Sit-Down Strikes Are Powerful, Could It Be That’s Why They’re Against the Law?
JANUARY 14 IS THE 89TH ANNIVERSARY of the break-through in negotiations that eventually resulted in the victory of the United Auto Workers’ 1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. It was a crucial moment in the development of U.S. labor unions.
Some two thousand striking workers had been occupying the auto parts plant for two weeks, during which they beat back several attempts by the police to force them out. General Motors management had completely refused to negotiate as long as the occupation continued. But the workers knew that if they could maintain control of the factory, management would eventually agree to negotiate, which is exactly what happened on the 14th.
With the strikers’ in complete control of the factory, negotiations continued for almost a month,
By occupying the plant, which produced essential parts for other GM factories, the strike caused a national shut-down of GM production. The strike continued until management agreed to recognize the union at all its factories.
Over the next year, the UAW grew from 30,000 to 500,000 members. The success of the strike inspired a wave of successful plant occupations in other industries. Less than two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that all sit-down strikes were illegal, eliminating one of organized labor's most effective tactics. https://xxxxxx.org/2021-11-15/labor-upsurge-1930s-and-40s-us-lessons-today
Sixty-Two People Own the Same Wealth as Half the World. Here's Why That's Bad
JANUARY 17 IS THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY of the publication, by Oxfam America, of a study showing that the world’s 62 richest people had the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population, or 3.6 billion poor people.
“Power and privilege are being used to rig the system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest of us to levels we have not seen before,” said Oxfam American president Raymond Offenheiser. “Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being pulled upwards at an alarming rate.”
And now, 10 years later, the maldistribution of wealth and income is substantially worse. https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/inequality-inc/
Red Dye No. 2 Was Banned 50 Years Ago, But Why Did It Take So Long?
JANUARY 19 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to ban any use of Red Dye No. 2 in food or cosmetics because it was known to be carcinogenic.
Public health activists, in particular Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, had first called for such a ban more than five years previously, when scientists first discovered that the dye could cause cancer.
Public Citizen had loudly protested the FDA’s footdragging, because Red No.2 was not only dangerous, it was the most widely used food dye in the U.S. More than a million pounds of the dye were being added to food and cosmetics every year. https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/1A.pdf
New York City Gets the Bad News About Racist Terrorism in the South
JANUARY 20 IS THE 158TH ANNIVERSARY of the first detailed description of the Ku Klux Klan published by the New York Times. The Klan had been founded in 1865 in Tennessee by six former Confederate Army officers, but it was little known outside the deep South until 1868, when the Times reprinted an article that had first appeared in the Nashville Press & Times.
In early 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, the population of the former Confederate states was deeply divided between those who were glad the Union had won and slavery had been abolished and those who had supported the Confederacy and wanted to prevent the formerly enslaved from exercising their rights as U.S. citizens.
The article reported that on January 11, 1868, in Tennessee, about 25 members of the “Kuklux Klan” ganged up on three men who were well-known to be active in the attempt to eliminate the vestiges of slavery, tied them up, and beat them mercilessly with wooden rods. “Four of the [Klansmen] were engaged at one time in beating one of the colored men, who received not less than one hundred lashes. . . . After having beaten [the three men] to their heart’s content, the gang withdrew.”
The article was not the first news of the revanchist terror campaign to appear in the North, but it was one of the first to name the Ku Klux Klan as one of the organizations behind it. https://thereconstructionera.com/torturing-a-black-man-the-first-new-york-times-article-on-the-klan-january-1868
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