Today in Labor History April 26, 1862: Congress passed the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862. They also called it, "An Act to Protect Free White Labor.” The law was one of a series of xenophobic laws enacted specifically to block the immigration of Chinese to the U.S., particularly to California. Laws like this encouraged anti-Asian violence like the Los Angeles anti-Chinese riot of 1871, the San Francisco anti-Chinese riot of 1877, the Denver Chinatown riot of 1880, the Eureka Chinese expulsion of 1885, the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, the Tacoma pogrom of 1885, and the Seattle anti-Chinese riots of 1886.

You can read my full article America’s Long Sordid History of Anti-Asian Violence: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/03/21/americas-long-sordid-history-of-anti-asian-violence/

Today in Labor History April 26, 1924: The U.S. House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution No. 184. It was a constitutional amendment to prohibit the labor of persons under 18 years of age. The Senate approved the measure a few weeks later, but it was never ratified by the states and is still technically pending. Even so, the act included many exclusions, like in agriculture. From 2015 to 2022, the number of kids working in violation of child labor laws rose by 283%. And, as you all probably already have heard, many Republican leaders are weakening child labor laws to make it even easier, and legal, to exploit kids in dangerous, low-paid jobs.

https://usafacts.org/articles/is-child-labor-increasing-in-us/

Today in Labor History April 26, 1937: The Nazis and Italian fascists bombed Guernica, a town in the Basque region of Spain, at the request of Spanish fascist leader, Francisco Franco. Later that year, Picasso painted his famous painting, Guernica, in protest of the atrocity. This was during the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans, a coalition of anarchist, socialist and communist partisans, were fighting the Nationalists, led by Franco. They bombed Guernica for two hours, killing between 1,000 and 3,000 civilians, or 20-60% of the population.

Today in Labor History April 26, 1966: Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales started the Chicano activist group Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado. Gonzales was a poet, activist and boxer.

Today in Labor History April 26, 2004: Author Hubert Selby died. He wrote “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “Requiem for a Dream.” His first novel, “The Queen is Dead,” was banned in Italy and prosecuted for #obscenity in the U.K. Allan Ginsberg thought that Last Exit would “explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” Selby dropped out of high school to work on the docks of Brooklyn, before becoming a merchant seaman in 1947. However, he caught tuberculosis from the cows on board the ship. He was in and out of hospitals for the next three years. Doctors told him he was going to die. But several surgeries and experimental drugs saved his life. Too sick to do physical labor, he tried writing to earn a living.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #HubertSelbey #literature #books #author #fiction #writer #obscenity #allanginsberg #LastExitToBrooklyn @bookstadon

Today in Labor History April 26, 1649: The English authorities sentenced Robert Lockier to be shot for leading a mutiny. Cromwell’s New Model Army had just defeated Charles I in the English Civil War. However, the Army failed to negotiate a settlement with the King. And when Charles I double-crossed them, they executed him. A conflict arose between the monarchists, who wanted another king, and Cromwell, who wanted a plutocratic Parliament. Then there were the Levellers, who wanted a democracy in which every male head of household had a vote, regardless of whether he owned property. And the Diggers (AKA the True Levellers), who wanted universal suffrage AND common ownership of the land. Lockier was a Leveller and a member the New Model Army. On April 24, he and some other soldiers barricaded themselves in a Leveller meeting place in London. They demanded to paid their overdue wages. Cromwell ended the mutiny after a few days and arrested Lockier as the ringleader.

The Diggers originally called themselves the True Levellers, to distinguish themselves from the more moderate Levellers. However, in April, 1649, they began pulling down enclosures (common lands usurped by the landlords) on St. George’s Hill. And when they started planting the land in common, for the benefit of all peasants, people started calling them Diggers. Needless to say, the local landlords were peeved. They asked the New Model Army to come in and remove the Diggers. However, their commander told the landlords to use the courts. So, the landlords organized gangs to beat and burn out the Diggers. Ultimately, the court ruled that the Army could evict the Diggers if they did not leave. So, they left. But they started new commons in neighboring regions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn31l2idKTA

That's all we've ever been allowed to teach. And the repression started well before Trump was elected.

Good luck teaching anything even remotely supportive of the Arab or Muslim experience. Forget anything that even mentions the word Palestine. And that's in the "liberal" San Francisco Bay Area.

There are already other places in the U.S., like Florida, where you can be fired simply for saying the word "Gay."

And who remembers hearing anything in school about Marx, socialism, anarchism, that wasn't completely negative? Anything about MLK's support of labor unions and opposition to the Vietnam War? General Strikes? The Tulsa pogrom? The Battle of Blair Mountain or the Great Train Strike of 1877 (the 2 largest insurrections and 2 largest labor uprisings in the U.S. since the Civil War)???

Dozens of books banned from school libraries and from the curriculum.

Today in Labor History April 25, 1960, the Korean army refused to shoot at professors, who had taken to the streets to protest the dictatorship, and its massacre of 130 students several days earlier. The April Revolution lasted from April 11-26. Overall, 186 civilians were killed and the government, which regained control, transitioned to the Second Republic.

Today in Labor History April 25, 1886: The New York Times called the eight-hour workday movement "un-American" and blamed the "labor disturbances” on “foreigners." Other media prophesied that the eight-hour day would cause "loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery and drunkenness."

Today in Labor History April 25, 1993: Over one million people marched in Washington, D.C., for gay, lesbian, bisexual, & transgender rights. This was in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discrimination within the military and Colorado’s constitutional amendment invalidating laws that protect LGBTQ rights. The marchers had seven basic demands. The 1st demand was a civil rights bill and ending all discrimination by state and federal governments, including the repeal of all sodomy laws. They also demanded more funding for AIDS research and treatment; an end to discrimination in adoption and child custody; full inclusion of all LGBTQ people in the education system; and an end to all discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people. However, in their platform, they also demanded these same rights and protections for ALL people, especially people of color, people with disabilities, women, nonbinary and trans people, and working class and poor people.

