In 1920 Appalachia, coal companies owned all the land, the homes and stores. They also paid workers with their own special money (that was useless everywhere else). The security companies they hired where armed and violent towards miners and their families.
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.
This is where the Tennessee Ernie Ford song comes from, "Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store."
There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
I would be remiss not to mention that Sixteen Tons was a Merle Travis song, recorded for the bona fide classic album[0] Folk Songs of the Hills. Both songs are classics, but the Travis version deserves to be heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I15_KUsOzs
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
This reminds me of a similar, and quite popular, 90's rock song in Australia called "Blue Sky Mine" [0]. It refers to the horrible exploitive activities of CSL on an asbestos mine in the Pilbara region of Australia where they controlled their workers in a similar manner to what you describe here.
Whether someone owns the land by property right or "owns" "common grounds" by administrative right, the result seems to be the same: Oppression of those, who don't.
And this is why a strong opposition is important. It makes oppression much more difficult.
(Probably) The first aerial bombardment on US soil was when private planes dropped homemade bombs on striking coal workers at Blair Mountain in 1921. The US has a looong and brutal history of breaking up labor movements.
> 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!
It's definitely either Blair Mountain or the Tulsa Race Massacre; there are some disputes about there actually being planes bombing in Tulsa but there was definitely a bomb dropped at Blair because one dud showed up in court. Both were in 1921 though which beats your thing by several years, didn't know about it though it's a wild story.
And let’s not forget why we have a separate Labor Day in the US:
>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.
That was thrown right not air dropped? I was mostly using it as a punctuation point about the violence and power imbalance applied to stop any labor movement in the US. But yeah there's a deep deep history of the government coming in to violently break up labor strikes for capital long before and long after 1921.
If getting your health insurance through your employer creates dependency and gives your employer more control over you (and it does) then why is it a good idea to give this power to the government?
Your employer can mistreat you under the threat of losing your employer-provided health insurance. If everyone had government-provided health insurance, then employers would have less leverage. Government-provided health insurance can also ease the burden and risk for people starting new companies.
It also maximizes the number of people paying into the insurance pool.
> If getting your health insurance through your employer creates dependency and gives your employer more control over you (and it does) then why is it a good idea to give this power to the government?
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).
We also had the ludlow massacre where the local militia and mine company guards attacked the miners with machine guns (pre nfa...) and dynamite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre.
It's important to remember that the strikers started the violence:
>>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.
For some reason, the history page on the Pinkerton website has a big hole in it between 1907 and 1962. What could they have been up to in the early 20th Century, I wonder?
https://pinkerton.com/our-story/history
Is there anything stopping workers from crowdsource their own protection anonymously? Does it have to be some kind of formal union?
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.
Oh, do you honestly think such an "secretive, radical union cell" funded by "dark money" would be allowed to exist and interface with corporates? (words in scare-quotes would be how this would be framed by employers and the media - they may or may not throw in foreign funding, Venezuela or China could get name-dropped with zero evidence).
It doesn’t have to be secret, just your membership is secret.
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.
Then the companies begin to fire employees that they find are part of this system and hire organizations like the Pinkertons to infiltrate and destroy your business resource system.
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.
> 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.
Well, this is not a union therefore doesn't match all the features and objectives. The not-union aims to relieve inherit disadvantages of individuals v.s. corporations while preserving individual freedoms and free market dynamics. Just like companies coming together to fix a price and specs of their products thus leaving consumers with no options, workers coming together to force their own preferences by leaving companies with no options is also unacceptable.
If the unions actually do the things that you describe and people are happy with it, they should opt out for unions.
Sounds like a talent agent. Sectors that utilize talent agents often still have strong collective bargaining agreements and unions in place. Part of the power of a union is the ability to deprive a business or industry of labor. A talent agent alone does not provide such leverage.
See, it's not a union. Unions are apparently uncool in the USA. Think of it as Musk inventing the Tube by removing the engineeringly silly parts of the Hyperloop and adding a sharing economy feature to the result :)
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.
The issue is that being in a "not-union" isn't a protected class, so you could probably get fired for it after your employer sent the "not-Pinkertons" to do some intel.
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"?
Why would they fire or investigate you? It’s not like you’re organizing strikes or anything like that. You are simply benefiting of the same knowledge that companies have to have a fairer deal.
How are you going to negotiate without striking (or threatening a strike)? Why would the company care that you know you're being underpaid if you're still going to do your job either way?
Individuals make their ways up and down the stack all the time. This doesn't change the income distribution. [0] Knowledge isn't the only power. Solidarity is also power, and it can change the income distribution. Unfortunately, knowledge of this has been lost.
Because you leveling the playing field is a net loss for them. Companies like to use their information and coordination advantage, and exploit it to their benefit.
It's why some companies will try to find ways to fire you if you share your salary.
Thanks to the not-union, the other party is not simply a single worker relying on an hourly wage job. Instead , the worker knows what can reasonably get from the company and if the company wrongs the worker, the not-union has the resources to help thanks to the subscription fees collected from the large number of members(potentially billions just like the companies).
It’s not about extortion, it’s about fair deal. The knowledge is useful as market research, in a similar way knowing rent prices in the neighborhood when renting.
In the current situation, companies have access to this and employees don’t.
He's referring to organized crime/racketeering. Your 'not-union' scheme seems like organized crime if you squint a bit and imagine that it would be backed up with violence.
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.
This is a not-union, it doesn’t have those elements at all. It has a fancy office, a responsive website that nags you to use the app instead, and blogs about how they implemented the latest FUD and does have open source projects.
It has a Twitter savvy CEO a it’s mission is to make the world a better place.
I respect a history lesson, but honestly, I think old comrade tales are not helpful.
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.
Nobody claimed a utopia. Extracting natural resources is always going to be a tough job that is ripe for exploitation.
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)
That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives
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.
>That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives
But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people
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:
Right, I think the point is that while things have improved since then, workers are still exploited. The only way to change that is for people to band together. Large, diverse, unified groups can bring about change.
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.
I get that 100 years sounds like a long time, but the coal miners unionization stories are my grandfather's. Things change fast and it is good to keep the past in mind when evaluating the decisions we make today.
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.