Labor Fest 2024 is coming to the SF Bay Area this July.
If you're in the Bay Area, July 21, 5-8 pm, please come hear me read from my working-class historical novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill. Signed copies will be available.
Make an evening of it. Or a weekend.
Lots of wonderful speakers and musical and theatrical performances!
And report-backs on organizing efforts among low-wage workers of color.
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
#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 😂
How I Live Now meets Exodus – a startling YA dystopia that imagines London as the epicentre of the refugee crisis, from critically acclaimed author Clare Furniss.
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.
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
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
Today in Labor History June 10, 1971: Mexican police, and paramilitary death squads known as Los Halcones, killed 120 student protesters, including a 14-year-old boy, in the Corpus Christi Massacre, also known as El Halconazo. In 1968, the government had massacred up to 500 of students and bystanders in the Tlatelolco massacre. The Halconazo started with protests at the University of Nuevo Leon, for joint leadership that included students and teachers. When the university implemented the new government, the state government slashed their budget and abolished their autonomy. This led to a strike that spread to the National Autonomous University of Mexico and National Polytechnic Institute. To suppress the strike, the authorities used tankettes, police, riot police, and the death squad, known as Los Halcones, who had been trained by the CIA. Los Halcones first attacked with sticks, but the student fended them off. Then they resorted to high caliber rifles. Police had been ordered to do nothing. When the injured were taken to the hospital, Los Halcones followed and shot them dead in the hospital. Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes about these events in her 2021 novel “Velvet Was the Night.” It is also depicted in the 2018 film Roma.”
Today in Labor History June 9, 1843: Bertha von Suttner was born (d. 1914). She was an Austrian journalist, author, peace activist and Nobel Prize laureate. She was also a friend of Alfred Nobel, who famously told her that there would not be world peace until a weapon was invented that was so deadly it could annihilate countries in seconds. Some say that it was her activism and advocacy that inspired him to include a peace prize as part of his endowment. Von Suttner wrote “Lay Down Your Arms,” an anti-war novel that made her a leading figure in the Austrian peace movement. However, it was also considered a feminist novel for its characters resistance to accepting traditional gender roles. Tolstoy compared her favorably with Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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.
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Stay tuned for updates on my forthcoming novel, From Terror to Valor: Echoes and Shadows, coming soon for pre-order. More on a site that no longer serves stale cache at https://authormulhall.com
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.
A VIRTUOSO RIFF ON AN AMERICAN classic: the inimitable Percival Everett retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, transforming it from a familiar picaresque to a more complex adventure and a meditation on code-switching. A MINUS
A FORMER CHILD INFLUENCER comes to terms with how the exploitation of her image changed her life. More than just a “problem novel,” this thoughtful book deftly takes on issues of family trauma, love, friendship, racial and national identity. A MINUS
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO Jasper Fforde’s enigmatic 2011 novel Shades of Grey is a fascinating, mysterious science fiction picaresque where decoding the secrets behind the worldbuilding is part of the fun. B PLUS
Today in Labor History May 20, 1776: The Mohawks, under the leadership Joseph Brandt (Thayendanegea), defeated the American Revolutionaries at the Battle of the Cedars (on the St. Lawrence River). A day earlier, Benedict Arnold, commanding the American military garrison at Montreal, surrendered to a combined force of British and Indigenous troops. Brant was born into the Wolf Clan of the matrilineal society, where power was divided between male chiefs and clan mothers, with decisions made by consensus between them. Much of this history is portrayed in the wonderful novel Manituana, by Wu Ming (2007), an Italian writing collective formerly associated with the Luther Blissett Project.