Today in Labor History April 24, 1915: The Turkish government arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. This marked the beginning of the Armenian genocide. The Ottomans slaughtered one million Armenians during World War I, or 90% of the Armenian population. The genocide also destroyed two thousand year’s-worth of Armenian civilization in Asian Minor.

Today in Labor History April 24, 1916: The Easter rising began in Dublin. Irish rebels, led by James Connolly and Patrick Pearce, attempted to end British rule and create an independent Ireland. The armed uprising lasted six days. Men and women participated. 485 people died in the fighting, including 143 British soldiers and cops. The rest were mostly Irish civilians. The British ultimately prevailed. They took 3,500 prisoners and sent 1,800 to internment camps. They also executed sixteen of the Rising’s leaders, sparking outrage among the Irish public.

James Connolly was an Irish republican, socialist and union leader. Prior to the Easter Rising, he lived in Scotland and participated in Scottish socialist organizations. After that, he emigrated to the U.S., where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founded the Irish Socialist Federation in New York. In Ireland, he was a leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and participated in the Dublin lock-out, one of the largest and most severe labor disputes in Irish history.

Today in Labor History April 24, 1954: Mumia Abu Jamal, death row activist, journalist and former Black Panther, was born on this date. Mumia is currently in prison on trumped-up charges of killing a cop. He is also extremely ill with congestive heart failure, diabetes, and a number of other maladies.

Today in Labor History April 24, 1999: The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union shut down all West Coast shipping in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was wrongfully imprisoned and held on death row for the murder of a cop—a crime he did not commit.

Today in Labor History April 24, 2013: An eight-story garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. The disaster killed 1,129 workers and injured 2,515. A day earlier, someone noticed cracks in the structure. However, factory officials, who had contracts with Benneton and other major U.S. labels, insisted the workers return to the job.

One of the first things Hitler did, 3 mos into his regime (5/2/1933), was to abolish all independent unions. Labor union headquarters and records were seized. Their leaders attacked, beaten, murdered, imprisoned. Collective bargaining, and the right to strike, were abolished.

All sounding very similar to Project 2025, and the early attacks and deportations of workers and union members, like Abrego Garcia.

Malicious Compliance & Work to Rule: 2 easy & legal forms of sabotage to fuck with the boss:

The Durango Worker writes: "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of intentionally inflicting harm by strictly following the orders of a superior while knowing or intending that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. The term usually implies the following of an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent but follows it to the letter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance

"Work-to-rule is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract, and precisely follow all safety or other regulations, which may cause a slowdown or decrease in productivity, as they are no longer working during breaks or during unpaid extended hours and weekends (checking email, for instance). Such an action is considered less disruptive than a strike or lockout, and obeying the rules is less susceptible to disciplinary action. Notable examples have included nurses refusing to answer telephones, teachers refusing to work for free at night and during weekends and holidays, and police officers refusing to issue citations. Refusal to work overtime, travel on duty, or sign up to other tasks requiring employee assent are other manifestations of using work-to-rule as industrial action.

Today in Labor History April 23, 1968: Students took over the administration buildings at Columbia University, in New York, and shut down the university. They were protesting the Vietnam war. Today, students have are being arrested and deported for occupying parts of campus, in protest of the Israeli war on Gaza, and in support of a free Palestine. Last year, they suspended the daughter of Congressional representative Ilhan Omar, who became homeless, as a result. At the time, the ADL and rightwing Trump supporters Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton were calling for the National Guard to be deployed to college campuses. And rightwing Zionist union leader, Randi Weingarten (of the American Federation of Teachers), who shook hands with admirers of the Ukrainian fascist and antisemite Stepan Bandera in Ukraine in 2022, denounced the Columbia protesters as “antisemites.” And recently, Columbia capitulated to most of Trump’s fascistic demands, in hopes of winning back billions of dollars in funding he had withheld from the university. But Trump just kept demanding more, sending the clear message to other universities that it didn’t matter how much they bent over backwards for him, he’d still fuck with them. Consequently, Harvard and over 200 other universities have pledged to resist Trump.

https://truthout.org/articles/over-200-higher-education-institutions-pledge-to-resist-trump-attacks/

Today in Labor History April 23, 1991: Johnny Thunders died, either from a drug overdose or by homicide. Thunders sang and played guitar with the New York Dolls, with the Heartbreakers, and solo. In their early days, the Dolls worked with Malcolm McLaren, who modeled the Sex Pistols after them. Thunders left the Dolls in 1975, blaming Malcolm McLaren for their demise, and then formed the Heartbreakers, with former Television bassist Richard Hell (who later formed the Voidoids and recorded the classic, Blank Generation). I was fortunate enough to see Johnny Thunders perform before solo he died (or misfortunate, depending on your perspective). It was in New York City, at a small club. He announced to us that he was finally clean and then proceeded to fall off his stool several times. https://youtu.be/KJpDXVMxzpc

Today in Labor History April 23, 2019: The Hpakant jade mine collapsed in Myanmar, killing four miners and two rescuers. Hpakant is the largest jade mine on Earth. Jade pickers are often migrants from other parts of the country. They live in dilapidated shacks and work as “freelancers,” scavenging through the tailings for small pieces of jade. On July 2, 2020, a landslide at the mine killed 174 miners. The landslide was the worst mining disaster in the nation’s history. The value of Myanmar’s jade industry is over $30 billion per year.