#National Coal Board

[hazel-of-sodor]

Presenting the Great Western Railway's 57xx pannier tank! Duck has appeared before, but was never quite finished, or given a proper release. Now he is here with 8 of his siblings.

[jlslipakauthorthriller]

Dream a Little Dream

Dunne was the first to theorize the stability of plane, known as the “Dunne Effect”. He also developed the “Dunne Dive”, a maneuver that allowed a plane to dive without losing altitude. This maneuver was later used by the Royal John William Dunne was an aeronautical engineer, inventor, and author. Born in 1875, he began working on his first project at 16. Dunne was a pioneer in aviation,…

[trainmaniac]

Steam Engines and Gravity Power in a 1950s Colliery by Michael Alford

[mariacallous]

lol philadelphia inquirer bodying nyt

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/first-presidential-debate-joe-biden-donald-trump-withdraw-20240629.html

President Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. His disjointed responses and dazed look sparked calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.

But lost in the hand wringing was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.

In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.

Trump, 78, has been on the political stage for eight years marked by chaos, corruption, and incivility. Why go back to that?

To build himself up, Trump constantly tears the country down. There is no shining city on the hill. It’s just mourning in America.

Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly said we are a “failing” country. He called the United States a “third world nation.” He said, “we’re living in hell” and “very close to World War III.”

“People are dying all over the place,” Trump said, later adding “we’re literally an uncivilized country now.”

Trump told more than 30 lies during the debate to go with the more than 30,000 mistruths told during his four years as president. He dodged the CNN moderators’ questions, took no responsibility for his actions, and blamed others, mainly Biden, for everything that is wrong in the world.

Trump’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection he fueled was farcical. He said a “relatively small number of people” went to the Capitol and many were “ushered in by the police.”

After scheming to overturn the 2020 election, Trump refused to say if he would accept the results of the 2024 election. Unless, of course, he wins.

The debate served as a reminder of what another four years of Trump would look like. More lies, grievance, narcissism, and hate. Supporters say they like Trump because he says whatever he thinks. But he mainly spews raw sewage.

Trump attacks the military. He denigrates the Justice Department and judges. He belittles the FBI and the CIA. He picks fights with allies and cozies up to dictators.

Trump is an unserious carnival barker running for the most serious job in the world. During his last term, Trump served himself and not the American people.

Trump spent chunks of time watching TV, tweeting, and hanging out at his country clubs. Over his four-year term, Trump played roughly 261 rounds of golf.

As president, Trump didn’t read the daily intelligence briefs. He continued to use his personal cell phone, allowing Chinese spies to listen to his calls. During one Oval Office meeting, Trump shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador.

Trump’s term did plenty of damage and had few accomplishments. The much-hyped wall didn’t get built. Infrastructure week was a recurring joke. Giant tax cuts made the rich richer, while fueling massive deficits for others to pay for years. His support for coal, oil drilling and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement worsened the growing impact of climate change.

Trump stacked the judiciary with extreme judges consisting mainly of white males, including a number who the American Bar Association rated as not qualified. A record number of cabinet officials were fired or left the office. The West Wing was in constant chaos and infighting.

Many Trump appointees exited under a cloud of corruption, grifting and ethical scandals. Trump’s children made millions off the White House. His dilettante son-in-law got $2 billion from the Saudi government for his fledgling investment firm even though he never managed money before.

Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in tens of thousands of needless deaths. He boasts about stacking the Supreme Court with extreme right-wingers who are stripping away individual rights, upending legal precedents, and making the country less safe. If elected, Trump may add to the court’s conservative majority.

Of course, there were the unprecedented two impeachments. Now, Trump is a convicted felon who is staring at three more criminal indictments. He is running for president to stay out of prison.

If anything, Trump doesn’t deserve to be on the presidential debate stage. Why even give him a platform?

Trump allegedly stole classified information and tried to overturn an election. His plans for a second term are worse than the last one. We cannot be serious about letting such a crooked clown back in the White House.

Yes, Biden had a horrible night. He’s 81 and not as sharp as he used to be. But Biden on his worst day remains lightyears better than Trump on his best.

Biden must show that he is up to the job. This much is clear: He has a substantive record of real accomplishments, fighting the pandemic, combating climate change, investing in infrastructure, and supporting working families and the most vulnerable.

Biden has surrounded himself with experienced people who take public service seriously. He has passed major bipartisan legislation despite a dysfunctional Republican House majority.

