With the Supreme Court ruling in the Janus court case, workers who are represented by public sector unions, but don't agree with the unions' political or ideological positions will not have to pay a union fee. This was the next step from the "right to work" laws in recent years that have been passed. "Right to work" is an Orwellian way of saying the destruction of organized labor. People can get the benefits of being in a union, while not having to pay into the union (have my cake and eat it too. Of course these are conservatives, to be discussed later). With the continuous decline of rights for organized labor, you have heard references to the "Gilded Ages." I agree with the sentiment, and I feel it's important to discuss the Gilded Age and what could happen if we don't have labor rights.
The first Gilded Age time period was 1870 through 1890, and the name comes the title of the book written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. "Gilded" means something covered with a layer of gold, but a core of little value. In the book 'The Gilded Age' the slogan for the era was "Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must."
Historian Eric Foner writes of the Gilded Age:
"Between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, the United States underwent one of the most rapid and profound economic revolutions any country has ever experienced. There were numerous causes for this explosive economic growth. The country enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of capital for investment.
"In addition, the federal government activity promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition, granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction, and used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by farmers and mining companies."
Private investment, along with massive land grants and money by local, state, and the federal government helped with the growth of rail roads across the United States. The four American time zones were put in place in 1883 by the four main railroad companies, and in the Gilded Age businesses engaged in "ruthless competition."
To temper this ruthlessness, competing businesses established "pools," which divided markets and fixed prices among competing entities. Competing companies also tried establishing "trusts" were rival businesses were managed by a single director. All efforts proved to be worthless, as the power of ruthless competition and pursuit of wealth were too powerful for any policies to tame these impulses. From the beginning of the Gilded Age and up to 1904, nearly 4,000 companies merged into larger companies. The main beneficiaries of these mergers were people of the likes of J.P. Morgan (US Steel) , and John D. Rockefeller Standard Oil).
John D. Rockefeller beat his rivals through cutthroat competition, and the end of the Gilded Ages, his Standard Oil Company controlled almost all of the nation's oil industry.
With regards to competition and Andrew Carnegies, Eric Foner writes:
"From his mother, Carnegie learned that life was a ceaseless struggle in which one must strive to get ahead or sink beneath the waves. His life reflected the tension between these elements of his upbringing. Believing that the rich had a moral obligation to promote the advancement of society..."
Before the Gilded Age, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, James Mellon, among many others of their wealthy class were able to pay $300 to a substitute, and take their place in the civil war. James Mellon's father wrote to him, "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable."
Of Carnegie Eric Foner further says of Carnegie:
"...Carnegie denounced the 'worship of money' and distributed much of his wealth to various philanthropies, especially the creation of public libraries in towns throughout the country. But he ran his companies with a dictatorial hand. His factories operated nonstop, with two twelve-hour shifts every day of the year except the Fourth of July."
People like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford and many others created institutions, libraries, universities among other things to be considered "philanthropic," but I feel historian Howard Zinn had an interesting perspective that deserves consideration:
"The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system- the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians-those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble."
When Eric Foner describes Carnegie running his business with a "dictatorial hand" or Howard Zinn says "loyal buffers" are ways of saying that Carnegie, Rockefeller and others, didn't get along with employees who were trying to unionize.
Henry Clay Frick was managing Carnegie's steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, while Carnegie was in Europe. Frick decided (likely orders from Carnegie) to reduce the wages of worker's, and to break their unions. He built a fence-topped with barbed wire around the plant, and had peepholes made for rifles. Frick further hired Pinkerton's to protect the strikebreakers (sympathetic conservatives or desperate, poor immigrants), for workers would not accept the pay cuts and were willing to continue striking.
As Zinn writes:
"On the night of July 5, 1892, hundreds of Pinkerton guards boarded barges 5 miles down the river from Homestead and moved toward the plant, where ten thousand strikers and sympathizers waited. The crowd warned the Pinkerton's not to step off the barge. A striker lay down on the gangplank, and when a Pinkerton man tried to shove him aside; he fired, wounding the detective in the thigh. In the gunfire that followed on both sides, seven workers were killed."
The strikers would eventually get the Pinkerton's to surrender, and the state sent in the military to protect the strikebreakers.
