As we have seen, the IWW used music to express feelingsabout political activism for workers. Throughout history, music and song have been used asa tool not just for political activism but also to convey feelings about work, jobs, the working life, and the balance between work life and home life. Choose a song that you think has something to say about one or more of these issues, analyze it, and compare it to one of the readings/videos from this class.
I have created aSpotify
playlist of songs about work if you would like some inspiration, but feel free to choose your own.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ywskkT6Bdeg6IIDTc8sSs
Your short paper should be approximately one page or 2-3 paragraphs long.
Reading from class is in the file.
The Story So Far I feel as though I've been telling you a story throughout this course, and we're getting to the end of one arc. The first part of the course focused on a very simple idea that most, if not all of us share: that if you work hard, you will find success. The movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" epitomizes this belief. I wanted to explore where that idea comes from, and I hope you realize that it comes from a lot of complicated background, including religious beliefs and the rise of industrial capitalism. The second part of the arc is about the upsides and downsides of the Industrial Revolution. The positives are clear: a booming American economy and the rise of cities. Unfortunately, industrial capitalism came with some downsides. In the rush to make money and find financial success, a lot of people who benefited exploited people who did not. How did that exploitation manifest itself? · In chattel slavery of African Americans · In scientific management practices that sped up work processes to the point that they increased stress on workers and made for dangerous conditions. · In assembly lines that reduced the pleasure of doing good work and instead promoted repetition and mindless unskilled labor. The final part of the arc is about resistance and change. Workers have resisted their managers for a long time, but what we know as strikes became more prominent in American history in the late 1800s. See, there's a problem with bringing workers together to do industrial work: They get to know each other. They depend on each other. They talk to each other. It is inevitable that collection action results. We saw this with the Mill Girls in the 1830s and 1840s. And we saw it in factories, mines, steel mills, construction sites, Pullman cars on trains, and many other workplaces in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was the era of increased unionization. You can look at any newspaper in a big city in the early 1900s and see articles about strikes. In fact, go to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and look at the headlines of this newspaper 100 years ago. You will see several articles just about every week on strikes happening throughout New York City and throughout the country. As noted in the cartoon portion of "Mill Times," workers realized that collectively they had more power than they did as individuals. The first national union was formed in the US in 1866. Several other groups of workers also organized: miners, railroad workers, iron and steel workers, textile workers in the north and the south, and so on. Socialists, influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, came to the United States and organized labor, the most prominent of which was Eugene Debs. Why did workers strike? We generally think of workers as striking for higher wages and benefits, and this is often and has often been the case. But the case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire calls attention to another aspect of collective action/strikes/unions: workplace safety. Workplace safety was a significant motivation for many workers who went on strike. Miners were among the most active workforces to go on strike. Mining is dangerous work, and safety measures are often expensive to the employers. As we saw from Taylor's work on scientific management, the faster the workers work, the more product they produce, and the higher the profits. Another issue on the table was the role of the government. Imagine the process of labor relations as a power struggle. One worker vs one owner is not a fair fight; the owner has the power over one worker. But several/all workers have power, and their power can provide them with enough power to negotiate with the owner. What happened is that rather than working within this balance of power, the owners called upon the government to step in and shift the power back to the owners. The government didn't just use laws and courts; they provided muscle from law enforcement. Police were called in to bust up strikes and make sure workers went back to work. Interestingly, this was the case with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Workers in the years before the fire. The Triangle workers, mainly immigrant women, would go on strike, and the police would intervene and beat the protestors. There was an interesting intervention into this dynamic, though. Several women from well-off families (many of whom had progressive views and/or were involved in social work in impoverished communities were immigrant workers lived) supported the striking workers. Many of them marched alongside the workers. The police became less willing to beat up the striking workers out of concern that they might beat up the wrong women! This is yet another object lesson in the benefits of collective action and alliances among different groups of people. The Triangle workers were interested in better wages and reduced working hours, but they were also concerned about safety and made their feelings known. But on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, when there was a fire on the 8th floor of the Asch Building in NYC, the location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, no safety measures were in place. In fact, doors were locked, stairwells were blocked, and there was no way to extinguish the flames. When the fire department arrived, they found that their ladders reached only as high as the 6th floor and couldn't reach the workers who were trying to escape. Every year, on the anniversary of the fire, the NYC Fire Department brings a ladder that reaches only to the 6th floor to commemorate the sad anniversary and call attention to the poor working conditions that once existed.