Sasha
20th April 2009, 18:25
liberal articel on union strugle in seattle:
The State of Our Unions
A Look at Seattle's Deep, Bloody Labor History—and Its Uncertain Future
by Eli Sanders (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=12168)
The saying around Everett in 1916 was that you could tell shingle weavers by their missing fingers, lost regularly to the unguarded saws of the town's mills. You might also have been able to tell them by their "cedar asthma," contracted from the dust that blew upward from those same saws and into countless lungs, some of which stopped working as a result.
The shingle weavers were on strike that year, a consequence of both their difficult situation and a larger boom in organizing in the state's early industries. Though they had mixed feelings about it, they were supported by the Industrial Workers of the World—known commonly as the Wobblies, committed to overthrowing the employing class—who had taken up the shingle weavers' cause in part as a means of promoting their own, more radical agenda. Throughout the summer and fall, teams of Wobblies came to Everett to engage in free-speech demonstrations and were arrested and beaten by the local police—once with clubs and whips. By November, incensed at the rough treatment of their union brothers, some 300 Wobblies decided to board boats in Seattle and head for Everett. They are said to have sung a battle cry called "Hold the Fort" along the way: "We meet today in freedom's cause and raise our voices high/We'll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die/Hold the fort, for we are coming, union us be strong/Side by side we'll battle onward, victory will come."
The Verona, the first boat of Wobblies to arrive, was met at the Everett waterfront by the Snohomish County sheriff and a couple hundred deputized citizens. "Who is your leader?" the sheriff shouted, according to historical accounts. "We are all leaders!" the Wobblies shouted back. Someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire. When it was all over, two sheriff's deputies and at least five Wobblies—the official number, though the actual number might have been as high as a dozen—were dead. Several union bodies floated in Port Gardner Bay, other union bodies (74 of them) were taken to jail, and the Everett Massacre, as it was called, entered into state union lore, alongside numerous other clashes and strikes and organizing drives that make up Washington State's deep union history.
It's a history that includes just about every single line of bodily labor that our region has ever seen: the cigar makers, the brewers, the maltsters, the newsboys, the cooks, the barbers, the waiters, the waitresses, the meatpackers, the X-ray technicians, the nurses, the truck drivers, the airplane makers. That history has grown increasingly remote, though. In recent decades, the businesses that defined the new Seattle economy—Starbucks, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, Microsoft, the biotech companies of South Lake Union, the Google branches in Fremont and Kirkland—have been able to grow huge sums of money out of the labor of nonunionized workforces. In addition to non-union-produced lattes and non-union-produced web browsers, a major product of this new Seattle is an increased number of citizens who have only an abstract awareness that this is, or used to be, a union town.
read the rest @
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-state-of-four-unions/Content?oid=1393334
The State of Our Unions
A Look at Seattle's Deep, Bloody Labor History—and Its Uncertain Future
by Eli Sanders (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=12168)
The saying around Everett in 1916 was that you could tell shingle weavers by their missing fingers, lost regularly to the unguarded saws of the town's mills. You might also have been able to tell them by their "cedar asthma," contracted from the dust that blew upward from those same saws and into countless lungs, some of which stopped working as a result.
The shingle weavers were on strike that year, a consequence of both their difficult situation and a larger boom in organizing in the state's early industries. Though they had mixed feelings about it, they were supported by the Industrial Workers of the World—known commonly as the Wobblies, committed to overthrowing the employing class—who had taken up the shingle weavers' cause in part as a means of promoting their own, more radical agenda. Throughout the summer and fall, teams of Wobblies came to Everett to engage in free-speech demonstrations and were arrested and beaten by the local police—once with clubs and whips. By November, incensed at the rough treatment of their union brothers, some 300 Wobblies decided to board boats in Seattle and head for Everett. They are said to have sung a battle cry called "Hold the Fort" along the way: "We meet today in freedom's cause and raise our voices high/We'll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die/Hold the fort, for we are coming, union us be strong/Side by side we'll battle onward, victory will come."
The Verona, the first boat of Wobblies to arrive, was met at the Everett waterfront by the Snohomish County sheriff and a couple hundred deputized citizens. "Who is your leader?" the sheriff shouted, according to historical accounts. "We are all leaders!" the Wobblies shouted back. Someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire. When it was all over, two sheriff's deputies and at least five Wobblies—the official number, though the actual number might have been as high as a dozen—were dead. Several union bodies floated in Port Gardner Bay, other union bodies (74 of them) were taken to jail, and the Everett Massacre, as it was called, entered into state union lore, alongside numerous other clashes and strikes and organizing drives that make up Washington State's deep union history.
It's a history that includes just about every single line of bodily labor that our region has ever seen: the cigar makers, the brewers, the maltsters, the newsboys, the cooks, the barbers, the waiters, the waitresses, the meatpackers, the X-ray technicians, the nurses, the truck drivers, the airplane makers. That history has grown increasingly remote, though. In recent decades, the businesses that defined the new Seattle economy—Starbucks, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, Microsoft, the biotech companies of South Lake Union, the Google branches in Fremont and Kirkland—have been able to grow huge sums of money out of the labor of nonunionized workforces. In addition to non-union-produced lattes and non-union-produced web browsers, a major product of this new Seattle is an increased number of citizens who have only an abstract awareness that this is, or used to be, a union town.
read the rest @
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-state-of-four-unions/Content?oid=1393334