In Colorado, in 1914; coal miners were striking for wage increases, eight-hour work days, and the right to live and shop in places not owned by Rockefeller owned businesses (Rockefeller owned the mine). After being evicted, 11,000 strikers and their families moved to tent cities. The larges of the tent cities was in Ludlow, Colorado, where militia's burned the tent city to the ground. Twenty to thirty men, women, and children would be killed in the incident that became known as the Ludlow Massacre.
Depressions of the 1870's and 90's saw workers lose millions of jobs, and forced to take less pay (from factory to Walmart). On average, 35,000 workers would die a year from 1880 to 1900. In 1880, over a million children under the age of 16 worked due to the poverty that many faced in the working class.
In 1877, the New York Times wrote "... already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard.. Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city." 139 babies would die in the first week of July in Baltimore, as raw sewage ran through the streets.
The reason I write about the Gilded Age is because I believe Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, has a history that is worth examining with regards to labor rights. Gorsuch "is a threat to working people's health and safety," said Jody Calemine, a Communications Workers of America lawyer, and for good reason that he says that.
In 2009, truck driver Alphonse Maddin was driving in Illinois in fourteen degrees below zero. After pulling over for a moment to see where he could refuel, Maddin took off to discover that his trailer breaks had frozen. Maddin followed proper protocol; he remained on the side of the road and called for a repair truck. While waiting, Maddin fell asleep for two hours until he was awoken by a cell phone call from his cousin. Maddin awoke to find that his legs were numb. He called the dispatch who told him to "hang in their," but after thirty minutes and fearing he was going to freeze to death, Maddin unhitched the trailer and drove to warmth. TransAm fired Maddin, and he filed a complaint to the Labor Department. TransAm was ordered to reinstate him, so TransAm went to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Two of the three judges upheld the ruling, while one, Neil Gorsuch, disagreed.
Congress passed a law stating that an employer can't fire someone who "refused to operate a vehicle because... the employee has a reasonable apprehension of serious injury to the employee or the public because of the vehicle's hazardous or security condition."
Neil Gorsuch decided to interpret that rule like a giant prick:
The law, "only forbids employers from firing employers from firing employees who 'refuse to operate a vehicle' out of safety concerns... Nothing like that happened here. The trucker in this case wasn't fired for refusing to operate his vehicle. Indeed, his employer gave him the very option the statue says it must: once he voiced safety concerns, TransAm expressly.. permitted him to sit and remain where he was and wait for help. The trucker was fired only after he declined the statutorily protected option and chose instead to operate his vehicle in a manner he thought wise but his employer did not. And there's simply no law anyone has pointed us to giving employees the right to operate their vehicles in ways their employers forbid.. The law before us protects only employees who refuse to operate vehicles, period."
Gorsuch gave Maddin two choices; drive the truck illegally (get fired) or wait for help to arrive. In other words; get fired or DIE motherfucker!!!
This is but of a taste of possible things to come of workers and public safety. In Arizona, their state Supreme Court has ruled as written in the Arizona Capitol Times;
"Arizona companies have no duty to protect family members from exposure to toxic materials their employees bring home on their work clothes." This is what will come as federal and state Supreme Courts have a conservative majority. Companies and the rich will get state assistance, while the working class and poor die and get sick.
For workers the Janus ruling could be the final blow to all the things past workers sacrificed to get, in both life and blood (literally). For Fox News (propaganda) though, it was a call from heaven for their masters, and a call from hell for workers. Fox News they have article titled; "Supreme Court's Janus ruling will end cash cow for liberal activists: experts." For Fox News "liberal activists" are unions just trying to get better wages and protections for their workers, while "experts" are libertarians from conservative think tanks (anti-labor). In terms of the word "activism" being a derogative term, it's actually the right with the likes of Neil Gorsuch who are turning the clocks back to the Gilded Age.
"The richest one percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half of the population, and owned more property than the ninety-nine percent of the population." One may think I'm quoting Bernie Sanders, but I'm not. That was the economic dynamics of the Gilded Age, and that's the economic dynamics of today.
According to the United Nations:
"The United States has the highest rate of income inequality among Western countries. The $1.5 Trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality." Remember what I said about sewage in the streets of Baltimore? Well the UN discovered that in parts of places like Alabama and West Virginia have; "A high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services. Contrary to the assumption in most developed countries that such services should be extended by the government systematically and eventually comprehensively to all areas, neither state was able to provide figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any planned government response."
Welcome to the Gilded Ages....
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