People died for a forty-hour workweek

This should be required reading in middle school history classes. Everyone needs to be aware of the history behind the rights they take for granted.

People died for a forty-hour workweek.

by James Robert Porter

This is a true thing. It happened. The one thing you’re virtually guaranteed to have when you get a job in this country. You might not get insurance, you might not get regular breaks…but you know when you walk in the door, you’re only going to be asked to work forty hours a week, or else you’re due overtime. This is basic. It’s not even a talking point anymore.

A couple of centuries ago, people felt so strongly about this right that they gave their lives for it. They died so you could enjoy it. They were shot, hanged, starved, let’s face it, they were MURDERED, and this happened so that you could enjoy a right that we now take for granted.

In the early part of the 20th century, the majority of Americans were working a 12-14 hour workday, regularly. When the average American walked into a new workplace, he could reasonably assume he would be working that kind of a schedule. It was expected. What most of us now consider a punishing overtime schedule, the majority of the workforce in 1905 regarded as a normal workweek.

And they thought it was bullshit.

As far back as 1791, Americans were lobbying for a shorter workday. This wasn’t a bunch of lazy New Deal liberals wanting to sit on their laurels. This was shortly after the founding of our country. This was the majority of carpenters in the nascent United States, sick of putting in long, grueling hours and knowing that there were better alternatives. In the next century, this demand had become commonplace. It turned out that the average employer worked their business from sunup to sundown, every single day, a schedule most of us can’t even comprehend. By the 1830s, people were pissed off about it.

People died for a forty-hour workweek.

At the close of the 1800s, most Americans still didn’t have what they wanted. Apparently, an eight hour workday was simply too much to ask from employers. So much so, that a great many employers found the need to hire their own police force to enforce the longer work days. When people talk of unionizing nowadays, many of them think it was just a bunch of socialists and liberals trying to push around their bosses, but that’s not the case. The reason unions took off was because, if you complained about something like a fourteen hour workday to your employer, and you didn’t have people backing you up, there was a real chance you were going to have your ass beat. Employers paid people to do this for them. If you were lucky, you just got fired for shooting your mouth off, but most people were not lucky. At least if you had a union, you had a sort of safety in numbers, even if it usually meant a more distributed beat down courtesy of the in house police force.

People died for a forty-hour workweek.

Pretty soon, people figured out they really only had one weapon they could use against their employers, and that was a general strike. Complaining just got you fired or beaten, going to the newspapers was about as effective as it is nowadays, since the people who printed the news, nine times out of ten, were the same people that made you work fourteen hours in the first place. But if you and all your union friends stopped working, you stopped production. If you stopped production, then the company loses money, and if that happens, you finally have their attention. In a sane world, this would lead to a civil airing of grievances and an honest attempt to address them.

This is not a sane world, because people died for a forty-hour workweek.

In 1886, a group of workers on strike at the McCormick plant in Chicago went on a march to Haymarket Square to protest the people trying to break the strike. This was a completely nonviolent demonstration. In return, police opened fire on them, wounding many and ending the lives of four people.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think those were the company police? No, this was the city police. Paid for by the tax money of those dead men. They shot them because they wanted an eight-hour workday.

Soon afterward, during another rally, someone threw a dynamite bomb as the police tried to disperse the crowd. It went off, killing some officers, and in the ensuing chaos a gunfight broke out. Labor leaders were rounded up and, even though everyone agreed none of the people arrested actually had anything to do with the bomb, they were given death sentences anyway. Four of them were hung. Afterward, after pressure from the public, a judge repealed the death sentence for the remaining leader, saying that he and the four dead men were actually innocent and their execution was the result of "hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge".

People died for a forty-hour workweek.

In 1916, in the town of Everett, Washington, a contingent of striking shingle workers, supported by members of the IWW (Wobblies), were confronted by the town police led by the sheriff, one Donald McRae. McRae drew a gun on the nonviolent protestors and told them to turn around and leave. A shot rang out, starting a gunfight that, again, left a lot of dead people. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but most historians agree that it’s unlikely it was from the worker side, considering they suffered the bulk of the losses and the few officers that were wounded during the battle were injured by their own side.

People died so you could work a forty-hour workweek.

There’s more. Much, much more. People were willing to die for this basic right we all enjoy now.

Employers were so against it that they were willing to murder so we couldn’t have it. Back in the early 1900s, an eight-hour workday was so threatening that it was worth killing someone over. The American people finally won it, paid for with blood and corpses, and now we don’t even think about it.

People died for a forty-hour workweek.

