Today in Labor History March 3, 1991: An amateur video caught LAPD beating Rodney King. Four officers were tried for excessive force. Despite the video footage of police brutally beating a defenseless King, the jury acquitted all the cops involved. Within hours of the acquittals, riots erupted in cities across the U.S. The biggest was the Los Angeles riots, which lasted six days and killed 64 people (including 2 Asians, 28 African Americans, 19 Latinos and 15 whites), and injured 2,383. The National Guard, Army and Marines came in and ultimately quashed the riots. The riots in L.A. also included an anti-Asian pogrom. 2,300 Korean businesses were looted or burned and hundreds of Koreans suffered from PTSD. 64 people died in the riots,

In San Francisco, African American youth chased cops down the street with bats. And protesters shattered the facade of Bank of America with a concrete bus bench. I also remember having to duck behind a car to avoid being shot by a shop owner who was chasing out looters. The violent police assault on King was one of the first to go viral in the digital age. It ushered in a new era of citizens documenting police brutality.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #policebrutality #rodneyking #riots #lapd #acab #police #losangeles #racism

Today in Labor History March 3, 1985: Arthur Scargill declared an end to Britain’s National Miners’ Strike. The miners returned to work without winning any major demands. After the strike, most of Britain's coal mines closed, supposedly because they weren’t profitable. Consequently, the union shrunk from 170,000 members down to 100 by 2015. Margaret Thatcher declared the miners the “Enemy Within.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #strike #miners #britain #MargaretThatcher #union

Today in Labor History March 3, 1913: Thousands of women marched in the first Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. Its purpose was to "march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded." Up to 10,000 participated. Speakers included Anna Howard Shaw and Helen Keller.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #womenshistorymonth #feminism #suffrage #sexism #washington

Today in Labor History March 3, 1873: U.S. Congress enacted the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any "obscene literature and articles of immoral use" through the mail. This included any literature discussing birth control. The authorities imprisoned many birth control and free love advocates for violating the law, including Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #WomensHistoryMonth #feminism #FreeSpeech #birthcontrol #abortion #emmagoldman #margaretsanger #prison #plannedparenthood #comstock #freelove

Today in Labor History March 3, 1903: U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1903, also called the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which bolstered previous immigration law, while adding four new classes of banned people: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes. Congress first discussed banning anarchists from entering the U.S. in 1889, in the wake of the Haymarket affair, when 8 innocent anarchists were framed for a bombing at a public demonstration in support of the eight-hour workday. Then, in 1901, Leon F. Czolgosz, a self-proclaimed anarchist, assassinated President William McKinley. The police responded by arresting numerous anarchists who had no connection whatsoever to the assassination, including Emma Goldman. The new immigration law had minimal effect. Over the next 11 years, only 11 anarchists were denied entry into the U.S., and four were expelled, under the law, including British anarchist John Turner.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #immigration #anarchism #sexwork #disabilities #ableism #emmagoldman #congress #racism #haymarket #prostitution #assassination

Hey now you better listen to me everyone of you. We got a lotta lotta lotta lotta work to do.
@onan has suggested giving this song a new twist. As soon as I'm safe, I'll do that. Because you know that when Reverend Onan Canobite says something, you have to obey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNzGoT5bYYs

https://word.undead-network.de/2026/03/03/hey-now-you-better-listen-to-me-everyone-of-you-we-got-a-lotta-lotta-lotta-lotta-work-to-do/
#music #royorbison #TheMan #workingclass

Not sometimes, always!

#ElinorOstrom #Politics #Bureaucrats #WorkingClass

Today in Labor History March 2, 1807: Congress abolished the African slave trade. The first American slave ship, Desire, sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1637. After that, nearly 15 million Africans were transported as slaves to America. Overall, the African continent lost 50 million people to slavery and the deaths associated with it. Another 250,000 slaves continued to be illegally imported into the U.S. up until the Civil War.

