On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.
U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.
The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.
The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like “insurrection” and “Bolshevik revolution”. Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General’s injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.
Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.
The US miners’ strikes, 1919-1922 - Jeremy Brecher
:worker
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Can’t stop thinking about how computer hobbyists are all anticommunist, some credulously and some with oafish severity, while every chip and circuit they’ve ever touched and ever will comes from Chinese fabrication lines, and if the US ever seriously tried to challenge Chinese power they would never see an upgrade again. Very funny to me.
This!! Most Linux enthusiasts and BSD users are just libertarians, it’s tiring. You would expect a more leftist presence due to the GNU license, but not really, I mean it’s there but rare. This is why I avoid anything tech, aside from looking at Phoronix occasionally
Seconding all this. It’s just a mass of contradictions in that bunch.
There are anarchists too, the degrowth crowd mostly. I like the linux room in GZD matrix but it’s rather inactive sadly, and the comms here.
The Libre community on reddit is one of the worst (excluding out and out hate subreddits, of course), just completely full of smug Libertarian arseholes talking down to anyone with less tech knowledge than them.
Makes me proud that the equivalent community here is great!
Or Libert-Aryans as I prefer to call them.
Not sure, I’ve seen communists that contribute to Mozilla, and the founders along with other active members of Lemmy are a prime example. Dessalines’s essays repo is surprisingly info rich and is great for getting into communism for people that already are left leaning.
If you’re reading this btw, great job