Past is prologue, and how we do not learn from history

[nadinbrzezinski]

or rather do not learn history.

So further readying into this history of labor, and Carlton writers in his book published in 1920, that during the 1880s the small businessmen were under attack from large conglomerates who were doing all they could to drive them out of business to concentrate all in as few hands as possible.

So I put my Sony reader down and wanted to cry. That was the reason the Sherman Anti Trust Act was passed, to bring to heel a lot of these large conglomerates (can anybody say House of Morgan? I knew you could)

Now quick. when was the last time the Act was used?

For some of you it hasn't been in your lifetime. The last President to use the Act was Carter...

Why I am actually thinking, I found a title to this work..."those who forget history..."

Now in case you are wondering... well a certain large Corporation is doing the same to small family businesses these days. Can you say Walmart?

Oh and there is more... the conditions of the factories of the Gilded Age existed thirty years before, where we had women working fourteen and eighteen hours a day, living in company provided quarters, and buying from the company store. Oh wait. you think this is gone? Look at many places in the Third World, were we even have the yearly contract, and of course the need to give a two week notice to stop your employment... that last one, if you were wondering where the hell the custom of giving two week notice comes? The mills in New England.

Ah yes, history does repeat itself, doesn't it?

Oh and here is a piece of trivia for those of you celebrating Passover... to my surprise, and purely in the trivia department. we did have corvee labor in the US during the Colonial Period... COOL The way it worked is that labor was compelled to help their neighbors pick up the harvest for a fixed wage ordered by the local judge. Now the Myth says that this was done willfully. Well, there is plenty of documentation of people who were forced, ahem compelled, to do this by court order. This fits the actual definition of Corvee Labor. I thought this piece of trivia would be ironic given how much we like to deny how much our Institutions at times come straight from Europe and we are like connected and such.

Oh and on the notes department, they keep growing... and I got more leads to go read and of course find. I also now know that once I sit down to write this... I will need to go get a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. I mean my copy is just a tad dated... grumble.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. The stagnation of wages under Bush and the decay of the labor movement is not a conicidence...

Right to work states (which are really right to abuse cheap labor) was the nail in the coffin of the labor movement.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Right to work goes back to 1948

and that was actually the beginning of the current war on organized labor.

[Ozymanithrax]

4. Yes, but it took many decades for it to grow.

First, they needed to destory labor. Once that was done, they replaced it with the fantasy of right to work.

[Omaha Steve]

2. K&R!