Biden believes in the best of America. He has rebuilt relationships with allies around the world and stood up to foes like Russia and China.

There was only one person at the debate who does not deserve to be running for president. The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be.

[wales-official]

Today is the twenty first of October – the day we remember what is known as the Aberfan Disaster. On this day in 1966, due to the incompetence of nine employees of the National Coal Board, 110,000 cubic metres of coal slurry crashed down the side of a mountain through a row of houses and into Pantglas Junior School, killing a total of 28 adults and 116 children. No survivors were pulled from the rubble after 11:00 a.m.

The people of Aberfan were submitted to massive trauma and suffering, and yet the people responsible did not face any consequences whatsoever.

Cofiwch Aberfan.

[myemuisemo]

The fiery bowels of hell are the setting for chapters VIII and IX of The Valley of Fear, in the two most recent Letters from Watson -- or, it's Pennsylvania.

Referring to "this most desolate corner of the United States of America" as of 1875 made me think first of Pittsburgh, but that's not possible, as Pittsburgh's steel industry didn't start until that year. This place in the grimy folds of the Allegheny mountains has been going for a while.

My heart says that the Vermissa Valley is an expy of the Wyoming Valley in the northeastern part of the state, where there is a string of towns from Carbondale at the northern end, through Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, down to Nanticoke. The iron furnaces of Scranton, Grant, and Company had the largest production in the United States in 1865, according to the Anthracite Museum. This is anthracite coal-mining territory, as well: the hardest, blackest, and purest grade of coal.

(Had I known I'd be reading this novel in 2024, I'd have made a point of visiting the Anthracite Museum when I went to Scranton in 2019. I was mostly there for the Steamtown National Historic Site, the massive railroad museum.)

The little single-line railroad could be any of a number of lines, since the Scranton area was the birthplace of railroading and very heavily served. It's possible that the train is a narrow-gauge line, better designed for handling mountains.

Given the meanness and muddiness of the settlement where the twinkling-yet-threatening John McMurdo stops, it's probably not Scranton: that had already passed 35,000 in population by 1875. Wilkes-Barre was a bit above 10,000, which still seems large. Of course, the point of the Wyoming Valley is that there is an almost continuous string of little towns, and we don't know why McMurdo wants any one town more than another.

The presence of a Market Square in chapter IX doesn't indicate much, as that was a common design wherever Connecticut settlers had perched -- which includes Wilkes-Barre, the site of the post-Revolutionary War scuffle between the states of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, known as the Penn-Yan Wars. ("Connecticut sea-to-sea" is also why Ohio has a Western Reserve where the towns look straight out of New England. The Nutmeggers calmed down before getting west of Ohio, though.)

By 1875, the Wyoming Valley was loaded with Germans, Irishmen, and Welshmen, all jostling for mining work that was, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, increasingly ill-paid. It was thus a scene of great industry but not great happiness.

I'm not sure what Doyle has in mind for the shacks with verandas lining the streets, so I'll just share an example of an 1876 "company town" house from New Haven, Connecticut. The big factories build tons and tons of these. At one point in the 1990s, I lived in one (not this one). This sort of house typically has three bedrooms on the second floor, a little bedroom off the dining room on the first floor, and enough space for two bedrooms in the attic. So you could squeeze a boarding house in here.

With the boarding house comes the landlord's beautiful daughter. Poor Ettie! She can't get McMurdo to leave her alone, nor can she shed her other suitor. Did she have friends among the daughters and wives of her neighbors, or is she another rose blooming alone in harsh soil?

The Eminent Order of the Freemen are presumably expies of the Freemasons: I guess if the members are going to be dreadful in an organized way, it's necessary to invent a pound-shop knock-off (though the Mormons certainly didn't get that courtesy in A Study in Scarlet).

We're still in the era when fraternal organizations were vital in giving a man entry into society in a new place. You might know no one -- but if you knew the secret handshake, you were instantly provided with friends and business partners. The Welsh Philanthropic Order of True Ivorites was present in the Wyoming Valley; and of course, Odd Fellows were everywhere. (Throw a stone in an old mining town in the U.S., and you'll hit an Odd Fellows Hall. it'll often be one of the oldest buildings still standing.)

