There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
0: The album was released in 1947 prior to the introduction of the 12" LP, so it was originally released as a literal album of multiple 78rpm singles. It is one of the first concept albums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Songs_of_the_Hills
And this is why a strong opposition is important. It makes oppression much more difficult.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre#Attack_by_...
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0118.shtml
> A far better documented incident occurred in southern Illinois in Williamson County in November 1926. "Bloody Williamson" had already garnered national notoriety during the 1920s as the site of labor unrest among coal mine unions, one of the bloodiest Ku Klux Klan wars in history, and gang warfare between two rival groups of liquor bootleggers. The Birger Gang, led by Russian immigrant Charlie Birger, and the Shelton Gang, led by brothers Carl, Earl and Bernie, had been involved in a bloody turf battle for domination of the southern Illinois liquor racket for several months. Their ever-escalating arms race had evolved from shotguns to tommy guns and even homemade trucks covered with armored plate used to shoot up each other's roadhouses.
> The warfare turned particularly violent in November 1926 as a series of shootings, bombings, and destruction of property caused terror throughout the county. Upping the ante once again, the Sheltons embarked on a bold plan to destroy the Birger Gang hideout, a place known as Shady Rest. They approached a pilot on a barnstorming tour and coerced him into taking a member of the gang on an overflight of the Birger roadhouse. On 12 November 1926, gang member Blackie Armes climbed aboard the old Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane carrying several bombs, each made out of dynamite sticks bound around a bottle of nitroglycerine. While passing over Shady Rest, Armes lighted and dropped three of the devices. Only one exploded, missing its intended target and instead killing Birger's favorite bulldog and pet bird. Though initially stunned, members of the Birger gang fired back but did no damage. The shocked pilot flew back to the airfield, let the gangster off, and then immediately took off again, probably fearing for his life!
The Haymarket Affair [1] which occurred in 1886
>Labor Day has conservative roots. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland pushed Congress to establish the holiday as a way to de-escalate class tension following the Pullman Strike, during which as many as ninety workers were gunned down by thousands of US Marshals serving at the pleasure of railway tycoon George Pullman, one of the time’s most hated industrial barons.
>Cleveland was wary of the response to his actions. He signed Labor Day into law a mere six days after busting the strike.
Source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/labor-day-may-first-ameri...
Here's a really short video of what used to be a "company town" in Appalachia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCxG_SCnQE
One of the host's grand dad was paid in scrip until the 1970s.
That's a great video.
Got another link?
It also maximizes the number of people paying into the insurance pool.
Does your government have due process? If it does, how would that government use an obligation to provide you health insurance against you to influence your decisions?
People quit jobs far more often than they quit countries, and employer provided insurance does tie you to more strongly to your employer (e.g. I knew someone who needed a heart transplant who would literally die if he went without insurance, because he depended on a heart pump).
Also, you have to get insurance/healthcare from somewhere, and in a democracy the government is far more accountable to its citizens than an employer typically is to its employees [1].
[1] This is very clear in the typical case, but less clear for people with rare in-demand skills (like software engineers).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22U0Hwb-7ao [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Tikas
>>When leasing the sites, the union had selected locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps in order to block any strikebreakers' traffic.
Blocking strikebreaker traffic amounts to using violence to obstruct others' freedom of movement.
Strikebreakers were often assaulted and sometimes murdered.
The fundamentally coercive nature of historical striking activity is heavily glossed over, and modern day anti-free-market ideologues go to extreme lengths to try to justify it.
If you think about it, work is just a business deal and wouldn't be possible for employees create some kind of company that deals with the companies they are employed? Pretty much like an agency, I guess.
It can have open plan offices in a cool neighborhood, pay politicians and all.
Just have centralized Emlpoyers information management system where information about employers, like salaries they pay business they do, the good and the bad to work there etc.
So when you are getting a job you apply to your not-union and they tell you what to expect and how much to ask. No more guesswork.
It’s like an HR that works for you. So it’s BR, businesses resources.
Fine, throw a bug bounty program.
Anyway, the idea is to have a coordinator that work on your benefit. Companies, even the large ones are simply people coordinated by the capital owners.
The not-union is a coordinator for the people who are not the capital owners but those who deal with the capital owners.
The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners.
This sounds similar to "the aim is to be good, not bad".
Your assertion does not lie on facts but on your personal moral interpretation and even prejudice against a label.
Unions are organizations whose aim is to represent workers and defend their best interests with the company's representatives.
Sometimes the company's goals are in direct opposition to the workers's best interests. How do you expect the negotiations to go if the company plans to strong-arm and coherce their workers into submissions.
If the unions actually do the things that you describe and people are happy with it, they should opt out for unions.
Historically, yes, sometimes.
Why would you share your "not-union" membership with your employer? Instead, use it as a coordinator between your peers to prevent being underpaid and overworked do to information disparity you normally have in your relationship with you employer and if you get screwed it turns out you have access to lawyers.
Something of that sort.
To prevent this, you'd have to get your "not-Union" to either have huge solidarity, or lobby the government to make that a protected class.
Maybe if you went for the first you could make a song about it, how about "Solidarity not-for-finite-periods-of-time"?
You’re going to negotiate with the knowledge in par with the company that is interested in having you.
Knowledge is power. - France is bacon.
Unless companies conspire not to hire you in order to depress wages.
https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/disney-settlement-wage-fix...
It's why some companies will try to find ways to fire you if you share your salary.
Without the threat of collective action, the idea is toothless.
In the current situation, companies have access to this and employees don’t.
What problem with unions are you trying to solve here?
It’s owned by a trust or something similar.
have you read Godfather?
Populist tough-guy shakes down businesses to get back at The Man or some such.
Plus unions in the US have often been infiltrated by organized crime.
It has a Twitter savvy CEO a it’s mission is to make the world a better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
It's an incredible story of capitalism gone mad. Areal bombardment and poison gas were used against the miners and it did not end well for them.
Here's for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291778 (another reply here that explains)
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
I don't mean that it's irrelevant, strictly, but we hear more of these than 2020 tales, 2020 strategies and concerns. This is 100 year later, and despite of how many union die hards see it... most workers aren't likely to buy int a centuries long struggle. They're interested in their own lives & jobs.
1. Their own struggles aren't new: companies have been trying to fuck workers over since time immemorial, and 2. There is a well-known solution to these problems: unions.
Are you working 16 hours a day, barely able to afford rent + food + utilities, and slipping further into debt every day? It doesn't have to be that way, and we have a really good idea, based on historical facts, about how to fix it.
yes it provided the employees that were still employed with greater protections, but it is not the utopia you seem to believe it is
Did unions improve the lives of members? They certainly did where I come from. American labour history is more complex (union corruption and take over by organised crime seemed to run deeper)
But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people
Where unions are more focused on their own political power than helping workers
Or even if in general the union helped the "average worker" the collectivist nature of unions means not everyone will be better off. For example Seniority, and "personal connections" are often more of a driving factor in Unions than merit or work performance. In fact highly efficient hard workers are often driven out of unions or forced to "work slower", etc.
The answer to this is not airy theorizing or anecdotes but statistical evidence. There are many people who do this. See for example figure 9 here:
The coal miners were mostly Irish and German immigrants and African Americans. They all joined together and brought about changes that workers still benefit from today. People in 2020 can do the same.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-used-..."
https://explorepartsunknown.com/west-virginia/coal-minings-d...
Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.