Queen’s Comments: Looks like once again in the battle of the rich against the poor, the rich win and workers get the shaft in America.

I just heard on Rachel Maddow tonight that the Detroit bailout will be supported by Republican senators if, in effect, the unions are busted. This is largely been effected by Republican senators from the South including Mitch McConnell–all of whom have foreign car maker factories in their states–all of which are non-union.

Somehow they have attached the lying rhetoric that American autoworkers are paid $71 dollars an hour.  That is such a lie that it should be so absurd that it would be laughable.  As Rachel said:  “Show me a pay stub from most American car workers indicating that they are getting paid $71 an hour and I’ll show you my US Healthcare card.

These senator should be required to defend this statement of $71 an hour.  I wonder if they arrive at this “average” by adding in the salaries that the CEOs get?  What a damn cynical joke–and even more damn cynical that more people don’t call them on their lies and ideological hatreds and generalities.

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TEXTILE RIOTS OF 1934

Auto workers who are hoping for Obama’s new deal to represent them and other workers might look to what happened to textile workers in the South during Roosevelt’s administration of the New Deal.

The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt  and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) appeared to change things. The NIRA, which Roosevelt signed in June 1933,  called for cooperation among business, labor and government and established the National Recovery Administration.  It was to oversee the creation of codes of conduct for particular industries that would reduce overproduction, raise wages, control hours of work, guarantee the rights of workers to form unions, and stimulate an economic recovery.

The NIRA rarely, if ever, lived up to its promises: employers usually dominated the panels that created these codes, which often offered far less than what workers and their unions demanded, and the NIRA and the codes themselves were toothless, since the Act did not provide any effective means to enforce the standards.

The textile workers’ strike of 1934 was the largest strike  in United States history at the time, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the  U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days. The strike’s ultimate failure and the union’s defeat left the Southeastern United States an unorganized and anti-union region for the next 50 years.

The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by the scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike.

Governor Blackwood of South Carolina took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state’s “mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen” to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Governor Ehringhaus of North Carolina followed suit on September 5th.

Millowners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately: in Trion, Georgia, a picketer and mill guard died in a shootout and guards killed two picketers in Augusta Georgia on September 2.  Six picketers were shot to death and more than twenty other picketers wounded, most shot in the back as they were fleeing the picketline, in Honea Path, South Carolina on September 6.

Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs. Employers resisted integrating textile mills; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement.

SOURCE:  WIKI

It is beginning to look like nothing short of a revolution will break the hold of the rich over the poor in our supposedly democratic society.

Proclaim the Queen!

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