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Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

6 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 6, 1865. Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery. Arguably, the single most important event in the history of American labor, the official end to slavery closed a chapter in the nation’s race-based labor system!

On the other hand, the 13th Amendment only ended one form of the race-based labor system, which still has tremendous power today, including in the prisons.

Let us the review the general outlines of what slavery meant–the right of the employer to do whatever they want with labor. Kill it. Rape it. Impregnate it and own the offspring. Beat it. Gamble it away. Dehumanize it. Whatever. It’s all open game when labor becomes property.

Read 34 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

5 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 5, 1894. Alabama repealed its child labor law in order to convince the Dwight Manufacturing Company, a textile corporation, to move its mill operations from Chicopee, Massachusetts to its state. Let's talk about the race to the bottom!

Dwight did this, settling in Gadsden.

This incident is both an early incident in the history of capital mobility, a phenomenon that plagues workers today, and also shines a light into how the apparel industry was a pioneer in breaking labor resistance through closing up and moving operations to a non-union state.

Read 39 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

4 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 4, 1907. Theodore Roosevelt ordered federal troops to the gold mining town of Goldfield, Nevada to bust a strike of workers affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World and Western Federation of Miners. Let's talk about TR, unionbuster!

This event shows both the potential of the IWW to win actions and the extent to which the government would participate in crushing what it saw as a radical threat to American institutions.

The Industrial Workers of the World formed in 1905 to organize all the nation’s and even the world’s workers into One Big Union that would bring an end to the oppression of workers.

Read 31 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

1 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 1, 1868. A young black former Union soldier named John Henry was among a group of convicts sent from Richmond to West Virginia to blast a railroad tunnel, where he would soon die. Let's talk about the real John Henry, man and myth!

In the aftermath of the Civil War, southern states had no money to hold prisoners. Contracting them all out, or at least the black ones, to coal companies became very common by the late nineteenth century.

But the first industry to seek free labor from black prisoners was the railroad. Between September 1871 and September 1872, for instance, the Virginia State Penitentiary leased out 380 black prisoners to the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, of which 48 died on the job.

Read 27 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

30 Nov

This Day in Labor History: November 30, 1932. The American Federation of Labor endorsed federal unemployment insurance, only at the point at massive member revolt. Let's talk about the AFL's deep problems and how the Depression changed it.

This was a remarkable shift for the AFL, which had long opposed any sort of government programs for workers, preferring to rely on voluntarism and negotiation to force employers to concede worker rights instead of a government which it felt it had no reason to trust.

This began the broader shift toward the American labor movement relying on government as the guarantor of its rights and the rights of working people writ large.

Read 34 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

28 Nov

This Day in Labor History: November 28, 1901. A Cuban cigar workers strike in Tampa collapses. Let's use this to talk about transnational organizing in favor of Cuban nationalism!

Tampa was a small town in the late nineteenth century. But a growing cigar industry began transforming it into a locally important center. The center of cigar production was in an area called Ybor City.

It was founded by a Cuban cigar manufacturer named Vicente Martinez Ybor, who moved production north in the 1880s to avoid the growing tension in Cuba between the Spanish government and nationalists that would eventually lead to American intervention in 1898.

Read 35 tweets

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