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Erik Loomis

Apr 7

This Day in Labor History: April 7, 1947. Telephone operators for the major phone companies walked off the job. This action was the precursor to the formation of the Communication Workers of America, one of the most important unions in the nation today!!!!!!

Telephone operators struggled with low pay. A large chunk of the workforce, since telephones required the direct connections of lines, it was also dominated by women.

As per always, certain types of work are defined as “women’s work” precisely so employers can pay them less and have greater control over their workers’ lives. Teachers are a great example of this. In the early 19th century, most teachers, even for small children were men.

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Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

Apr 4

This Day in Labor History: April 4, 1936. Workers won the Strutwear strike in Minneapolis, a significant victory specifically for the women who made up most of this workforce. This is a useful strike to explore issues of gender and working class culture in the Great Depression.

In 1934, the Teamsters local in Minneapolis, led by a group of Trotskyites that put it at odds with the international union, went on one of the most epic strikes of the Great Depression, part of that amazing, transformational year of militant organizing.

This victory gave unions a lot of momentum in Minnesota and a culture of solidarity in Minneapolis developed that would have major implications of expanding that movement over the next decade.

Read 33 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

Mar 17

This Day in Labor History: March 17, 1921. The Kronstadt Rebellion was crushed by Soviet military forces. This moment was the final nail in the coffin to any idea that workers would have the ability to protest their new proletarian government.

One of the great contradictions of Marxism is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The idea of a dictatorship to create the workers’ state and suppress rightist forces perhaps made sense, but if workers’ activism is necessary to create that state, then it was an awful lot to ask for those workers to then give up their activism outside of state-building.

Read 35 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

Mar 7

This Day in Labor History: March 7, 1990. Jay Lovestone died. Let's talk about this character who started as a communist and then became so rabidly anti-communist that he sought to undermine any social justice unionism in any global labor movement. It's a sad story!

Jacob Liebstein was born in 1897 into a Jewish family in what today in Belarus. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s and then sent for his family in 1907. He then grew up on the Lower East Side.

From the time he was a teen he was attracted to the Jewish-Socialist politics of the area, particularly the work of Daniel de Leon, who wanted to be the Lenin of the U.S. Liebstein went to City College in 1915 and continued engaging in socialist organizing.

Read 37 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

Feb 26

This Day in Labor History: February 26, 1972. A Pittston Coal Company slurry dam collapsed in Logan County, West Virginia. The ensuing flood of coal slurry would kill 125 people and demonstrate once again the horrific contempt the coal industry has for the people of West Virginia

Coal slurry is basically the toxic leftovers of modern industrial coal production. This was less of an issue in the days of underground mining, but with strip mining and later mountaintop removal, large scale residue became a real problem.

The coal is sifted and processed, washed of impurities, and transported to market by rail or boat. The leftover is the slurry. It includes heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, beryllium, manganese, selenium, cadmium, as well as a whole slough of toxic chemicals.

Read 26 tweets

Erik Loomis

@ErikLoomis

Oct 28, 2023

This Day in Labor History: October 28, 1793. Eli Whitney submitted a patent for his invention known as the cotton gin. Perhaps more than any technology in American history, this invention profoundly revolutionized American labor! Let's talk about its complex legacies!

Creating the modern cotton industry meant the transition from agricultural to industrial labor in the North with the rise of the factory system and the rapid expansion and intensification of slavery in the South to produce the cotton.

The cotton gin went far to create the 19th century American economy and sharpened the divides between work and labor between regions of the United States, problems that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

Read 40 tweets

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