Today in Labor History May 18, 1980: Koreans rose up in Gwangju against the repressive U.S.-supported government. The uprising lasted from May 18 to May 27. According to official reports, 165 civilians were killed and 3,515 were injured in the uprising. 37 soldiers and 4 cops were killed and 253 were injured. Another 14 soldiers died from “friendly” fire. However, Gwangju’s death records for May of 1980 were 2,300 above normal. Many believe the actual death toll from the uprising is closer to 2,000. In addition to the casualties from the uprising, nearly 1,400 people were arrested and 7 were given death sentences. 12 were sentenced to life in prison.

The background for the uprising is complex. However, the country had been living under the 18-year dictatorship of Park Chun-hee, who was assassinated on October 26, 1979. A series of pro-democracy demonstrations developed in the wake of his death. But on December 12, Chun Doo-hwan led a military coup in order to quell the protests. He did not officially take over as “president” until after the Gwangju Uprising. But he was acting as the de facto ruler and the country was still under martial law from the coup.

In March, protests picked up again. People wanted democratization, human rights, minimum wage increases, freedom of the press, and an end to martial law. On May 15, 100,000 people demonstrated at Seoul Station. Chun Doo-hwan responded by extending martial law to the entire nation, closing the universities, banning all political activities and further curtailing the press. Furthermore, he dispatched troops throughout the country to suppress any potential demonstrations.

On May 18, students demonstrated at Chonnam University in defiance of its closing. At first, there were only 30 paratroopers and hundreds of students. They started to clash. By afternoon, at least 2,000 people had joined the protest. The government sent in hundreds of troops. Soldiers started to club demonstrators and onlookers. They attacked with bayonets and raped people, and they beat a deaf man to death. Outraged, the number of protesters swelled to over 10,000. Street battles continued for days, climaxing on May 21, when soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters. In response, citizens took up arms by robbing local armories and police stations, arming themselves with M1 rifles and carbines. By afternoon, there were bloody gunfights between ad hoc civilian militias and the army. By 5:30, the citizens militias had obtained two machine guns and used them, forcing the army to retreat.

The troops retreated to the suburbs to await reinforcements. However, they also blocked all routes and communications leading into and out of the city. Meanwhile, inside of Liberated Gwangju, the Citizens’ Settlement Committee negotiated with the army, demanding the release of arrested citizens, compensation for the victims, and a prohibition of retaliation in exchange for disarming themselves. The army demanded immediate surrender and some in the committee were willing to give it to them. But those who wanted to resist until their demands were met took control of the committee.

On May 27, at 4 am, troops from five divisions moved on the protesters and defeated the civilian militias within 90 minutes.

Today in Labor History May 18, 1979: An Oklahoma jury ruled in favor of the estate of atomic worker Karen Silkwood. Kerr-McGee Nuclear Company was ordered to pay $505,000 in actual damages and $10 million in punitive damages for negligence leading to Silkwood’s plutonium contamination. On appeal, the court reduced the settlement to a pitiful $5,000, the estimated value of her property losses. In 1984, the Supreme Court restored the original verdict, but Kerr-McGee again threatened to appeal. Ultimately, Silkwood’s family settled out of court for $1.38 million and the company never had to admit any wrongdoing.

Silkwood first started working at Kerr-McGee in 1972. She joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers union and participated in a strike. After the strike, her comrades elected her to the union’s bargaining committee. She was the first woman to attain that status at Kerr-McGee. In this role, one of her duties was to investigate health and safety issues. Not surprisingly, she discovered numerous violations, including exposure of workers to contamination. The union accused Kerr-McGee of falsifying inspection records, manufacturing faulty fuel rods and other safety violations. After testifying to the Atomic Energy Commission, Silkwood discovered that her own body and home were contaminated with radiation. Her body contained 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination and she was expelling contaminated air from her lungs. Her house was so contaminated they had to destroy much of her personal property.

Later, she decided to go public with documentation proving the company’s negligence. She left a meeting with union officials in order to meet a New York Times journalist. She brought a binder and packet of documents supporting her allegations with her. However, she never made it, dying in a suspicious car crash. The documents were never found. Some journalists believe she was rammed from behind by another vehicle. Investigators noted damage to the read of her car that would be consistent with this hypothesis. She had also received death threats shortly before her death. However, no one has yet substantiated the claims of foul play.