The Thirteenth Amendment “prohibited” slavery throughout the USA, but with the following clause: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Jim Crow laws in the past and racial profiling today result in large numbers of African Americans being incarcerated and subjected to legal slavery. Sometimes prisoners have even been rented out to plantations that had used chattel slaves in the past. But with the U.S. having both the world’s highest number of incarcerated people (2.1 million) and the highest incarceration rate (665 per 100,000), there are a lot of people from all ethnicities being subjected to legal slavery.

And on this same date in 1859: The Great Slave Auction began. The two-day event was the largest such auction in U.S. history. The auction was held at Ten Broeck Race Course, near Savannah, Georgia. They sold 429 men, women, children and infants. Prior to the sale, they housed the slaves in stables. Journalist Mortimer Thomson pretended to be a buyer. He then wrote a scathing article titled, “What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #civilwar #africa #abolition #africanamerican #BlackMastodon #racism #jimcrow #thirteenthamendment #prison

Today in Labor History March 2, 1997: Earth First! Activist, feminist and IWW labor organizer Judi Bari died. Bari, and her comrade, Darryl Cherney, survived a terrorist bomb attack in Oakland, CA in 1990, when they were organizing Redwood Summer, a 3-month campaign of nonviolent direct actions, during the summer of 1990, to end the clear-cutting of northern California redwood forests. The police and FBI immediately blamed her for the bombing, claiming that she was the terrorist and that the bomb was intended for logging companies. They arrested her and handcuffed her to her hospital bed, as she lay there with a shattered pelvis. Bari and Cherney were eventually exonerated and won a settlement for the FBI’s role in violating their civil liberties. The bomber was never caught. In addition to their organizing and activism, Bari and Cherney were also musical composers and performers. Their song, “Will the Fetus Be Aborted,” (to the tune of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,”) was performed by Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon on their Prairie Home Invasion album.

Bari was instrumental in organizing Local 1 of the IWW, an effort to unite timber workers and environmentalists around the same goal of ending the clear-cutting of the forests. Some of the actions during Redwood Summer included preparing breakfast at base camp and getting it to the timber workers at 5 am, before they began work, in an effort to talk with them and organize them. Redwood Summer, as a whole, was well-organized. Veteran Direct-Action activists hosted numerous organizing events in the months that preceded the actions, to train activists in their legal rights, direct action tactics, security, jail solidarity, etc. However, there was little to no training in labor organizing or class solidarity. Consequently, at least for the actions in which I participated, the conversations with timber workers tended to be privileged activists talking down to the workers, telling them how they should be thinking and acting, and the timber workers yelling at them and threatening them. One environmentalist was clobbered with an axe handle. Others were attacked with rocks. And on at least one occasion, assailants fired guns at base camp. Overall, the actions did not stop the clear cutting of the forests, but they did slow things down for a while, and they did reduce Louisiana Pacific’s profits.

#LaborHistory #workingclass #IWW #earthfirst #judibari #fbi #terrorism #bombing #police #ecology #redwoodsummer #folkmusic #solidarity #classconsciousness #jail #directaction

Today in Labor History March 2, 1990: Over 6,000 bus drivers went on strike against Greyhound Lines. The company declared an “impasse” in negotiations and fired nearly every one of the drivers, who they replaced with scabs. During the strike, there were numerous reports of sniping incidents, with unknown assailants shooting at, or into, Greyhound buses that were being driven by scabs. The bosses, to no ones surprise, blamed the union leaders for orchestrating the shootings.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #greyhound #strike #union #scab #solidarity #union #bus #police #shooting

Today in Labor History March 2, 1974: Salvador Puig Antich was executed by garrote in Barcelona, Spain. He was a militant anarchist and Catalan independence fighter who fought against the Spanish state with the terrorist group Iberian Liberation Movement in the early 1970s. He was convicted of bank robbery and killing a police officer. His arrest and execution became a cause célèbre in Francoist Spain for Catalan autonomists, pro-independence supporters, and anarchists. He was also the last person executed by the fascist Franco regime. His execution inspired new artistic works by Catalan artists Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #execution #BankRobbery #police #barcelona #fascism #franco #catalan #independence #joanmiro #surrealism #salvadorpuigantich #prison #terrorism