The fact that the Freemen's lodge leader is called the Bodymaster -- I assume this is supposed to sound menacing, but it has the ridiculous feel of something the Clampers would have come up with. Yes, fraternal orders were so popular that there was a parody version formed in the 1850s: E Clampus Vitus. The Clampers faded, with the rest of the fraternal movement, after the 1870s -- only to rise again in the 1930s and establish their mission as preserving local history in the West. So many an historic monument in small-town Caliornia has E Clampus Vitus on its plaque as the sponsor.

Since the Bodymaster is excited about making counterfeit currency, I feel this secret society will not be as fun as the Clampers. Having a side line in murdering people, as the Scowrers, also is not quite a gentleman's work.

I'm presuming McMurdo is Douglas, so he's going to get the girl and not get killed -- but something else will surely go very, very wrong.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sam Delgado at Vox:

It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today.

It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement.

What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama?

Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members.

Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant.

The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant.

[...]

Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going?

The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members.

The UAW is leading a unionization drive at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Hope it wins. #UAWVance #UAW #1u

[beguines]

Concerns over safety were not confined to mineworkers. On May 6, 1949, sixty-​two thousand Ford Rouge workers, for example, wildcatted over speedup and safety issues. On the same date, the continuous miner was introduced at Bethlehem Steel's Carolina-​Idamay captive mine in Marion County, West Virginia. The amount of dust and heat generated by this new machinery was so extreme that it could no longer be controlled by the existing sprinkler systems, and miners saw their health and safety conditions deteriorating. Meanwhile, a number of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions challenged the union. The Taft-​Hartley Act of 1947 mandated that union shops could be achieved only by a workplace vote run by the NLRB. Since the coal miners had refused, however, to sign the anti-communist pledges of Taft-​Hartley, they were not eligible for NLRB elections. The union shop provisions of their contracts were ruled illegal. Then questions were raised about whether the health and welfare royalty payments to the union were legal contractual issues. Companies began to refrain from making their contractual contributions, and the union health care system approached insolvency.

On September 19, 1950, the largest captive mine in West Virginia, Barrackville, and largest commercial mine, Grant Town, voted to strike until companies paid into the health and welfare fund. The rest of West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania miners immediately followed; roving pickets covered the whole region, including many "small unorganized mines." Most scab operators immediately closed their mines when they saw union pickets.

On October 1, 1950, steelworkers also went out on strike, followed shortly by workers at Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. These strikes together almost certainly stalled efforts to repeal the Taft-​Hartley Act, creating an anti-​union public opinion backlash. John L. Lewis then ordered the West Virginia miners back to work, but they refused to comply. Finally, district officials called a meeting on January 19, 1950 to try to get the miners back. Two thousand showed up and chased the international reps from the stage; Lewis's name was booed from the floor. The coal miners again had support from the rest of the labor movement. Autoworkers in Detroit donated money and food. Tommy Thompson, president of UAW Local 600, came to Pursglove, West Virginia, with a food caravan and relief money, pledging the support of the sixty thousand auto workers at his Ford local. The 1950 strike, however, was the last one that Lewis was to lead.

Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s

[discflame]

I'm going to be dictator. when I am I'm banning horse racing. I'm banning the met gala. I'm banning children's beauty pageants. I'm banning pet breeding. I'm banning school boards and putting the federal government in direct control of schools. I'm banning county level government. I'm banning every mid-level elected bureaucracy that has made itself an environmental niche for this nation's least charismatic yet most petty tyrants. I'm banning any job position with the word "manager" or "director". I'm demolishing every ugly ass detached single-family mcmansion and every golf course and every members-only club and replacing them with affordable apartments, parks, and libraries respectively. I'm banning cryptocurrency and currency speculation. I'm banning the trading of corporate stock. I'm banning cars in every metro area across the country and putting all those managers I fired to work in building buses and trains and trollies. I'm taking every passive-income finance bro, giving them a welding torch and a hammer, and making them build passenger rail in between every town with a population over 500. the others I'm establishing direct bus routes to and from. I'm taking control of every single coal, natural gas, and oil plant and converting them to nuclear power. I'm crushing every car larger than a Ford pinto down and recycling the scrap and using it to build bullet trains.

[littlewestern]

ok so re: the previous ask, was there a bit of a culture shock with dieselization happening as fast as it did, and in that vein are diesels who worked with steam locomotives like Pioneer and Pilot sort of a go-to on the subject?

I like this question, but I want to provide a little bit of context for my answer. Another rambling intro, if you'll forgive me.

