Anti-Unionism is alive and...cheesy.

Oy. Some more classic anti-union propaganda from Target, via Gawker.

Watch it here.

Ouch, Target, you had me lulled into a comfy state of tampon-buying consumer satisfaction. 

Patronizing? Misleading? Shameless? Cheesy? False interpretations of labor history? Oh no they didn't! (Apparently, thanks to Lewis Hine and unions in the 1930's, we don't need unions anymore.) It's capitalism laid bare!

Parks-in-progress! Labor history! Community comment!

Cesar Chavez Special Resource Study Newsletter #1

http://www.facebook.com/chavezstudy

Right now! The National Park Service is conducting a series of public meetings on a special resource study to consider designating an NPS site or affiliated area in recognition of Cesar Chavez and the farm labor movement. Circle-chairs and a flip chart! I think I've just identified my NPS dream job: Public Meeting flip-charter, extraordinaire.

A recent public meeting on the Chavez Special Resource study.

This would be (I think) the first NPS area dedicated primarily to an exploration of the history of organized labor/labor organizing. The national park system doesn't need to (and shouldn't) try to represent every major theme and prominent moment in our national heritage. But the combination of a unique and broadly relevant story, and a significant number of meaningful historic locations that could be included in a park or trail, gives this proposal real promise.

[I suppose I would think so.]

The really exciting part of this process is the Park Service's commitment to holding a well-organized series of public comment meetings, not as an afterthought or gesture, but (it seems), as an actual, integral part of the planning process. There are big, basic questions -- where would it be? how would it be organized? where does local community need and interest lie? These public meetings should really be able to shape the answers.

See newsletter #1 for a schedule of meetings (sorry, AZ and CA only) and more info.

And, a little debate on the subject: http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2011/05/should-cesar-chavez-site-be-added-national-park-system8070

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911-2011

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers in New York City were killed in a workplace fire. Infamously, management had locked the factory's exit doors. A wave of safety reform legislation and memorialization followed. For a moment, the dangerous realities that faced some of the nation's most marginalized industrial workers -- young, female, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe -- gripped the nation's attention.

Recently brought to my attention: the New York Times has assembled extraordinary coverage of the many facets of the fire: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire/?ref=nyregion

Some particular highlights of museum-think interest:
Triangle Fire: Clinging to Scraps of Memories
Triangle Fire: A Frontier in Photojournalism (interactive)
Garment Work in New York 100 Years After the Triangle Fire (video)
In a Tragedy, a Mission to Remember
Remembering the Triangle Fire, 100 Years Later

And, last but not least, from President Obama's resolution marking today's 100th anniversary:
Despite the enormous progress made since the Triangle factory fire, we are still fighting to provide adequate working conditions for all women and men on the job, ensure no person within our borders is exploited for their labor, and uphold collective bargaining as a tool to give workers a seat at the tables of power...As we mark the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, let us resolve to renew the urgency that tragedy inspired and recommit to our shared responsibility to provide a safe environment for all American workers.

NPR: Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History

From All Things Considered: Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History

Great story about the 1921 "battle of Blair Mountain," in West Virginia, and current controversy over adding it to the National Register of Historic Places. Preserve the space of a landmark event in US labor and mining history, or open the site to mountaintop removal mining? This story is an unusually direct glimpse into the tensions that often arise between preservation, economic realities, and memory in dealing with local labor heritage and industrial history.

A sign commemorating the battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County, W.Va. NPR.

Key points:

King believes this is hallowed ground, like Gettysburg or the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., places where America's history was forever changed. But he's had a hard time making that case to the folks in Logan County — a place where every fourth person is out of work.

There are only about 16,000 miners in West Virginia today. Mountaintop removal doesn't require as much manpower as underground mining. These are coveted jobs; they pay well. So for the most part, miners are more interested in seeing the economy grow than preserving what they see as just another mountain.

"This is a political fight, this is a social fight, this is a fight about our history, our heritage, our culture," Simmons says. "It's a fight about what kind of society West Virginia is going to be going forward and what has been in its past."

Sounds to me like labor heritage interpretation at its best, and most relevant.

UPDATE (ish): The plot thickens?  http://www.sierraclub.org/environmentallaw/lawsuits/0312.aspx

American Experience: Triangle Fire

Highly recommended! American Experience: Triangle Fire. PBS is currently streaming the entire hour-long documentrary online:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/player/

The film focuses not only on the fire itself, but on the extraordinary struggle to unionize female garment workers in the year that led up to the tragedy. One point made in the film stuck out, so much so that I wrote it down. In going out on strike to fight for improved working conditions and wages, thousands of these women "walked away from the only thing between their families and starvation" -- their dangerous, low-paid jobs.

That's what I call interpretation! A simply, evocatively made point that applies not only to this particular series of events, but that gets at the essence of Progressive Era labor struggles. Whether in New York, Lawrence, Paterson, etc., a powerful mixture of community, conviction, and desperation drove workers in this country's burgeoning industrial centers to take enormous personal risks for a chance at something better.

Salon: What Wisconsin's governor is really threatening

Today, in the ongoing and infuriating saga of Gov. Scott Walker and his assault on public employees/collective bargaining rights...an enlightening article on the history of the labor movement and the National Guard: What Wisconsin's Governor is Really Threatening

"This would be the first time in nearly 80 years that the National Guard would be used to break a strike by Wisconsin workers, and the first time in over 40 years that the National Guard would be used against public workers anywhere in the country. The last time was the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination."

“If they want to strike, they should be fired.”

Call out the Pinkerton guards! The new governor John Kasich of Ohio on public employees, sounding like an incredulous early 20 century steel baron: "If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?”

Saw this disheartening (to me) item in the New York Times this morning: Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions. Later found myself talking to a coworker about the difficulties of interpreting the history of organized labor. The incredible decline in union representation over the last half-century and an apparently increasing, politicized (although not historically unprecedented) suspicion of organized labor can make both radical and mainstream labor movements of the past 100 years seem too irrelevant, controversial, anomalous, or difficult to fully integrate into many museums' narratives of American industry.

As the modern structure of work and industry undergoes immense global shifts, maybe the history of organized labor's struggles, values, failures, and achievements is more important than ever. What does the past look like, and why is the present different? A couple organizations that are keeping real conversations alive about the past, present, and future of organized labor in the US:

Tamiment Labor Library at New York University
Labor Heritage Foundation
1912 Lawrence Textile Strike Centennial

Oh, and one more low point from the article -- the new governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker: "We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots."

That's a ridiculously misleading dichotomy. Divide and conquer. The idea that public employees are the "haves" of our corporate society is, in my estimation, ludicrous.

Monday's feel-good links

Prisoners are America's Strongest Union [Gawker]

And, the original story from the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html?_r=1&ref=us

"Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons."


Is it wrong to find this sort of inspirational?