Tag: labor

My work rules for working hours need to apply to all the globe’s working people. Unless you have interest income and or dividend income you can live on, you’re a worker.  Managers are workers, if they are useful managers. Most senior managers, from what I’ve seen in the last 3 decades, are most focused with rigging the system to take a huge cut of the pie before anyone else gets a fair share of the pie they helped create. Just about all of us are working stiffs.

I’ve got no problem with competition.  However, competition without fair rules is NOT fair competition.  When the people with money make the workers’ rules about competition, the competition ain’t fair and ONLY benefits those with the money. The winners of the daily foot races of productivity get false promises and pennies, while the senior management pockets the surplus. For each inventor of a google or band aids who gets their deserved rewards, there are how many trumps, gates, hiltons, bushes … who are ushered into all the right doors with all the right opportunities?

Some of you may remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s old song. I do. When I was a kid we spent summers in eastern Kentucky with my Aunt and grandparents, Dad sometimes took us out to an old strip mine to shoot tin cans with his pearl-handled six shooters, and learn some history while we were at it. Back in the day, he told us, the coal barons had a clever scheme to enslave the local populations who worked to dig out the coal from its natural habitat.

(Orange version of this diary.)

The immigrant labor movement in this country has come full circle. The immigrants are from different countries and the jobs have changed some but the issues are the same as they ever were.

On a sunny April day, I paid a visit to my favorite bakery in San Franciso, the Arizmendi Bakery. Amongst the the beautiful baguettes and the sumptuous scones, I saw a sign stating that the bakery would be closed on May 1 to celebrate Labor Day – the same day it is celebrated in Europe and many other places.

Since Arizmendi Bakery is a worker owned cooperative it didn’t surprise me that they would chose the May 1 observation. (I always figured the US had a different date for cold-war reasons). It turns out there’s an important reason why the world celebrates Labor Day is on May 1:

It’s to commemorate a hard fought, yet forgotten victory for American and immigrant workers that took place right here in the United States: the May 1, 1886 Haymarket Protest in Chicago.

So why doesn’t the US celebrate this?

It’s been awhile since my last entry in my series on the New Deal.  I’ve dipped into the motherlode of picture archives – the FSA pix from the Library of Congress, and got lost amongst the rich legacy therein for a time.  Starting with Dorothea Lange, with some 4000 entries.  This picture of hers is one of the most iconic from the period:

A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?  And everyone thinks they know what this picture’s about.  But consider the caption that goes with:

Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Destitute in pea picker’s camp, Nipomo, California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the twenty-five hundred people in this camp most of them were destitute.

Permanently changed my understanding of the picture.  Throughout the diary, text in italics is direct quotes from the photographers notes

Cross-posted from Daily Kos

One thing about the New Deal is that it was well documented.  Some of the best photographers of the day were hired by Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration.  Lewis Hine worked for the TVA/CCC.  

Pretty much every New Deal agency sent photographers out to document both the need for their activities, and also the results.  There’s some terrific photographs which don’t have the artist identified.  And I do mean artist.

Back in the days of the New Deal, there was a lot of emphasis on work.  On labor actually.  Organized labor was a force, and the powers that be were worried about insurrection from the left in the US.  So it’s not surprising that work is depicted in an heroic light.  

In light of the debates over what is or isn’t worthy of inclusion in the stimulus package, I thought it might be interesting to look at work in FDR’s day.

Cross posted at Daily Kos

What happened at that Chicago manufacturing plant brought back alot of memories of how extremely talented workers fought for what they knew were their rights, decent wages for their labor, on the job safety, trading wages for benefits like health and welfare directly and much much more. Fights that shouldn’t have really happened in a real model of capitalism where all should share directly in the quality and growth of their work and the companies they work for.

We need to return to that pride in company and product, quality products and customer service, correcting the defaults, and growth for all, owners, workers, and investors.

My Labor Day Weekend began this Sunday morning – I jumped on a TriMet bus for a quick ride out to my Sunday farmers market to pick up most of the food I’ll eat this week, directly from some of the people responsible for growing it.  We all enjoyed those few hours in that little Clackamas County town; and then I hopped on the bus back home to my tiny urban inner SE Portland apartment just as they began to pack up their stands and crates onto their trucks and into their vans to scatter back out to their wide open lands in random towns, villages and hamlets all throughout the Willamette Valley.

It’s September tomorrow, and the transition will come soon – the squash become harder, the berries give way to apples and pears…salads and light sandwiches step aside to make room for soup and chili, potatoes make the move from cold salads to hot and creamy au gratin.  I’ll enjoy these last few weeks of fresh local tomatoes; even as I get the oven ready for heavy-duty work again on these upcoming wet and windy 40 and 50-something degree days and 30-something nights, and dust off my butternut squash sauce and (in)famous Oregon Winter Pizza recipes…

Of course, the current American ‘food’ system overall is hardly pastoral or idyllic…and exploitation is the rule for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of farmworkers and food processing plant workers who make possible the many great holiday feasts of millions of Americans on these occasions.

Crossposted from La Vida Locavore, more below the fold…

Blurb here: By Mick Brooks via Socialist Appeal.

This is an audio with the MP3 available for download.  There’s also a link on the page.