• zd9@lemmy.world
    97·
    10 days ago

    It’s a shame they don’t teach in school just how hard unions and the workers of America had to fight to get the rights we think of as default today.

    They went to literal war with their companies and the government multiple times. Look up the Coal Wars, look up the Haymarket affair, look up Matewan, look up Lucy Parsons. We have a long history of worker’s rights, but since WW2 the ruling capitalists learned not to give the working class too many ideas to get too uppity.

    We are well overdue for this kind of activity again.

      • Denvil@lemmy.ml
        13·
        10 days ago

        They taught it in mine too, although I feel it should have gotten more coverage instead of learning about WW2 every single year…

      • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
        9·
        10 days ago

        Sometimes I think a lot of people just aren’t paying attention in class.

        Or…in a country as big as the US there are many differing levels of education depending on where the school is located and how rich the zip code is.

        Some people may have been taught this and others weren’t.

      • zd9@lemmy.world
        6·
        10 days ago

        I was in AP US History so yes we talked about Pinkerton battles and all that, but it really falls on deaf ears for high schoolers. Once you become an adult and participate in the workforce, we should have to learn it again. America needs to celebrate its socialist and worker’s rights cultures, but it doesn’t by design.

      • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        I wasn’t taught past WWII in public high school.

        This was for an AP US History class, so the teacher was teaching to the test… And of course, whoever controls the test controls what’s taught.

    • criticon@lemmy.ca
      13·
      10 days ago

      I find it “funny” that most of the world celebrates labor/workers day on May 1st to commemorate the Chicago protest to fight for 8-hour shifts and workers rights but in the US they don’t even talk about it.

      Labor Day in the US was chosen kinda arbitrarily to fall between independence Day and Thanksgiving Day

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        9 days ago

        The history of that is pretty straightforward:

        • In 1886, the Chicago labour unions organized for protests on May 1 to demand an 8 hour day
        • On May 3rd strikers tried to confront strike breakers, police fired into the crowd of strikers, killing some
        • An anti-police, anti-big-business rally was organized for the next day in Haymarket Square
        • The May 4th rally was mostly peaceful, but there were police standing by
        • At 10:30 the police moved in en masse to break up the rally
        • As the police advanced, someone (it was never determined who) threw a homemade bomb into the path of the advancing police, killing 1 and injuring many
        • There was a huge gun fight, involving some protesters and a lot of police, many more people were killed, including police, many shot by their own fellow cops
        • The bomb throwing was blamed on the anarchists, the anarchist leaders were rounded up, found guilty in quick and massively unfair show-trials, and hanged
        • There was massive backlash against the unions and the anarchists, and the cause of the 8 hour work day was massively set back
        • Labour unions kept fighting for an 8 hour day, and decided to keep the May 1st date for their actions, with the first being 4 years later on May 1, 1890, but this time it was international, with strikes in Europe, Central and South America
        • As a movement representing workers, communist parties around the world adopted May Day as a significant day
        • After WWII, the US was in full-on anti-communist mode, and May Day came to be seen as a communist holiday, so they moved it to September 1st and made May 1st “Loyalty Day” instead.

        Edited to add: the only really confusing part about the whole thing is the names. One of the main guys involved was named “Spies”, and another peripheral figure was named “Most”. That makes it really confusing when you get phrases like “Most thought hat…” or “Spies believed…”

      • zd9@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 days ago

        Does China celebrate or even acknowledge the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Same thing

    • Typhoon@lemmy.ca
      7·
      10 days ago

      I hear so many excuses from Americans about how they can’t protest their Nazi regime because they have bills to pay and it’s hard and the government has guns and how it won’t change anything anyway.

      They have no idea how hard all of these people fought to give them the things they have today. They faced all the same problems and they succeeded.

      • zd9@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 days ago

        Yeah I agree mostly, but also it is actually a different time in many ways. The same problem and solution are still there and the American public should do more, but there are some significant differences.

    • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
      6·
      10 days ago

      That is completely by design. If kids were taught what actually drives change then…

      No the kids are given distractions and fed propaganda and brain rot.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      2·
      10 days ago

      Uh, wait, we didn’t have much of those fights here but have better worker protections than all of America. How did this happen in central europe? Did we just at some point agree, it would be good? Or is it a swap-over from US?

  • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    10 days ago

    We got weekends because of collective action, Unions are an example of collective action (when formed and utilized correctly).

  • doingthestuff@lemy.lolEnglish
    61·
    10 days ago

    I’ve been working weekends for forty years, and I’ve never worked less than six days a week.

  • Keilik@lemmy.world
    57·
    10 days ago

    We originally got weekends off because Henry ford realized you needed time to go spend the money you were getting from your job and you couldn’t spend money while you were working.

    • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
      81·
      10 days ago

      What is up with all these complete shit takes in this thread, like the one above?

      • Keilik@lemmy.world
        41·
        10 days ago

        I’m not glorifying ford and I’m pro union. This is actually pretty much why happened, just the same as ford realizing if he paid his workers enough to afford his products he could sell more of them.

        Unions are there to help business owners remember that people need money to buy things and time to relax and enjoy life, and that the alternative to that is violence.

        Something that seems to have been forgotten by most business leaders today.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      10 days ago

      There’s some truth to that. Unions got us the 8 hour work day, after decades of strikes made bloody by companies and cops. Unions were also working on establishing a “weekend”, for decades, and only making slow, incremental progress.

      When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was able to make cars more efficiently and quickly. But, it was backbreaking work. Many of Ford’s workers quit after only a few months. Because training new workers was inefficient, Ford decided it was in his company’s best interest to offer the workers more pay and more time off. Workers liked that deal, so his turnover rate dropped and his factories ran more efficiently.

      Eventually he settled on a 40 hour work week with 2 weekend days. He claimed it was for a more noble purpose, of giving workers more money and time off so they could spend more money on everything, including his cars. Maybe it was just a purely selfish calculation though, that to run his factories as efficiently as possible he needed to make the conditions and compensation such that people would stick around and not force him to train up new workers so often.

  • abbotsbury@lemmy.worldEnglish
    821·
    10 days ago

    what an extremely lazy comic, “weekends good, unions good” and reusing the same panel 4 times. Couldn’t even contrive a scenario to share your opinion with a setup and punchline. And if you really want to get nitpicky, it’s not even correct because blue says “thank god it’s the weekend,” not “thank god for weekends.”

    • essell@lemmy.world
      61·
      10 days ago

      Neither really. It was that guy who wrote the Scriptures, likely based on the cultural values of the time.

    • FreddiesLantern@leminal.space
      21·
      10 days ago

      I dunno, I wouldn’t put too much value in what a god says who:

      Aborted the entirety of humanity so he could start over because he was disappointed in his own handy work. And then needed a rainbow to remind himself not to do it again.

      Bets wagers on his own people to test their loyalty, and torture them to unimaginable lengths in the process.

      Somehow is always on the side of the tribe that managed to kill the other tribe after the facts.

      Creates hell and then somehow manages to forfeit ownership of his own creations based on whimsical matters, sending said creations to an endless loop of peaking torture and agony.

      And that’s just the one from the bible…

      Unions on the other hand: ” hey let’s make your time on earth a little bit more bearable.”

      If you reaaaaally wanna stick to the patriarchy side of old and whatnot… I’d welcome the unions with open arms.

      Because if you piss off the people long and hard enough… honhonhon mon ami!