Study Hall Digest 9/4/2017

Hi

On May 11, 1894, workers at the Chicago-based Pullman Company, which manufactured railway cars, called a strike. George Pullman, the owner of the company, had reduced wages and laid off thousands of workers but refused to reduce rents on the apartments his workers were forced to live in, in the Pullman-owned company town on the city’s south side. Pullman also refused to recognize the legitimacy of the workers’ union, and so Eugene Debs, the head of the American Railway Union, called for a boycott and strike of any trains that used Pullman cars. By June of 1894 some 125,000 workers across the country had walked off their jobs. Debs was arrested for not calling off the strike and at least 30 workers were killed by the National Guard and other police and military forces.

Shortly after the strike ended Grover Cleveland declared the first Monday in September Labor Day as an attempt to appease the hundreds of thousands of workers and the unions that represented them, which seemed ready to keep fighting in the wake of the Pullman strike. Labor Day became controversial among some hardcore leftists because it was seen as a way for Cleveland to pacify the more militant wing of unions. But nonetheless, the holiday shows that every labor victory was a hard fight.

Today, let’s remember that many writers and media workers (especially freelancers) are treated unfairly by the owning class of the media—underpaid, expected to work weekends and odd hours, not given health insurance, and punished for asking for better conditions. That’s what happened at the Village Voice this week, when 13 of the paper’s 17 unionized employees were fired, a move the union called a blatant union-busting tactic. The paper’s owner, Peter Barbey, born into wealth and known to fumble around and fail in every industry he works in, has proved incompetent at the Voice, and hostile to the idea that his workers deserve a fair shake.

Companies like Mic and BuzzFeed and Splinter, which espouse ideas of social justice online, have shown themselves to be the enemies of workers they defend so vigorously in their stories.

Labor Day is a good time to reflect on the fact that no media company and no boss is your friend, that everyone is equally vulnerable to the machinations of this exploitative industry, and that any hope for better working conditions, in the media and every other field, will necessitate mass struggle and sacrifice.

Final Thoughts

Some shots from a Soviet children’s book called Who’s the Strongest?