Today in Labor History May 18, 1928: Big Bill Haywood died in exile in the Soviet Union. He was a founding member and leader of both the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW (the Wobblies). During the first two decades of the 20th century, he participated in the Colorado Labor Wars and the textiles strikes in Lawrence and Patterson. The Pinkertons tried, but failed, to bust him for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. However, in 1918, the feds used the Espionage Act to convict him, and 101 other Wobblies, for their anti-war activity. As a result, they sentenced him to twenty years in prison. But instead of serving the time, he fled to the Soviet Union, damaging his image as a hero among the Wobblies. He ultimately died from a stroke related to his alcoholism and diabetes. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The other half of his ashes were sent to Chicago and buried near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument.

You can read my full article on union busting by the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/

Today in Labor History May 18, 1895: Augusto Sandino was born. Sandino led the original Sandinista movement for Nicaraguan independence and fought a protracted war against the U.S. occupation. One of their manifestos read, “it is better to be killed as a rebel than to live on as a slave.” While in exile in Mexico during the early 1920s, Sandino participated in strikes led by the IWW. Inspired by the anarcho-syndicalist union, he adopted their red and black logo as the colors for the revolutionary Nicaraguan flag.

The U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua from August 4, 1912 until January 2, 1933, when Juan Sacasa took over as president. Sacasa put Anastasio Somoza in charge of the hated Guardia Nacional. Sacasa met privately with Sandino and won his support. However, Sandino continued to call for the dismantling of the Guardia Nacional. So, Somoza assassinated him in 1934. After that, the Somoza dynasty ruled Nicaragua until the FSLN (Sandinista Nation Liberation Front), named after Augusto Sandino, overthrew them in 1979.

Today in Labor History May 18, 1814: Russian anarchist militant and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was born. In Paris, in the 1840’s, he met Marx and Proudhon, who were early influences on him. He was later expelled from France for opposing Russia’s occupation of Poland. In 1849, the authorities arrested him in Dresden for participating in the Czech rebellion of 1848. They deported him back to Russia, where the authorities imprisoned him and then exiled him to Siberia in 1857. However, he escaped through Japan and fled to the U.S. and then England.

In 1868, he joined the International Working Men’s Association, leading the rapidly growing anarchist faction. He argued for federations of self-governing workplaces and communes to replace the state. This was in contrast to Marx, who argued for the state to help bring about socialism. In 1872, they expelled Bakunin from the International. Bakunin had an influence on the IWW, Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Emma Goldman, and the Spanish CNT and FAI.

Just finished the The Fascist Painting: What Is Cultural Capital? By Phil Beadle. If you are a working class educator, you need to read this book. #WorkingClass #Education #curriculum
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Fascist-Painting-by-Phil-Beadle/9781913622176

Today in Labor History May 17, 1900: Following the siege of Mafeking, during the Second Boer War, over 27,000 Boer women and children died in the world's first concentration camps. The Spanish had actually created similar death camps in Cuba during the Ten Year’s War (1868-1878). However, the death camps in South Africa were the first to be called concentration camps. Additionally, the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time an entire nation had been targeted. During the war, Mahatma Gandhi and 800 Indian slaves started the Ambulance Corps to serve the British.

Today in Labor History May 17, 1917: The government stayed the execution of Tom Mooney while he appealed his case. Mooney ultimately spent 22 years in prison for the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade bombing in 1916, a crime he did not commit. Mooney, along with codefendant Warren Billings, were members of the IWW and were railroaded because of their union and anarchist affiliations. The bomb exploded at the foot of Market Street, killing ten and wounding forty. Billings had heard rumors that agents provocateurs might try to blacken the labor movement by disrupting the pro-war parade. He tried to warn his comrades.

Mooney’s father had been in the Knights of Labor, a forerunner of the IWW. He had been beaten so badly during one strike, that his comrades thought he was dead. He ultimately died of silicosis from mining at the age of 36, when Tom was only ten. In San Francisco, Tom Mooney published The Revolt, a socialist newspaper. He was tried and acquitted three times for transporting explosives during the Pacific Gas & Electric strike in 1913.