Today in Labor History March 1, 2005: The Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute juveniles convicted of murder. Americans executed their first juvenile in 1642. Between 1642 and 2005, they executed 342 people who were juveniles at the time their offense occurred. Between 1976 and 2005, the U.S. executed 22 juvenile offenders. All but one of these occurred in the South and more than half of them in Texas, alone. Overall, 50% of all youth executed in the U.S. were African American. At the time of the SCOTUS decision ending juvenile executions, there were 71 people on Death Row for crimes they were accused of committing as minors. Several people have been executed for crimes they were accused of committing when they were 14. And James Arcene, a Native American, was executed for a crime he was accused of committing at the age of 11.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #deathpenalty #capitalpunishment #cruelandunusual #juveniles #children #SCOTUS #prison

Today in Labor History March 1, 1981: Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began his hunger strike at HM Prison Maze against the removal of Special Category Status, which had effectively granted them Prisoner of War status. POW status, under the Geneva Conventions, gave them special privileges not given to other prisoners, like not having to wear prison uniforms or do prison work, being housed within their paramilitary factions, and being allowed extra visits and food parcels. Sands had been in prison for his role in the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in 1976. During the hunger strike, he was elected to parliament. 10 prisoners died from starvation during the strike, including Sands. 100,000 people attended his funeral.

Hunger striking had a long tradition in Ireland, going back to pre-Christian times. In the 20th century, 12 men died from Hunger Strikes prior to the 1981 strike. The Special Category Status that Sands and his comrades were fighting for was first implemented as a result of a Hunger Strike by republican prisoners in in 1972. British removal of this status was part of an attempt to change public perception of, and sympathy for, the republican cause, by making it seem like they were common criminals, gangsters, thugs, without any political agenda. Kieran Nugent, the first republican prisoner to lose this status (1976), refused to wear the standard uniform, telling the warden that he’d half to nail it to his back. Instead, he wore a blanket, leading to a blanket protest by other prisoners. In 1978, this escalated to the Dirty Protest, where prisoners refused to wash and smeared their excrement on the walls of their cells. This protest spread to the women’s prison in Armagh, where prisoners also smeared their menstrual blood on the walls.

The mural shown here is at Sevastopol Street, in Belfast. Many artists contributed to its design, including Danny Devenny, Marty Lyons, Michael Doherty and Gerard ‘Mo Chara’ Kelly. It depicts Bobby Sands with two quotes from him. On either side of him are images of his Belfast IRA comrades in the blanket protest, Kieran Doherty (left) who was elected to the Irish parliament while also on hunger strike in 1981, and Joe McDonnell (right) who was arrested with Bobby in October 1976. At the bottom of the mural is a lark breaking free from its cage/chains and at the very top is the mythical phoenix, a bird symbolizing rebirth and renewal which at the end of its life cycle is said to burst into flames but to arise anew from its ashes. The mural also shows republican Sean McCaughey who died on hunger strike in Portlaoise Prison in 1946. To the right of this image are lines from ‘The H-Block Song’ by the late Francie Brolly:
 
I’ll wear no convict’s uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight
Eight hundred years of crime

One of the Bobby Sands' quotes on the mural reads: “Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has their own particular role to play. Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IRA #bobbysands #hungerstrike #maze #prison #starvation #bombing #ireland #irishrepublicanarmy #prisonerofwar

Today in Labor History March 1, 1954: The U.S. detonated Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll. It caused the worst radioactive contamination ever by the U.S. However, this occurred after years of nuclear testing and contamination of the islands and waters around them. The U.S. detonated 23 nuclear devices on the islands from 1946 to 1958. They blew up the bombs on the reef, in the sea, in the air and underwater. They relocated islanders several times, each time to supposedly safe islands. But they neglected to provide sufficient food and water, causing starvation. When the islanders tried to catch fish to eat, or grow their own crops, they were so contaminated from radioactive fallout, that it poisoned all who ate it. Women started having miscarriages and giving birth to babies with abnormalities. To this day, it is still too contaminated for inhabitants and their descendants to return. A trust fund that had been set up to help support the survivors ran out of funds in the late 2010s.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #bikini #islands #nuclear #radioactive #bomb #contamination #coldwar #castlebravo #indigenous #indigenousrights #imperialism #forcedmigration #genocide

