The deliberate destruction of workers rights in the modern era

 By Glen Wallace

There was a famous labor conflict back in the 1800's between the workers of a steel mill and Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the mill.  The striking workers actually locked the gates to the plant preventing any scabs or management from entering the plant to keep it running.  Back then, no state or federal agency would come to the rescue of the ownership, sending in the national guard like they would today.  Instead the owner had to fend for himself.  In the case of this particular strike, Carnegie hired a gang of Pinkerton thugs to break up the strikers and get the gates open to clear the way for the scab replacement workers to come in and get the plant running again.  Now, while all this was going on Carnegie, not wanting to soil his delicate bourgeoisie 'civilized' hands with the mess, had left his henchman Andrew Frick to organize and direct all the dirty work, while Carnegie was off in Europe on a hunting trip.  Unfortunately the striking steelworkers were no match for the Pinkerton professional brutes.  That was fortunate for Carnegie because for him to both hire new scabs and the Pinkertons' was an extremely expensive endeavor that he could not have possibly sustained financially for very long even for a man as wealthy as himself.  Now looking back at those events of that strike I have to wonder if maybe the striking steel workers might have been successful had they employed a different strategy from what they employed of directly taking on the Pinkertons' when challenged.  Had I been there in that place in time I would have advised the strikers to retreat as soon as the Pinkertons arrived and allow them to open the mill for the replacement workers to come in and start the plant up again.   Then as soon as it appeared that Carnegie and the Pinkertons had succeeded and thus left, the strikers would come back to shut down the plant again.  Of course Carnegie and Frick could have just turned around and hired the thugs to come back, but that would have resulted in another big bill that Carnegie would have had to have eaten.  I suggest that it would have been much easier for the striking workers to maintain such a 'stick and move' pattern that would have slowly undermined Carnegie to the point were he would have been forced to capitulate and meet the strikers demands.  I find it remarkable that the strikers back then were allowed to do as much as they did without government intervention as would happen today under similar circumstances.  Today if a union tried anything similar, the National Guard would surely come out to break up the plant shut down.  What should be clear from this is that the government has taken on the very same role that the Pinkertons took on during the steel mill site.  The state, local and federal government has clearly become the protectors and advocates for the plutocrats at the expense of the proletarians interests.  I like to think that I'm pretty clever to think up such a strategy that I believe would have been successful in such a historically famous event where a different strategy had failed.   But here and now in the present day as I type this I try to think up strategies that might help advance the interests of today's prol's and 'I got nothing.'  And I don't think it's that I had just a 'one hit wonder' strategy, it is that the doors of opportunity for common man to, in general, advance,  have been strategically slammed shut by the plutocrats so that every possible move has already been thought up by them and has been blocked off to the proletariats.

The mysterious disappearance (censorship?) of Roger Swardson's book from Amazon

by Glen Wallace

Update: I recently discovered a listing for his book on the British Amazon website  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Out-America-Roger-Swardson/dp/0465017002, so why not on the US website?

I've recently discovered that Roger Swardson's book 'Down and Out in America' has disappeared from any listing on Amazon's website.  It has just disappeared even though for a long time I remember that the book could still be found at least as an entry on the site even though the book has been out of print for a long time and no used copies were available.  I have to wonder if this omission by a mega corporation of a book that is so supportive of labor rights and does such a good job of highlighting the plight of the underclass in a very entertaining manner is accidental or deliberate.  I thought that Amazon would continue to list an entry for even the most obscure work that is out of print and without any available used copies.   It seems like an awfully big coincidence that a book like Swardson's stops being listed from a corporate site like Amazon. Here is a book that could be considered critical of the sort of general labor practices of low pay for workers that a corporation like Amazon has become dependent on for its product shipping distribution networks to maintain its already low profit margins that has allowed it to continue its dominance in online retail.   Any resurgence in the labor movement in this country I imagine could easily first hit Amazon, given that much of the shipping work, due to its nature, could not be outsourced and therefore give leverage to the workers in Amazons shipping warehouses to demand better pay and working conditions.  And even though his book was never a big seller, I think that his writing style could, given the chance, popularize a new labor movement. And therefore, I wonder if someone at Amazon saw that and decided to nip any chance of such a labor resurgence from happening in the bud by making Swardson's book disappear from Amazon's database.