I think American exposure to the idea of dieselization has been somewhat tainted in the past 40 years due to the way in which it was depicted in Thomas the Tank Engine and other stories like it. This isn't anyone's fault, and is somewhat a product of the inherent human anxiety about change and industrial progress. Narratives like Thomas, the Brave Little Toaster, Toy Story, these are all - at their core - stories about being obsolesced, where the clash of the new and old creates conflict.

It makes sense in Thomas, because British Rail really did want to completely overhaul their steam fleet in favor of the cheaper, more standardized diesel locomotives. This fact alone makes it very easy to turn the two sides against one another, as it makes operation a zero-sum game. One side is literally replacing the other one-for-one, and it's not hard to guess which side Awdry was on based on his writings.

American railroads though, were never nationalized and resisted consolidation for much longer than British railways, resulting in a long period of time where steam and diesel engines worked alongside one another on even major railroads up until 1961. Even then, shortline railroads were free to keep their steam engines running into the 1980s.

In the early days, the concept of diesel locomotives like Pioneer or M-10000 completely replacing steam was seen as far-fetched, possibly even laughable for how entrenched the entire rail system was in steam operations. It's true that many diesels were built and quickly found their place on main line operations, but in America the idea that diesel would replace steam didn't hold a lot of merit for a much longer time than it did overseas due to how big the country is. Standardization is almost impossible on our infrastructure, even today. So there might have been a culture shock, perhaps, but never in a way that could be construed as hostile, at least not across the board.

I imagine reactions by steam and diesel engines to one another were pretty varied in the 1930s, but it's hard to invest a lot of energy into being judgemental or prejudicial when there's work to be done. As much as steam gets flak for being somewhat persnickety to work with, early diesels (and even Pioneer himself) had their own teething problems as manufacturers worked through the design process, so it's not like one was inherently better than the other all the time. I think camaraderie would win the day much more frequently than snide jab.

Plus, you don't need to know how a guy makes steam to work with him or find him as agreeable as your peers. And you might learn a thing or two about coal, though not enough to keep from embarrassing yourself 30 years later in a letter to a friend.

[hazel-of-sodor]

Presenting the revamp of my British Railways 9F.

92203 Black Prince is preserved (irl) on the North Norfolk Railway .

92220 Evening Star is preserved (irl) in the National Collection, she was already selected for preservation when built, as she was the last steam engine built for BR.

92000 Crewe Works is preserved at the Sodor Railway Musuem as the class prototype.

92162 is preserved on the Coleford Preservation Railway after a stint working for the National Coal Board (who donated her to the railway)

92079 Brianna was purchased by the NWR, for Banking at Wellsworth due to her experience/time working on the Lickey Incline.

92210 was purchased by Caledonian Preservation Railway in 1964. While the line was focused on Caledonian locomotives and rolling stock, 92210 was only 5.25 years old when withdrawn, and the line couldn't pass up the opportunity of a basically new locomotive. She was painted in Caledonian Blue to help her blend in with the rest of the fleet, and has remained as such ever since.

92001 Murdoch is the second built 9F and was was delivered directly to the North Western Region (Railway) where she has remained ever since. When adpated for a childrens tv series in 2003, the Show portrayed her as male, much to her ire.

92167 Vulcan was one of the last two 9Fs in service, and quite famously broke a rod, forcing her to finish her service as a 2-8-2. She was purchased by the London New Eastern Railway directly from BR, and repaired.

92160 Hephaestus was the other of the last two 9Fs in service, and was run directly onto Chester and Holyhead Railway's lines and ownership at the end of the day.

92250 Tamerlane was the last steam engine built at Crewe Locomotive Works as was bought direct from British Railway by The Rose Line preservation society.

92187 Paddington Station, the first Swindon built 9F, is preserved on the Kingsbridge Branchline Railway.

92170 Brighton Belle ia preserved on the Spa Valley Railway.

92169 Minerva, one of the first withdrawn, was purchased by the London New Eastern Railway

C92 (formerly 92137) was handed over to the Denbigh and Wrexham Railway upon their seperation from British Railways.

[georgefairbrother]

On February 18th, 1981, a BBC headline announced something that would be unthinkable three years later, 'Thatcher Gives in to Miners'.

"…Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Government has withdrawn plans to close 23 pits in its first major u-turn since coming to power two years ago. President of the National Union of Mineworkers Joe Gormley is confident the government's intervention will avert the threatened national miners' strikes…"

After crisis talks in Whitehall between union leaders and Energy Secretary, David Howell, the government agreed to reduce coal imports from eight million to 5.5 million tons and to reinstate higher operating subsidies.