Today in Labor History March 1, 1921: Anarchist and leftwing communist soldiers, sailors and civilians rose up against the Russian Bolsheviks in the Kronstadt uprising. The rebellion, which lasted until March 16, was the last major revolt against the Bolsheviks. It began when they sent delegates to Petrograd in solidarity with strikes going on in that city, and demanded the restoration of civil rights for workers, economic and political freedom for workers and peasants, including free speech, and that soviet councils include anarchists and left socialists. Just prior to the uprising, there had been over 150 peasant revolts against the government in February, alone, and thousands of arrests of students, intellectuals, leftwing communists, and anarchists. The Bolshevik forces, directed by Trotsky, killed over 1,000 Kronstadt rebels in battle, and executed another 2,100 in the aftermath. As many as 1,400 government troops died in their attempt to quash the rebellion. The repression against the rebels turned many former supporters against the Bolsheviks, including Emma Goldman, who was living in Russia at the time, after having been deported by the U.S. during the Palmer raids.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #communism #ussr #soviet #kronstadt #rebellion #uprising #revolt #massacre #bolshevik #freespeech #solidarity #strike

Today in Labor History February 28, 1947: The Kuomintang government in Taiwan put down an anti-government uprising known as the February 28 Incident. They killed 28,000 civilians. And in the White Terror that followed, the government killed, imprisoned or disappeared 30,000 more. These events helped spark the Taiwanese independence movement.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #kuomintang #taiwan #uprising #formosa #massacre #civilian #slaughter #WhiteTerror #independence #chiang

Today in Labor History February 28, 1933: Erich Mühsam, was arrested and blamed for the Reichstag fire. The fire was actually set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist.
Mühsam was sent to the Oranienberg concentration camp, where he was tortured and murdered. Mühsam was an anarchist, poet and playwright who condemned Nazism and satirized Hitler. In the wake of the fire, President von Hindenburg issued the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, and launching a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists, making the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. They went on a witch hunt, mass-arresting Communists, including members of Parliament, crippling their participation in the March 5th special elections, which allowed the Nazi party to expand their plurality in parliament. Hitler had called in hopes of moving the Nazi party from a plurality to a majority through quasi-legal means. Sound familiar?

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nazis #hitler #germany #communism #anarchism #concentrationcamp #reichstag #Poet #playwright #fascism #antifascism #antifa @bookstadon

Today in Labor History February 28, 1887: Clément Duval had his death sentence commuted to life in prison. He was a French anarchist and criminal whose ideas influenced the illegalist movement of the 1910s. The most famous illegalist was Jules Bonot, who orchestrated one of the world’s first bank heist utilizing a getaway car. According to Paul Albert, Duval’s story was the basis for the bestseller Papillon, about multiple escape attempts from Devil’s Island. In October 1886, Duval broke into the mansion of a Parisian socialite, stole 15,000 francs, and accidentally set the house on fire. His trial drew crowds of supporters and ended in chaos when he was dragged from the court, shouting "Long live anarchy!"

#workingclass #LaborHistory #prison #anarchism #illegalism #papillon #devilsisland #clémentduval #DeathPenalty #julesbonot #bankrobbery #books #novel #fiction #author #writer @bookstadon

@janl

THIS!

The Intelligensia fucked the #workingclass when the programmable looms, and steam shovels took the proletariat jobs...

...now the capitalists and the machines came for the soft palmed office workers
...and Instead of swarthy arms swinging the pickaxe, the barricades are held by overweight, pasty geeks whose main weapon is a meme.

Don't fall for the propaganda.

#USEconomy #Jobs #MiddleClass #WorkingClass #Billionaires

https://financialpost.com/news/economy/unprecedented-jobless-boom-tests-limits-of-u-s-economic-expansion