Labor Struggles [The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, well-versed in history and a wide range of subjects. I know this sounds like hubris, but it is isn’t, I’m simply claiming a little intellectual curiosity. Which is why I was taken aback one day some years ago when I was entering an NYU building for one of my classes and noticed a large wreath of flowers. There were no words, no plaque, no reason, apparently, for the wreath. When I asked a classmate, she looked at me in surprise, and asked, “You never heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?” Actually, I never had heard of that horrific incident.

They say that history repeats itself, but I disagree. I tend to see history as a spiral not a circle (an important distinction). If you want to know where the current conservative Kool-Aid will lead us, then read on. This is the “America” the teatarded want to bring back (h/t Sam Smith)

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-=[ The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire]=-

Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana

Note: My maternal grandmother toiled as a garment worker for decades.

The fire at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

This incident has had great significance to this day because it highlights the inhumane working conditions to which industrial workers can be subjected. To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism.

The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed.

Brunswick Times Record editorial, ME - On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City. It spread quickly through the factory, which made women’s blouses, known as “shirtwaists,” and occupied the top three floors of the building.

Most of the workers could not escape the flames, since doors leading to the roof were locked and flames prevented workers from descending stairwells or by an elevator that eventually buckled under the heat. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant women, who either died in the flames or jumped to their deaths from the factory windows.

It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the city’s history, the fourth deadliest in the United States.

The fire, and the acquittal of the two owners in a criminal trial, helped spur factory workers to organize and join labor unions that would advocate for them against sweatshop working conditions, low wages and 50-hour work weeks.

A young woman named Frances Perkins was appointed as the lead investigator of the commission looking into how to prevent a similar tragedy from happening again. The commission took four years to complete its seven-volume report…

Perkins later become the first woman to hold a Cabinet post, serving as secretary of labor for the 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Her mind as well as her heart seared by what she had learned in the Triangle fire investigation, she was the driving force behind most, if not all, of FDR’s “New Deal” reforms. Among them:

The Wagner Act, which gives workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which established for the first time a minimum wage and gave us the 40-hour work week.

The Social Security Act of 1935, legislation she literally nagged FDR to support, astutely recognizing that the dire conditions of the Great Depression were probably the only way such a sweeping economic security package would gain public support.

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Company executives, showing no concern for the welfare of the women workers, managed to escape by secretly taking a freight elevator where they were rescued. It is said that girls and young women leapt from eighth- and ninth-story windows, their flaming skirts billowing in the wind. It horrified a nation and led to some of the first city, state and federal laws dealing with workers’ safety. It gave a powerful impetus to the fledgling labor movement, greatly strengthening the building of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which two years before the fire had led a three-month strike to focus attention on conditions in workplaces like the Triangle factory.

How easily we forget the sacrifices and victories of our own labor history.

More on the Shirtwaist Fire here

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...

The Blame Game

¡Hola! Everybody...
A little economic ranting today...

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-=[ Blaming the Unemployed ]=-

When my adult son was very young -- say 7-8 years-old -- we were at a picnic, and kids being kids, he didn’t want to wait until I set everything up in order to play ball. In his impatience, he kept swinging this large plastic bat perilously close to one of his cousins (who was zoning out, oblivious to the danger). I warned my son about swinging the bat and he stopped (or so I thought). Of course, a little time passed before I heard the thwack of plastic bat meeting said cousin’s head.

I disciplined my son and he was confused because he felt it was an “accident.” The hardest job of a parent, as far as I’m concerned, is teaching the “accountability lesson” -- the basic life lesson that actions have consequences.

This is forgivable in a young child, after all, they are here to learn, but I have to wonder what the fuck happened to the mostly conservative crowd who refuse to learn consequential thinking even as they pass judgment on everyone else.

Unlike the oil disaster, there is little talk about criminal investigations into the economic collapse, there is little sense that it was instigated by the same sort of greed, carelessness, and arrogance that is now ruining the Gulf of Mexico (and quite possibly changing life as we know it on the planet). Yet the economic meltdown will kill more people, create more chaos, and wreak more havoc on our lives than the Gulf oil “spill.” First, I have an issue with calling the BP oil catastrophe a “spill.” Spill denotes accident, and this was no accident. This is like an eight-year-old child claiming “accident” when he was swinging a bat perilously close to someone else’s head.