NUM President Joe Gormley stated that as a result of commitments given, he would not be recommending a strike despite overwhelming support for industrial action from within the union membership.

Not everyone was happy;

"…The next day the NUM told all miners to return to work after the executive voted to accept the concessions made by the government and coal board by 15 to 8, with one abstention. Some left-wing pits maintained unofficial stoppages and there were pickets outside the NUM headquarters in London…"

When the government confirmed an injection of 300 million pounds in industry support, the unofficial action was called off and rebel pits were operating again by 20th February. Just over a year later, Joe Gormley secured a 9.3 % pay rise for miners, and was replaced by Arthur Scargill as NUM President.

In a 2002 BBC documentary, a former Special Branch officer claimed that Joe Gormley was a security services informant during the 1970s, having become concerned over the increasing influence within the NUM of left-wing militants.

Arthur Scargill opined,

"…The history of our movement is littered with people in leadership positions who were either connected with Special Branch or connected with the State..."

Joe Gormley was awarded a Life Peerage in 1982, and passed away in 1993.

[man-and-atom]

“The way they judged a new boss was to whip out a cigarette and see if he said anything. If he said something, he was done. He’d never be able to mine any coal.”

—From a story about US engineer and civil servant Chris Marks, who has dedicated his life (quite successfully) to preventing coal–mine cave–ins.

Coal kills.

Always has, always will. This fact is reflected in the attitudes of the miners. Mine operators don’t bother to invest in safety measures and equipment, even when it’s clear that safer mining is more profitable mining, not merely because they are heartless capitalistic exploiters (although nobody denies that!), but because the men in the mine themselves scorn safety.

People like Amory Lovins and, even more so, EF Schumacher (an economist for the National Coal Board in Britain) certainly could not have been ignorant of this when they set out to promote a “coal–based, fission–free bridge to a solar future” as far preferable, better for human beings individually and socially as well as for the environment, than the use of nuclear energy.

The Labour politicians in Britain who repeatedly cut back nuclear power programmes to protect employment in the coal mines knew it too. Even with the horrible example of Aberfan before them, they prevaricated for a generation on industrial retraining schemes, out of fear that closing coal mines would cost them safe constituencies — until Thatcher simply threw all the miners out of work with no recourse.

Much of the “thermal” coal burned for energy today, especially in the USA, is mined by open–pit techniques, which have a much lower rate of injury and death than underground mining. This, of course, is the coal we can easily eliminate by building nuclear power stations. Coal mined underground is more likely to be of “metallurgical” grade, an industrial product used partly as fuel source and partly as chemical reagent, which is considerably more difficult to replace.

[scotianostra]

January 26th marks Australia Day.

Scots played many key parts in the story of Australia, we were convicts, soldiers and governors; orphans, free settlers and gold hunters; bushrangers, merchants and immigrants.

Although it is sometimes said of nineteenth-century Sydney that it was an English city, in contrast with the more Scottish city of Melbourne, people of Scottish origin have played important roles in the development and life of Sydney. They have been there from the very beginning.

For hundreds of years Scots have packed up their families and their belongings and sailed to Australia to start a new life.

When Australia needed workers between 1832 and 1850 about 16,000 Scots became ‘assisted immigrants’. They boarded chartered ships, like the 50-ton ship Stirling Castle, chartered from Alan Kerr and Company, Greenock, alongside skilled stonemasons, engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths and even professors. In the same period more than 20,000 Scots travelled to Australia as unassisted immigrants.

The majority of Scottish emigrants were from the Lowlands but around 10,000 Highlanders boarded chartered ships to Australia between 1837 and 1852.

The 20th century continued to see Scots migrate to Australia. In the 1920s Scots stonemasons helped to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Scots miners from Lanarkshire, Fife and Ayrshire worked in coal mines in New South Wales in the '20s and '30s. In 1929 Alexander MacRae, originally from Loch Kishorn in the Highlands, first produced the famous Australian swimming ‘cossie’ - Speedos.

In 1930 MacRobertson Chocolates created Freddo Frog. Macpherson Robertson, the founder of ‘Mac Robertson Steam Confectionery Works’ that later became simply MacRobertson Chocolates, was the son of a Scottish carpenter. He spent many of his early years in Leith and became an apprentice at a confectionery company. When his family moved back to Melbourne he started making sweets in his mother’s bathroom.

