Fred Mooney approaches his fellow miners in secret….

In case you don’t know, this is not how it went.

At the turn of the twentieth century miners, their families and other workers risked not only their livelihoods, but their lives to eliminate the guard system, gain the right to be paid in cash, shop and live where they chose, to see the scales that measured their labor–and for those scales to actually exist.  

Our labor and housing laws, including the basic protection of your home and belongings from nighttime raids, seizure and eviction by your employer, workers comp, safety regulations, a 40 hour work week, the right to be paid in actual money, and even the right to cast your own vote without it being screened by your employer’s armed guard were secured by their sacrifices. 

What would it have meant for the last 112 years if they had sided with their billionaire ‘job creators’? 

What would your life have been like if they had traded their red bandanas for red hats?

As a child, my grandmother and her family were evicted from their home in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve–along with almost every other family working at the mine.  That was how things worked.  Sustained solidarity and real sacrifice forced change.  We have crossed another tipping point back toward the day of unfettered oligarchal power while much of the working class cheers.  Yet, like our ancestors, many of us will not go meekly back.  We can be better than this.

We’ll be back, but outside it’s 1933 so I am hitting the bar…

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