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Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

25 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 25, 1831. The Baptist Rebellion began in Jamaica. This slave rebellion of up to 60,000 people, put down over the next couple of weeks, also was the final straw that moved the United Kingdom toward outlawing slavery in its colonies!!!

By the early 1830s, the slave system in the British colonies was under attack from a number of fronts. First, there was a large abolitionist movement in Britain, led by William Wilberforce. This was known to slaves in the Caribbean.

Second, the British religious denominations had engaged in large-scale missions among the slaves in the previous decades.

Read 27 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

23 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 23, 1872. Coal miners near Clearfield, Pennsylvania got into a fight with strikebreakers trying to mine coal during a strike. This tells us a lot about how miners defined their jobs and their rights in 1872, providing lessons to us today!

In November 1872, the miners of central Pennsylvania went on strike. The mine owners did nothing. They just waited them out.

Railroads found alternative coal sources. In this still early period of American industrialization, companies attacking their own workers violated a lot of customary relationships that defined early American work. But times were changing fast.

Read 38 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

22 Dec

Predictable, safe, and basically fine. Not my top choice, but OK.

nytimes.com/2020/12/22/us/…

With every interest group putting tons of pressure on Newsom to put in someone who looks like them, it's extremely predictable that he would see this is a no win situation and revert to putting in a trusted ally who is also now the first Latino senator from CA.

And the fact that Newsom now gets to appoint the new Secretary of State and Attorney General for California gives him plenty of tools to placate other groups.

Read 4 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

14 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 14, 1945. The House passed what would become the Employment Act of 1946 once Harry Truman signed it. Let's talk about this watered down legislation and how real full employment policy has always been a tough fight in America!

World War II ended the Great Depression. But policymakers knew that the war would end and they didn’t know what would happen to the economy. There was disagreement over the extent to which the underlying factors that led to the Depression had dissipated.

Many economists believed that the Great Depression was the natural state of a mature economy and would return without significant government intervention. This was a serious concern as the war ended, with widespread fears of a massive economic downturn.

Read 34 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

12 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 12, 1957. The AFL-CIO evicted four unions from the federation for corruption, most notably the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Let's talk about corruption in unions, which is unfortunately a plague of all power, not just unions.

There’s certainly nothing special about labor unions in this way except that corporate corruption is dealt with through hand slaps or ignored or even celebrated while union corruption brings down the federal government in harsh ways.

This is a reflection of the nation’s pro-corporate ideology. But corruption in unions is an unquestionably awful thing. As early as the 1920s, there were investigations of corruption in some New York building trade unions.

Read 29 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

11 Dec

This Day in Labor History: December 11, 1886. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was established in Lovelady in Houston County, Texas. It represented the brave attempt of black farmers to avoid tenancy, sharecropping, and other forms of white controlled labor. Let's talk about it!

The Farmers Alliance itself, an organization formed to speak to the very real concerns of increasing poverty and economic marginalization of southern farmers within the burgeoning industrial capitalist world, could not be a truly integrated organization.

The reality of segregation and racism were too much for that. What's important here is not overstate the racial alliance between white and Black farmers in the Alliances. It was extremely limited and we should not think of it as a history of interracial cooperation. It was not.

Read 34 tweets

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