Instead, those (with the help of the media they own) who caused or helped enable the class war we call the Great Recession by parroting the talking points of the rightwing economic revolution are now treating the problem almost as if it were an act of God -- or an “accident.” Today the pathetically failed neocons now have only praise for tough and austere measures -- as if making ordinary folk suffer for the greedy indulgences of the rich was a noble cause. the deficit hawks have returned, and like most sequels, this one stinks to high heaven.

As Sam smith at Undernews succinctly notes:

There is a long line of economists, politicians, columnists, academics, and other powerful voices whose advice and encouragement directly led us to this economic disaster. You won’t read about it, however, because the very media that was complicit in the problem is now directing your attention away from its causes.

With a few exceptions (Dean Baker and Joseph Stiglitz come to mind) prominent economists and the major media has evaded saying the obvious: an economic policy that increasingly feeds the rich at the expense of everyone else can lead to nothing but trouble. Call it the “free market” or whatever other endearing name you want, but at its heart it was a vicious and brutal con game perpetrated against the majority of America.

The evidence is endless and endlessly ignored but here are a few examples:

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the gap in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928. Here’s what the change looks like:

In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.

According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of society, a higher share of income than at any time since 1928.

This is not sound economic theory put into practice but state-sponsored fascism. So when you complain about so-called lazy workers, save a little blame for all those economists, columnists, and politicians who told you to just let the free market be and it would all work out fine.

To the hypocrites stigmatizing those most impacted by failed economic policies of the right I say fuck you very much. In terms of action, it happens that the House is now considering single issues job bill. If you believe that hard-working people deserve a chance, then I would strongly recommend you call your representatives and demand action.

Love,

Eddie

Modern Enslavement

¡Hola! Everybody...
I went to see Michael Moore’s latest, Capitalism: A Love Story, and I have to say that whatever your political affiliation (or lack thereof); regardless of whether you “like” Mr. Moore (or not), you have to see this film. You may not agree with his political ideas -- you might even find them offensive (or not), but free societies will always need people like Moore. People who ask the questions not being asked; people who offer the challenge, “Who said it has to be that way?”

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-=[ The Psychological Plantation ]=-

It is said that when the slaves in America and the serfs in Russia were “freed,” the chains were laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most slaves and serfs, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival depended on their servitude. It is the same with individuals who have experienced long periods of incarceration: they have become conditioned to being told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average working stiff accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart makes all that money?). All this in the name of profit. You can be assured that when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make more money for Boss Hawg as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than likely sweating gold.

Today we measure progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child in some far off country). Your success is measured how much you make off your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much you stand to lose.

We are all governed by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend on for our subsistence; a river that gives us life-giving water and news from upstream. It has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us believe it is the only way that a nation can be great. If we fail at education, when our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from Russia or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit, but just the illusion or dream of a profit holds millions of Americans and American wanna-bes, in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder -- like gambling or drugs. But this over preoccupation with profit is far more harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds everything that is good and human about us into the unnamable glob of meat by-products squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then forgotten.

Our values are turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in plastic -- this is our identity. Truth here has no value. The cure for cancer is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we will ignore rape and genocide. For profit, we will accept and rationalize apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in isolated cases. For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle mind, soul, and body doing the work of two women or three.

And here we are -- all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in America, but not all of us share in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that dehumanize us, where our hearts are destroyed. We -- all of us -- we live in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised welfare handouts for the rich, for the millions it took to look at Clinton’s cock, and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the history of humankind.

Broken roads and schools, children who can’t read, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones -- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize. We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the ledgers of Citibank, Halliburton, AIG, and the rest. We are the skin that defines the monster that ells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to him and even sacrifice our children to him.

Let us be clear: the world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress is defined by this margin but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, defined by the margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective psychological enslavement. Like the poor souls whose minds have been broken, we can no longer envision a world without a master...

Eddie

Crime Pays!