James Robert Porter is the son of 31-year IBEW member Donald Porter. His message is especially timely on May 1, which is the anniversary of the famous Haymarket Square rally in Chicago in 1886, which was the springboard for the long fight for an eight-hour day.

In All the Debate About Breastfeeding, Where Is the Support For Mothers? | RH Reality Check

In All the Debate About Breastfeeding, Where Is the Support For Mothers? | RH Reality Check:

[T]he decision to breastfeed (or not), it should be supported. In all the debate about breastfeeding, I feel that it is a personal choice that may or may not work for all mothers; however, it is critical that as a society, we have the policies and infrastructure in place to support those decisions.  

We should not be relegated to a bathroom or closet because society has not deemed it critical to create private nursing or pumping spaces in public locations.  

We should not have to feel the burning judgmental stares because we decide to breastfeed on a plane, or anywhere in public.  

We should not have to hear the banter of folks who are uncomfortable with the idea of mothers continuing to nurse when children are ‘too old.’  

We should not have to hear the denigration of mothers who are unable or uninterested in nursing at all.  

On this mama’s day, we -- as a society -- need to respect and support the decisions that women and families make when raising their children. We also need to serve as advocates for change at the political and societal level so that the U.S. is no longer one of the lowest-scoring industrialized countries to be a mom, with a dismal breastfeeding policy score of ‘poor’ and the only developed country to not guarantee paid parental leave.

(Breaks and bolding added.)

Forget Flowers This Mother's Day: 11 Ways to REALLY Help Mothers | AlterNet

Forget Flowers This Mother's Day: 11 Ways to REALLY Help Mothers  | AlterNet:

The reality is that mothers are not as supported as they should be in this country, and the recent, ongoing war against reproductive rights, unions, and legislation like the Violence Against Women Act have only made things worse.

Below are several ways (among many) that we, as a nation, could do a much better job of supporting mothers.

1. Require paid parental leave.

2. Support workplace flexibility and other leave policies.

3. Address the gender wage gap.

4. Stop trying to roll back access to birth control.

5. Support safe, legal access to abortion.

6. Support unionization.

7. Fight for affordable health care.

8. Reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

9. Address cuts to safety net services.

10. Ensure that mothers behind bars are treated with dignity.

11. Celebrate mothers of all stripes, from all backgrounds.

All mothers deserve love and respect, on Mother's Day and every day.

We Are the 99.9% - Paul Krugman

The Ultra-Rich are not Job Creators:

Why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies. ...

But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do. ...

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

This Video Makes It Perfectly Clear Why Karl Rove Is Terrified Of Elizabeth Warren

This Video Makes It Perfectly Clear Why Karl Rove Is Terrified Of Elizabeth Warren:


She’s solid as a rock, and there’s nothing the GOP can attack her on. It’s about time a candidate like Elizabeth Warren came along!

If the Church Were Christian

In this world of religious fanaticism and widespread intolerance, this by author Philip Gulley is an extremely important message to reinforce:

If the Church were Christian...

1) Jesus would be a model for living rather than an object of worship

2) Affirming our potential would be more important than condemning our brokenness

3) Reconciliation would be valued over judgment

4) Gracious behavior would be more important than right belief

5) Inviting questions would be valued more than supplying answers

6) Encouraging personal exploration would be more important than communal uniformity

7) Meeting needs would be more important than maintaining institutions

8) Peace would be more important than power

9) It would care more about love and less about sex

10) This life would be more important than the afterlife

Could Florida happen again?

Charles Stewart III of MIT and the Voting Technology Project in their milestone 100th Working Paper (emphasis added):

Nowadays, when I am asked “could Florida happen again?” I answer, “We won’t have any more problems of hanging chad, but I actually think the chance of a large-scale meltdown in many parts of the county are greater now than they were. I at least expect ‘another Florida’ in my lifetime.” The reason I answer this way is that innovation in the core technology of voting has failed to keep up with the challenges of the voting environment. At the same time, the “new” machines purchased with HAVA (Help America Vote Act) money have proven to have shorter life spans than initially estimated. Just as the pregnant chad problem was caused by the failure to keep up the maintenance of old technology that inevitably degrades, the “next Florida” is likely to come when a cash-strapped county somewhere in America lets its maintenance contract lapse, or fails to update its software in time.

In other words, low-tech human failures.

