A People’s History of the United States by Zinn Howard

Author:Zinn, Howard [Howard, Zinn,]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0060838655
Published: 2010-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

The conditions of women working in a Milwaukee brewery were described by Mother Mary Jones, who worked there briefly in 1910 (she was close to eighty at this time): Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul- mouthed, brutal foremen ... the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds.. .. Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption.. .. The foreman even regulates the time the girls may stay in the toilet room. ... Many of the girls have no home nor parents and are forced to feed and clothe and shelter themselves . . . on $3.00 a week. ...

In the laundries, women organized. In 1909, the Handbook of the Women's Trade Union Industrial League wrote about women in steam laundries: How would you like to iron a shirt a minute? Think of standing at a mangle just above the washroom with the hot steam pouring up through the floor for 10, 12, 14 and sometimes 17 hours a day! Sometimes the floors are made of cement and then it seems as though one were standing' on hot coals, and the workers are dripping with perspiration.... They are . . . breathing air laden with particles of soda, ammonia, and other chemicals! The Laundry Workers Union ... in one city reduced this long day to 9 hours, and has increased the wages 50 percent.. . .

Labor struggles could make things better, but the country's resources remained in the hands of powerful corporations whose motive was profit, whose power commanded the government of the United States. There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.

Around the turn of the century, strike struggles were multiplying-in the 1890s there had been about a thousand strikes a year; by 1904 there were four thousand strikes a year. Law and military force again and again took the side of the rich. It was a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans began to think of socialism.

Debs wrote in 1904, three years after the formation of the Socialist party: The “pure and simple” trades union of the past does not answer the requirements of today. . . .

The attempt of each trade to maintain its own independence separately and apart from others results in increasing jurisdictional entanglements, fruitful of dissension, strife and ultimate disruption.. . .

The members of a trades union should be taught ... that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it; that while it engages to do all that possibly can he done to better the working conditions

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