Today in Labor History—July 20

Robert Kett under the Oak of Reformation

July 20, 1549 – Kett's Rebellion against the enclosures began with the insurgents' refusal to disperse on this date, though they began destroying enclosures in Morley St. Botolph on July 6. The went on to attack the estate of John Flowerdew, who tried to divert the mob by bribing them to attack the estate of Robert Kett, instead. His plan backfired when Kett joined the rebels and helped them to tear down his own fences. Their 3500 strong peoples' army captured Norwich, tried landowners en masse and established a Commonwealth on Mousehold Heath. The movement gained strength, with the army growing to 16,000. It was eventually quashed and Kett refused the King's pardon, arguing: "Kings are wont to pardon wicked persons, not innocent men. We have done nothing to deserve such a pardon. We have been guilty of no crime." Kett was eventually tortured and hanged slowly over several days. (From the Daily Bleed and Wikipedia)

Maryland National Guard Sixth Regiment fighting its way through Baltimore, Maryland, 20 July 1877

 July 20 1877 – In the midst of the Great Strike, Maryland state militia fired on striking railroad workers in Baltimore, killing 50. (From the Daily Bleed)

Minneapolis Teamsters Fighting Police, 1934

 July 20, 1934 - Police shot at picketing strikers during the Minneapolis Teamsters strike without provocation, killing two and wounding 67 more, what would become known as Bloody Friday. (From Workday Minnesota and the Daily Bleed)

July 20, 1955 – The UAW (United Auto Workers) was indicted for illegal political contributions (not to be confused with the millions in legal contributions they have recently made, thus ensuring a government bailout that kept their bosses afloat, but resulted in lost jobs and lower wages for workers). (From the Daily Bleed)

July 20, 1971 – The first labor contract in the history of the federal government was signed by postal unions and the Postal Service through the collective bargaining process. (From the Daily Bleed)

Robert Reich, Scabbing On Arianna’s Plantation

The Huffington Post has now surpassed the New York Times in online readership, Working in These Times reported today, and their newsroom is now bigger, too, with 1,300 staff members, compared with the Times’ 1,200. However, the Times still pays their unionized writers (at least the “professional” ones), while the Post relies on volunteer bloggers for the bulk of its reporting.

In response, the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union have called on bloggers to refuse to write for the Huffington Post and for an electronic picket of the website. The unions are demanding a pay schedule be established for the compensation of all bloggers and that they be given greater editorial control over their work.

Not everyone has respected the picket, including Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner, Robert Creamer of Americans United for Change, and bloggers at the labor-funded Campaign for America’s Future, according to Working in These Times. Reich has argued that he is a proponent of the Creative Commons and gives his work freely to all. Yet he copyrights his books and makes a great deal of money from them. Furthermore, he is independently wealthy and does not depend on his blog posts for his survival.

The point of the Creative Commons, like all commons, is to maintain a resource that the masses can share and use for free, (since the ruling class controls and makes us pay for virtually everything else), not to give the ruling class freebies to sell back to us. Huffington Post produces big bucks for Arianna Huffington, who essentially runs a digital plantation, exploiting the free labor of 8,000 journalists who have “voluntarily” become actual slaves in hopes of branding themselves for a better future of wage slavery.

Of course this behavior is not really voluntary. With most print media downsizing in response to declining readers, there is a growing pool of unemployed and marginally employed writers competing for a dwindling number of paying gigs. For those unable to secure a job, it makes sense to write for free for a while in order to build a following that can be leveraged when applying for future writing jobs, or at least it might make sense if they were writing for a medium that didn’t bring in revenues.

On the other hand, it makes no sense at all to place oneself in competition with one’s natural class allies. It is this competitiveness that leads to the illogical behavior of voluntary slavery. In contrast, workers who act in concert have a much greater chance of influencing the conditions of their work in a mutually beneficial way, like forcing the boss to pay them. A strike in this case ought to be easy to win considering how little the strikers risk. Unlike chattel slavery, where rebellions were suppressed with deadly force, or work stoppages, where workers lose their wages, a strike on the Huffington plantation simply means that writers who weren’t getting paid anyway can choose to not get paid by someone else for a while. If the strike is disciplined and all writers participate, including Reich and his scab cronies, Huffington will have nothing to post and will eventually have to offer her writers something in order to stay in business.