CSotD: You have nothing to lose but $2.13 an hour
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Serbian cartoonist Predrag Srbljanin marks May 1 with a reminder that it has been a full century since the Russian revolution freed the workers and that the march towards the Workers' Paradise hasn't exactly set any speed records.
My initial, five-in-the-morning reaction was that I hadn't remembered it was the centennary of International Workers' Day, but a little more coffee and I remembered that it wasn't, that the day stretched back nearly 30 years before the uprising in Russia to the Haymarket Massacre.
That earlier event didn't overthrow a monarchy and create an empire that would dominate the next 70 years or so, but it has some interesting touchstones to the modern era and our own situation.
Regardless of who started what, labor and capital were in a struggle that was more than billy clubs and tear gas, and protesters were being brutalized and shot down in mining camps and in city streets, while anarchists responded with bombings and with violence of their own.
That above-linked Wikipedia piece notes that the gathering at Haymarket Square was to protest the shooting by police of protesters and that the intial flyers (left) were recalled and reprinted (right) when the featured speaker objected to a line calling for attendees to arm themselves.
The question of who had the right to do what and with which and to whom is not nearly as important as noting that nobody was kidding around, but also that excess then, as now, bred propaganda for both sides.
Such that a bombing then by a foreign-born anarchist not only stiffened opinion against unionists but against all foreigners, just as, today, a small group of anti-fascists using violence (or threats of same) to shut down appearances by rightwing bigots provide grist for those who wish to portray all college students as holding those extremist views.
It ain't necessarily so, and Nellie Bly went out to cover the Pullman Strike convinced that these ingrates were being disloyal to the man who had built a model city for them to live in.
She found, instead, good decent people being cheated by wages that went down and rents that didn't.
This difference between public impressions and the person behind the headlines surfaced in another Bly interview, this one with Emma Goldman, and it's worth pointing out that, as an adult, sweet little Helen Keller had long since dried the wawa from her hands and become a Wobbly and there were many social workers — "community organizers," one might say — like Josephine Shaw Lowell working in the vineyard with neither gun nor bomb.
Point being that there came a moment in history when the injustices of common folks were able to break through the narrative, a time when Jacob Riis could shake people up with "How the Other Half Lives" because they genuinely hadn't known how the other half lived.
I'm not sure what people know today, but simply given the number of people who are flipping burgers instead of welding auto bodies, you'd think the empty promises and false friendship emanating from high places would be more obviously hollow, which leads us to our …
Juxtaposition of the Day:
Markstein nails the class issues at hand, but, while I can't say I'm okay with that, I guess either I accept that to the victors belong the spoils or at least that, however foolishly I think they chose, the voters wanted the bosses to run everything.
However, I am outraged that, as hinted in Breen's commentary, they don't have the decency to at least find a fig leaf or two, a gentle lie to cover the way they have taken support away from the working poor, or refused it in the first place, because they insisted on containing the deficit, but are happy to shovel money into their own pockets without explaining how they plan to pay for it.
However it came about, I think another Cartoon Movement contributor — Russian cartoonist Andrey Klimov – has the right current view of International Workers' Day: Not even a snail's pace march to better times, but merely a rest break in a thankless, eternal task.
In the US, we've never celebrated May 1 as a worker's holiday, but we used to down tools and relax on Labor Day. Today, fewer and fewer companies actually shut down for that, though, in fairness, many of them don't shut down for Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other holidays anymore.
It's not just that they exploit workers on Labor Day. They exploit them every day, and you can't get any more fair than that.
As Scott Stantis — cartooning from the hometown of Haymarket Square — notes in Prickly City, it's been a while since the workers of the world united anyway.
And Lalo Alcaraz suggests that the burden seems to be more on those at the lowest rung of the ladder these days, and I would add that even Clark Kent might find it hard to get a job at the Daily Planet without being able to verify where he came from.
I'm getting a little tired of long-form "explainer" cartoons that don't explain anything you couldn't find yourself in five minutes of Googling, but Sam Wallman's piece on the minimum wage in particular and labor/management issues in general at the Nib is more of a well-informed rant and very much worth your time.
Not only does he explain where we stand, but he adds some pretty solid analysis, not only of the greed at the top but of the crabs-in-a-bucket issues among workers themselves.
There were always blacklegs to work the mines while the union struck in the bad old days, but, today, he notes, besides the economically desperate who can be openly exploited, there are companies that base their entire business plan on, for instance, hipsters who can afford nice cars willingly undercutting the wages and benefits that put licensed cabbies out of work.
Now here's your moment of last-century zen
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