Robertson became a great philanthropist as well as a hugely successful chocolate maker. He sponsored the MacRobertson Air Race from London to Melbourne, and financed a combined British, Australian and New Zealand expedition to the Antarctic. A part of the Antarctic was named ‘Mac Robertson Land’ in his honour.

Today Freddo Frog is the most popular children’s chocolate in Australia.

After the Second World War thousands of Britons set sail for Australia. Between 1947 and 1981 more than a million Britons took advantage of an assisted passage scheme introduced by the Australian Government. Around 170,000 Scots left the country of their birth to become ‘Ten Pound Poms’ and start a new life Down Under.

During the past 24 hours there have been protests in Australia as part of a campaign to move Australia day to a date more fitting to the indigenous people of the country, names they give to January 26th include Survival Day, Invasion Day, Day of Mourning.

Gammeya Dharawal man, Jacob Morris, said there isn’t one emotion that fully captures the day.

"It's a day of teaching. It's a day of celebrating as well. We're not up there celebrating the Union Jack, we're celebrating us," he says.

But the day also reminds Jacob of the treatment of First Nations people throughout history.

"Anger … that is still what is felt today and that comes from the sadness, trauma and the hurt," he said.

[rjzimmerman]

As a native of Gary, Indiana, and a former "summer employee" at U.S. Steel (to pay for my college education), I'm obviously invested in what happens to the Gary Works of U.S. Steel. This story answers several of my questions, and puts me on the "no" side of this proposal. Excerpt from this story from Grist:

U.S. Steel, once the world’s largest company of any kind, can take substantial credit for the growth of American industrial power in the 20th century. But in recent decades, it’s been shuttering mills and shedding workers. Now, the iconic Pittsburgh-based manufacturer is set to be acquired by a Japanese steelmaker, Nippon Steel — if the federal government allows the deal to proceed.

Earlier this month, reports emerged that the Biden administration is preparing to block the nearly $15 billion merger on the grounds that it presents a threat to America’s national security interests. The United Steelworkers union opposes it, fearing future layoffs and weaker labor protections under new ownership. So do both major candidates for president, who are vying for votes in the Rust Belt. Supporters of the deal, like the Washington Post editorial board and the nonpartisan think tank The Atlantic Council, have cast the politicians’ opposition as election-season pandering, and argued that the national security rationale on which Biden may block it is flimsy. But one area, in which the question of whether the merger goes through could be particularly consequential, has gone largely unremarked upon in the conversation: what it means for the climate.

Some environmentalists say the deal could slow the crucial progress that the steel industry must make in order to decarbonize. Their argument stems from the fact that both U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel have been slow, compared to industry peers, to adopt the most impactful decarbonization technologies, even with federal funding available in the U.S. to do so.

The most common process by which primary steel is produced is massively carbon-intensive. The reasons for this lie in chemistry. Steel is made from iron, but the form in which iron ore occurs in the Earth’s crust is mostly iron oxide (similar to rust). In order to get usable iron from it, one needs to remove the oxygen. For centuries, iron-makers have accomplished this by using coke, a fuel made from coal, which is heated alongside iron ore in a blast furnace at such high temperatures that the iron melts into a liquid while the oxygen bonds with the carbon in the coke and produces carbon dioxide.

Blast furnaces are responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions from steelmaking, and the inextricability of carbon emissions from the ironmaking process is a large part of the reason why, overall, steelmaking is responsible for 7 percent of global carbon emissions, and a quarter of industrial carbon emissions. These percentages will likely grow as other sectors of the economy are decarbonized. In the U.S., demand for steel is also expected to grow dramatically over the next decade to provide the raw material of the industrial growth sparked by the Inflation Reduction Act and the planned buildout of clean energy infrastructure and transmission lines. For these reasons, the task of decarbonizing steel is as urgent as it is difficult and expensive.

Fortunately, there is a solution on offer that has recently become viable due to new technological advances — and one that the Biden administration has sought to heavily subsidize: replacing blast furnaces with a process called direct reduction, and using hydrogen as a reducing agent in place of carbon, ultimately discharging water rather than carbon dioxide. “The chemistry is sound, it’s being built, it’s been piloted and demonstrated,” said Yong Kwon, a senior advisor with the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign. “The question is now: Will industries adopt it?”