¡Hola! Everybody... I grew up poor -- I come from humble origins -- and I am grateful for that. I am not ashamed. My family taught me how to smile in the midst of trouble, laugh during adversity, and pawtay even during rough times. Sure, the conservatives see that and call it irresponsibility or evidence of a “culture of poverty,” but I know it’s living even when authorities do their damndest to put their boots on your neck.

These are tough times, but perhaps my ancestors have something to teach all of us today -- to smile in the face of adversity, to celebrate life even when it seems as if “life sucks” (and saying that is just narcissistic bullshit!). My people -- we party hard because life is hard, but they also knew life was precious. Hope you can find it within yourself to at least fake the funk this holiday season.

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-=[ Victoria's Secret ]=-

“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”

-- Al Capone

Too many of my friends are being kicked to the curb these days. Quite a few of my friends who work in the financial sector are being let go right before the holidays. It’s for economic reasons -- health insurance will change in the New Year, and it’s best to give severance packages before the end of the year. Two of my fiends who work at Citibank will be clearing their desks this Monday. Two others, who work on Wall St. have already been let go. There are many more living in fear for their jobs. These are good people, hard-working people with families and homes, who have always played “by the book” and believed in the merit myth that if you played by the rules, worked hard, that you could achieve the American Dream.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a very close friend -- a woman who had to scratch and fight for everything she got working in the financial sector. She was let go. I tried to spin it positively for her, but she’s in her 40s and she’s afraid that she won’t be able to get a job.

This is what we have voted for people. We believe in using people as disposable assets. We believe in the “free” market to set our social policies. We believe that predatory lending is cool. We want corporations to be our masters.

Welcome to the world we have chosen. A world where people die in emergency rooms and talented people, good, honest people, are thrown to the curb even while our tax dollars pay for CEO Golden Parachutes. Welcome to a world where, in the richest nation in the history of the world, children die needlessly of hunger and treatable disease.

Welcome to the world you have created. A world where imprisonment is the answer to poverty and lack of education. Welcome to a world where we would rather spend $50,000 a year to incarcerate a black youth rather than a fraction of that to educate him. A world in which we incarcerate more people than any other nation. Welcome, it’s our world -- yours and mine.

I spoke at a prison yesterday. I’m asked to speak at these things because I am considered an expert in helping people not return to prison. Administrators and politicians are interested in this not because it’s morally correct, but because there’s no money left to run the prisons.

I get in trouble all the time because I don’t filter my analysis with kind language. I’m not here to convince anyone, nor persuade anyone. I’m here to speak the truth.

Period.

This world of ours didn’t come about by accident. Our criminal justice system is racist. It always has been. They ask me to expound on this phenomenon and I tell them -- it’s racism, you stupid ma’fuccas! No one else mentions it. someone has to...

Put together long mandatory sentences for minor drug offenses, a strong racial bias, prisons run by corporations for profit, the sale of convict labor to corporations, and a charge from room and board and you have a modern system of bonded labor -- a social condition otherwise known as slavery.

People don’t like to hear this, but it’s the truth with a big “T.”

JC Penny, Victoria’s Secret, IBM, Toys R Us, and TWA are among the US corporations that have profited by employing incarcerated men and women. If you think this is inconsequential, think again because prisoners have no rights and the jobs they are taking (working for literally slave wages) are the jobs that you are losing. How would you like to compete for a job where you competition comes from third world nations and prisoners? You don’t stand a chance. Sure, keep bad mouthing unions, you idiot.

Not only do corporations profit from the prison system they profit tremendously from committing corporate crime. Corporate crimes kill far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. Include illness, physical injury, and death from dangerous, defective, and mislabeled products, dangerous working conditions, and the release of toxic pollutants, and the human and financial costs or organized corporate crime becomes truly staggering.

Yet, unlike the harsh mandatory sentences imposed on street criminals (mostly young men of color), mostly for petty crimes, the persons responsible for corporate crime rarely suffer personal fines of imprisonment.

I saw fear in my friend’s face yesterday. Fear in the face of a Latina who has fought all her life to make her place in a world dominated by mostly white privileged males and my anger seethes because they’re taking our money and using it to downsize good, honest, hardworking people.

Welcome to out world, people. The world you wanted.

Eddie