Mooney filed a writ of habeas corpus in 1937, providing evidence that his conviction was based on perjured testimony and evidence tampering. Among this evidence was a photograph of him in front of a large, ornate clock, on Market Street, clearly showing the time of the bombing and that he could not have been at the bombing site when it occurred. The Alibi Clock was later moved to downtown Vallejo, twenty-five miles to the northeast of San Francisco. A bookstore in Vallejo is named after this clock. He was finally pardoned in 1939. Upon his release, he marched in a huge parade down market street. Cops and leaders of the mainstream unions were all forbidden from participating. An honor guard of longshoremen accompanied him carrying their hooks. His case helped establish that convictions based on false evidence violate people’s right to due process.

The accompanying photo shows Oliver Law, and the Tom Mooney Machine Gun Company, part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, who fought in the Spanish war against fascism (AKA the Spanish Civil War). Oliver Law was a communist, and the first black man known to have commanded white U.S. troops.

Read my complete article on Mooney and Billings here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/05/19/tom-mooney-and-warren-billings/

Today in Labor History May 17, 1954: Brown v. Board of Education went into effect. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was unconstitutional, and a violation of the 14th Amendment. The ruling reversed the 1896 "separate but equal" Plessy vs Ferguson decision. However, researchers at Stanford and USC have recently found that, in spite of this SCOTUS ruling, racial segregation in the nation’s 100 largest school districts has increased by 64% since 1988, while economic segregation increased by 50% since 1991. While residential segregation was a major driving force for school segregation in the past, the primary driving force for today’s segregation is the School Choice movement, which has allowed hundreds of charter schools to open up, many for-profit. During the 2021-2022 school year, 7.4% of all public-school students, 3.7 million kids, attended charter schools. And there tends to be much more segregation within charter schools. Additionally, there has been a decline in court oversight of segregation in schools, resulting from a number of lawsuits in the 1990s against affirmative action policies.

Https://www.vox.com/24156492/school-segregation-increasing-brown-board-of-education

Today in Labor History May 17, 1974: Cops raided the headquarters of the Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles, killing six members. It was one of the largest police shootouts in U.S. history. The cops fired 5,000 rounds and the SLA fired 4,000. Prior to the shootout, the SLA had committed several bank robberies and murders. However, they were most famous for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. One of the conditions they demanded for her release was for the Hearst family to distribute four hundred million dollars’-worth of food to the Bay Area poor. In actuality, over 100,000 bags of groceries were distributed. The SLA was a Maoist organization that saw itself as an American version of urban guerillas, like the Tupamaros, in Uruguay. By most accounts, the SLA was a group of confused wingnuts. Leader and founding member, Cinque, has been accused of being a police informant.

Today in Labor History May 17 2004: Twelve Starbucks baristas in a midtown Manhattan store, declaring they couldn’t live on $7.75 an hour, signed cards demanding representation by the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies.

"Uptown Girl" is a song written and performed by American musician #BillyJoel from his ninth studio album #AnInnocentMan (1983), released in September 1983 as the album's second single. The lyrics describe a #workingclass "#downtown man" attempting to woo a #wealthy "uptown girl". The 12" EP has the tracks "#MyLife", "#JustTheWayYouAre" and "#ItsStillRockAndRollToMe" (catalogue number TA3775), whereas some 7" single versions featured "Careless Talk" as a B-side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E

Today in Labor History May 16, 1912: Studs Terkel was born, New York City. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for his book The Good War, a collection of oral histories from World War II. He was born to Russian-Jewish parents. He joined the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. This provided him work in radio. He is best known for his oral histories, and his raido program, The Studs Terkel Program, which aired on WFMT, Chicago, from 1952-1997. Some of the people he interviewed on this show included: Bob Dylan, Big Bill Broonzy, Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, Martin Luther King and Tennessee Williams.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #StudsTerkel #union #jewish #pulitzer #radio #books #writer #author #nonfiction @bookstadon

Today in Labor History May 16, 1918: Congress passed the Sedition Act against radicals and pacifists, leading to the arrest, imprisonment, execution and deportation of dozens of unionists, anarchists and communists. The law forbade the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive” language about the U.S. government, its flag, or it military. The mainstream press supported the act, despite the significant limitations it imposed on free speech and of press freedom. In June, 1918, the government arrested Eugene Debs for violating the act by undermining the government’s conscription efforts. He served 18 months in prison. Congress repealed the act in 1920, since world War I had ended. However, Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, lobbied for a peacetime version of it. Additionally, he continued to round up labor activists, communists and anarchist for seditious behavior, particularly Wobblies, or members of the IWW. For example, they convicted Marie Equi for giving a speech at the IWW hall in Portland, Oregon after WWI had ended.