There are eight operating steel mills in the United States that make “primary” steel (newly created steel, rather than the generally lower-quality “secondary” steel produced from scrap metal). Three are owned by U.S. Steel. Cleveland-Cliffs, the owner of the other five, has also made an offer to buy U.S. Steel and has been much more proactive in making the shift to greener production. “The Department of Energy has made available a great deal of money to do partnerships with industry to demonstrate the value of decarbonized projects,” said Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Institute. Both Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel have availed themselves of such funding to embark on decarbonization programs. U.S. Steel has partnered with the Department of Energy on carbon capture projects at several of their steel mills, and funded research and development of hydrogen-based ironmaking technology. The company also plans to install a carbon capture program at a blast furnace at its steel mill in Gary, Indiana, which it says will turn up to 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually into limestone — a tiny fraction of that facility’s overall emissions. But critics note that U.S. Steel has yet to take a step as ambitious as its rival by actually replacing one of its blast furnaces with direct reduction of iron.

The stakes of the potential U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel merger are perhaps best illustrated in the city of Gary, Indiana, which was built in 1906 by U.S. Steel to house workers at its Gary Works steel mill. That mill is home to the country’s largest and most carbon-emitting blast furnace — and it’s nearing the end of its lifespan. This situation hypothetically presents the furnace’s owner with an ideal opportunity to switch to a cleaner technology, with federal funding on the table to do so. But in August, Nippon Steel announced its prospective plans for Gary Works, which include a $300 million investment in relining the furnace to extend its lifespan for another 20 years. With this announcement, Kwon said, “Not only have they back in Japan not pursued solutions that we feel are responsible; they’ve now explicitly come out and said that they’re not going to pursue the solution that is on the table for reducing the climate change and public health harms that are currently produced by the iron-making process.”

[racefortheironthrone]

What are your thoughts on government intervention to end labor disputes in general? On one hand, forced settlements almost always favour management, and if management knows that the government will intervene, they have an incentive to stall negotiations and run out the clock, so to speak. On the other hand, some shutdowns will have far reaching negative effects on society as a whole, particularly if the strike involves the public service or things like railroads or ports.

In terms of my take on government intervention to end labor disputes, I'm fully in favor of procedural hypocrisy (or, as a philosophy PhD might put it, consequentialism) because the only question that really matters is whose side the government is intervening on behalf of. (This is where I'm going to make a massive plug on behalf of my colleague Erik Loomis' book A History of America in Ten Strikes, and in particular recommend his chapters on the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 and the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937.)

As a labor historian, I would say that as a rule, the state almost always intervenes in labor disputes at some level, whether it's the local cops and local government, the state militia, the U.S Army, or the courts. For most of labor history, the state has intervened on behalf of capital, and was broadly succesful in using its police power to crush strikes and keep the trade union movement economically marginal.

Where the union movement has been most successful is not when the state is neutral (because capital versus labor is not historically a fair fight between opponents of equal weight), but when the state intevenes on behalf of labor. So yeah, government intervention in labor disputes is awesome - when it's Governor Frank Murphy sending in the National Guard to keep the cops and the strikebreakers out of the plants in the Flint Strike, or the "Madden Board" NLRB enforcing the Wagner Act through the work of the Economic Division and the Review Division, or the National War Labor Board ordering Little Steel to recognize SWOC and agree to the union's terms.

Specifically on the issue of forced settlements, whether they're a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on whose terms the settlement is made, which in turn depends on how labor law is written and enforced (and staffed). The whole reason why the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 mandates that "neither party shall be under any duty to accept, in whole or in part, any proposal of settlement made by the [Federal Mediation] Service" is because one of capital's biggest grievances against the "Madden Board" NLRB was that the Board's orders and settlement proposals had systematically favored workers between 1935-1947.

I think the numbers tell the tale - when the state was at its most "neutral" at the turn of the 20th century, union density hit a ceiling of 10% of the workforce. The only time that the labor movement broke through that ceiling was during WWI and then the New Deal, when the state shifted to supporting unions. And then when the state began to shift back in the direction of capital and labor law increasingly favored management, the union movement began to shrink.

This is why I always tell my students that the state is like a great stationary engine, and the only thing that changes is where that engine's power is being sent to. If you refuse to engage in electoral politics and only rely on direct action, the engine doesn't go away - it just gets harnessed by the other side and the power is used against you.