Some of you are aware of the ongoing TA #strike at #McGill, and it pains me to see the administration is succeeding in actively dividing undergraduates, graduate #students, and #professors alike, by pushing all three to the absolute mental limit. We - and by that I mean all three above - must NOT let the administration tear the social fabric in our #university to put money before people. When the #union says "united we bargain, divided we beg," it means not just them, but everyone. 1/
#Students are also hurting: undergraduates lose support for succeeding in courses and become increasingly frustrated with grades, while graduates lose their income, especially since the #university has also suspended every striking TA from their concurrent positions. We are also in the dark, as the administration never communicates to us about the progress of the negotiation, other than to demand #picket lines to cease. I am hearing more and more expletives on the picket line now. 4/
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
Today in Labor History February 19, 1990: After a 10-month strike, rank-and-file miners at the Pittston Coal Co. ratified a new contract. Ninety-eight miners and a minister occupied a Pittston Coal plant in Carbo, Virginia, inaugurating the year-long strike. While a one-month Soviet coal strike dominated the U.S. media, the year-long Pittston strike received almost no media coverage. The wildcat walkouts involved 40,000 miners in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. Over 2,000 people occupied Camp Solidarity. Miners and their families engaged in Civil Disobedience, pickets, work stoppages and sometimes sabotage, vandalism and violence. Over 4,000 were arrested.
But letting the #government decide who gets to #speak and who doesn't is NOT something you should be cheering for. #Censorship is a dangerous road; we've seen where it leads.
What if the next government decides that your#media is "#hate#speech" and #blocks it from airing, while letting Fox or OAN on-air?