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested six strike leaders. They were all convicted of “conspiracy to murder.”
The strike lasted from April 1 to September 14. It started in response to the “stretch-out” system, where bosses doubled the spinners’ and weavers’ work, while simultaneously lowering their wages. When the women went on strike, the bosses evicted them from their company homes. Masked vigilantes destroyed the union’s headquarters. The NTWU set up a tent city for the workers, with armed guards to protect them from the vigilantes.
One of the main organizers was a poor white woman named Ella May Wiggans. She was a single mother, with nine kids. Rather than living in the tent city, she chose to live in the African American hamlet known as Stumptown. She was instrumental in creating solidarity between black and white workers and rallying them with her music. Some of her songs from the strike were “Mill Mother’s Lament,” and “Big Fat Boss and the Workers.” Her music was later covered by Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, who called her the “pioneer of the protest ballad.” During the strike, vigilantes shot her in the chest. She survived, but later died of whooping cough due to poverty and inadequate medical care.
For really wonderful fictionalized accounts of this strike, read “The Last Ballad,” by Wiley Cash (2017) and “Strike!” by Mary Heaton Vorse (1930).
Today in Labor History June 4, 1943: The Zoot Suit riots began in Los Angeles, with white soldiers attacking and stripping mostly Latino, but also some black, Italian and Filipino youth who wearing zoot suits. They did it in response to wartime propaganda vilifying the wearers of zoot suits as unpatriotic hoodlums. There was a government ban on zoot suits and other long, woolen articles of clothing because of war rationing. Additionally, the LA Times had been whipping up racial tensions by publishing propaganda associating Mexican and Hispanic youth with delinquency, particularly in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon murder. Race riots also occurred that summer in Mobile, Beaumont, Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, Oakland, Philadelphia and New York City.
During the Great Depression, the U.S. had deported between 500,000 and 2 million Mexicans. Of the 3 million who remained, the largest concentration lived in Los Angeles. Because of discrimination, many were forced into jobs with below-poverty wages. And then, the U.S. military built a naval academy in the Latino community of Chavez Ravine, further exacerbating tensions.
Zoot suits (baggy pegged pants with a long, flamboyant jacket that reached the knees) became popular in the early 1940s, particularly among young African American men. It was associated with a sense of pride, individuality and rebellion against mainstream culture. The trend quickly made its way into the Hispanic and Filipino subcultures in southern California. During this time, there was also a rise of pachuco culture among Latin youth. Chicano or pachuco jazz had become incredibly popular. Some of the great Pachuco band leaders included Lalo Guerrero, Don Tosti and Don Ramon Martinez.
Margarita Engle depicted The Zoot Suit riots in her young adult novel, Jazz Owls (2018), which she wrote in verse.
SHARP, SATIRICAL DYSTOPIAN near-future adventure skewers privatized government, social censorship, and unrestrained avarice—and it’s a high-energy thriller as well! B PLUS
Today in Labor History June 1 is the day that U.S. labor law officially allows children under the age of 16 to work up to 8 hours per day between the hours of 7:00 am and 9:00 pm. Time is ticking away, Bosses. Have you signed up sufficient numbers of low-wage tykes to maintain production rates with your downsized adult staffs?
The reality is that child labor laws have always been violated regularly by employers and these violations have been on the rise recently. Additionally, many lawmakers are seeking to weaken existing, poorly enforced laws to make it even easier to exploit children. Over the past year, the number of children employed in violation of labor laws rose by 37%, while lawmakers in at least 10 states passed, or introduced, new laws to roll back the existing rules. Violations include hiring kids to work overnight shifts in meatpacking factories, cleaning razor-sharp blades and using dangerous chemical cleaners on the kills floors for companies like Tyson and Cargill. Particularly vulnerable are migrant youth who have crossed the southern U.S. border from Central America, unaccompanied by parents. https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/
Of course, what is happening in the U.S. is small potatoes compared with many other countries, where exploitation of child labor is routine, and often legal. At least 20% of all children in low-income countries are engaged in labor, mostly in agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa it is 25%. Kids are almost always paid far less than adults, increasing the bosses’ profits. They are often more compliant than adults and less likely to form unions and resist workplace abuses and safety violations. Bosses can get them to do dangerous tasks that adults can’t, or won’t, do, like unclogging the gears and belts of machinery. This was also the norm in the U.S., well into the 20th century. In my soon novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” the protagonist, Mike Doyle, works as a coal cleaner in the breaker (coal crushing facility) of a coal mine at the age or 13. Many kids began work in the collieries before they were 10. They often were missing limbs and died young from lung disease. However, when the breaker bosses abused them, they would sometimes collectively chuck rocks and coal at them, or walk out, en masse, in wildcat strikes. And when their fathers, who worked in the pits, as laborers and miners, went on strike, they would almost always walk out with them, in solidarity.