Today in Labor History May 16, 1934: Teamsters initiated a General Strike (5/16-8/21) for union recognition in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, which was, then, the main distribution center for the upper Midwest. The worst violence occurred on Bloody Friday, July 20, when police shot at strikers in a downtown truck battle, killing two and injuring 67. Continuing violence lasted throughout the summer. The strike formally ended on August 22. The strike was led by the Trotskyist Communist League of America, which later founded the Socialist Workers Party (United States). While this General Strike was going on in Minneapolis, there was an equally violent General Strike going continuing on San Francisco’s waterfront (5/9-7/31), with much of the West Coast dockers joining them (Everett, WA; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; and Los Angeles, CA). 9 workers were killed in the West Coast waterfront strikes, along with over 1,000 injuries and over 500 arrests. At the same time, there was also a General Strike going on in Toledo, OH, the Auto Lite Strike (4/12-6/3), in which 2 workers were killed.

Today in Labor History May 16, 2007: Long before the current wave of union organizing at Starbucks, Baristas at the Starbucks in East Grand Rapids announced their membership in the IWW Starbucks Workers Union. Starbucks was and is notorious for their poor treatment of workers. The NLRB slapped them with numerous anti-labor violations and forced them to settle the Grand Rapids dispute in October. In 2024, the Supreme Court heard the case of seven union workers from a Memphis, Tennessee Starbucks who were fired in retaliation for joining the union, in violation of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rules.

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/23/1226955737/starbucks-supreme-court-union-organizing-labor-injunctions-nlrb

Today in Labor History, May 16: Romani Resistance Day, commemorating the Roma people who fought the fascists during World War II. The date was chosen due to a Holocaust survivor stating that on 16 May 1944, there was a rebellion of Roma detainees at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. However subsequent research by the Auschwitz Museum discovered that this date was most likely incorrect. It was actually in early April that a number of Roma prisoners refused orders from the SS to leave to work in Germany. Instead, a Polish prisoner was ordered to make a list of Roma able to work to be transported later. By 2 August 1944, those Roma able to work had been transported elsewhere, when the SS came to take the others to the gas chambers. The prisoners armed themselves with crowbars and fought back, but were eventually overcome and gassed. And in 2024, The European Committee for Social Rights (ECSR) unanimously concluded that Italy was violating the European Social Charter as regards the housing rights of the Roma, 15,000 of whom are currently living in shanty towns on the margins of big cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/european-watchdog-rebukes-italy-over-treatment-roma-minority-2024-05-13/

Today in Writing History May 16, 1906: Margaret Rey was born. Rey was an author an illustrator of children’s books. She cowrote the Curious George books with her husband H.A. Rey. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, she studied art at Bauhaus and later worked in advertising. In 1935, she fled Germany to escape the Nazis, moving to Rio de Janeiro. There she met H.A. Rey, also a German Jew who had fled the Nazis. Many of us remember the Curious George stories fondly. George was a monkey, who was kind of like an adorable little boy. Yet in every one of the stories, he does something naughty that disappoints his “daddy,” (The man in the Yellow Hat), and has to win back his affection doing something dangerous. In one story, he is exploited by a cook and must wash dishes without pay. In another, he is hired as a window washer on a skyscraper. Even his origin story is fraught, with the Yellow Hatted Man kidnapping him from his home in Africa. In this video clip, hear Werner Herzog’s take on the stories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T8y5EPv6Y8

#workingclass #LaborHistory #curiousgeorge #books #fiction #childrensbooks #wernerherzog #illustrator #nazis #fascism #antisemitism #author #margaretrey #HARey #writer @bookstadon

Mit Engels über „Wir müssen in diesem Land wieder mehr arbeiten“-Merz lachen #TGIF Den Zusammenhang von Profitgier des Kapitals und der Verelendung der lohnabhängigen Klasse arbeitete Marx’ Partner + BFF bereits im 19. Jahrhundert heraus. Gute Lektüre, spannend wie unterhaltsam geschrieben, dazu mit ausgewählten Original-Texten: https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/friedrich-engels-oder-wie-ein-cotton-lord-den-marxismus-erfand-2

Majority of US residents (60%) don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, according to New study.

The usual data, like the 4.2% unemployment rate, grossly underestimate the level of economic distress in the US.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us