Animated map of nuclear explosions, 1945-1998

Here is a fascinating map animation that shows every detonation of a nuclear bomb through 1998, by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. The Map Scroll posted this last fall when Boing Boing called attention to it and The New Yorker commented:



The New Yorker:

It is the sort of set of pictures that makes you want to read—to learn more, for example, about how it came to be that France exploded more than a tenth of those bombs (two hundred and ten); China blew up forty-five. Not that anyone was taking cover in Provence: if you don’t watch the icons above and below the map, you might think that Algeria, and not France, was the world’s fourth nuclear-armed power (and that Australia, not Britain, was the third). The Gerboise Bleue explosion, of a seventy-kiloton device, took place in 1960, in the Sahara desert, in the midst of the Algerian war; several others followed. (Later, after Algeria gained its independence, France’s tests moved to French Polynesia; its last one was in 1996.)

Supreme Court Justices can be Corrupt Politicians Too

Few justices allow political ideology to influence their judicial opinions as Scalia and Thomas do.

Not only do we have Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices using their offices to promote ideological political agendas, but also hiding their politically funded income from public view.

Antonin Scalia is the latest to cross the line with an announcement that he plans to address the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives. The New York Times editorial board accused Scalia of becoming a “Justice from the Tea Party,” for his planned participation in their caucus seminar. This isn’t Scalia’s first breach of court practices.

Scalia also spoke at a Koch Industries retreat, sponsored by two billionaire brothers with a history of supporting extreme right-wing positions.

Normally, when judges are personally involved in cases before the court, they recuse themselves because they cannot give an unbiased opinion when they have a conflict of interest. Supreme Court justices are legally exempt from this requirement, but few justices push their involvement with extremists as Scalia and Thomas have.

Who is Jared Lee Loughner?

This is the best analysis to date on the web of Jared Loughner's motivations:

"At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target.

One thing that seems clear is that Giffords, who was terribly wounded but survived, was the nearest and most obvious representative of “the government” that Loughner could find."

Even if Jared Loughner acted alone, he heard the rhetoric!

In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, we must end the violent rhetoric that has exploded in American politics. Violent rhetoric has consequences. As stated by Sady Doyle:

It does not matter whether the man who shot Giffords was schizophrenic. There are a lot of schizophrenics who don’t shoot people!

What matters is this: That if you create a culture of violence, if you inflame anger (that’s fine to do, and often necessary!) and direct it toward specific targets (that’s fine to do, and often necessary!) and then point people in the direction of physical violence including gun violence as a solution, someone is going to take your word on that.

Someone is going to be vulnerable enough to your message to take you at your word and shoot someone, because they are:

• Young
• Stupid
• Drunk
• High
• Just got dumped and full of rage that needs somewhere to go
• Just got fired and full of rage that needs somewhere to go
• Socially disempowered or disenfranchised, and (especially — in my experience — if they are white men, who are not taught to expect or deal with being socially disempowered) full of rage that needs somewhere to go
• Poisoned by a toxic variety of masculinity that equates manhood with power and power with violence
• Very unhappy and self-destructive
• Isolated and unloved and willing to get attention by any means possible, even negative attention
• Or just not thinking right, in some very rare cases due to mental illness, but with the above factors probably contributing, or else THEY ARE JUST NOT THINKING RIGHT

SOMEONE IS GOING TO HEAR THAT, AND IT IS GOING TO RESONATE IN THEIR MINDS THE WRONG WAY. I am all for anger; I am all for, even, pointing at someone and saying “here is a person to be angry at!” What I am not a fan of is going, “do you know what would help with your anger? Second amendment remedies. Guns, they will help with your anger.”

Now we're talking --- James Galbraith goes against the tide

In my mind I have been questioning the wisdom of raising the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits, which seems to be the Beltway CW. Why force people who often won't live a long time to continue working, or in many cases, fruitlessly looking for work, until age 67, 68 or more? Here's an excerpt from Now we're talking --- James Galbraith goes against the tide.

The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less....

Older people who would like to retire and would do so if they could afford it should get some help. The right step is to reduce, not increase, the full-benefits retirement age. As a rough cut, why not enact a three-year window during which the age for receiving full Social Security benefits would drop to 62 -- providing a voluntary, one-time, grab-it-now bonus for leaving work? Let them go home! With a secure pension and medical care, they will be happier. Young people who need work will be happier. And there will also be more jobs. With pension security, older people will consume services until the end of their lives. They will become, each and every one, an employer.

Obama could take a history lesson from FDR's 1936 re-election

H.W. Brands, the author of "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" has a great opinion piece published today that says what I feel about our president:

Many of Obama's supporters wish he would emulate Roosevelt's combativeness. They have lamented his efforts at bipartisanship, which yielded him little, they say, and cost him the political momentum of 2008. But Obama has generally ignored such counsel. Some of this difference owes to diverging temperaments and personal styles; where Roosevelt relished getting angry in public, Obama apparently does not.

Read the whole thing.