#scrip

[direwolfrules]

I get that this is kinda over shadowed by the, well, everything going on in the book, but why is no one talking about how District 12 was a fucking Company Town. The miners were paid in scrip. Scrip was only supposed to be redeemable in the Capitol Store, but luckily some of the merchants in town would accept it as an alternative form of payment.

Keep in mind I’m American so my knowledge of the subject is very USA history centered, if anyone with knowledge of similar systems in other nations wants to jump in I encourage it.

For those who aren’t aware, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, companies would build entire communities, Company Towns, to house their workers. In the United States this often happened in remote areas where resource extraction jobs such as mining and logging/lumber milling were occurring. These towns would often be the only place to live for miles near these work sites, so even in the locations where it wasn’t required by the company that owned the site for their employees to live in the company town, many had no choice but to do so.

Most company towns were exploitative. You HAD to live in the company town most times, and in many cases the company would charge you rent. Then comes the Company Stores and scrip. The company owned and ran the store in town. So you needed to buy your groceries and toiletries and basic articles for living from the company. Thing was, they’d charge an excessive mark up for these products. So your pay would never quite be enough to afford everything you were buying, leaving you forced to put in on credit. Leaving you in debt to the company. But say you were in a company town just close enough to another community that you’d be able to make the trek to buy stuff from their shops. Surely, in that case, you’d be able to avoid the debt to the company that employs you? This is where scrip comes in. Scrip was an alternative type of currency that was only really good in the company town that issued it. Miners and loggers would be paid in scrip instead of actual money, and the exchange rate was practically worthless. Even if that neighboring community existed, the likelihood it would have a shop that would accept pieces of paper that were only useful as tinder outside of a company town were slim to none.

Company towns were designed to keep workers in debt to the company, and therefore trapped in their employment with the company. They were often lacking in what we would today consider to be basic municipal services, were full of poverty and lacking conditions, and the general awfulness of the practice and environment was one of the factors that lead to the unionization of mine workers.

Which leads me to a bit of Appalachian Coal Mining specific history and another few things I don’t see people talking about in the books. For around a decade in the 1910s-1920s the West Virginia coal wars, also known as the mine wars, raged as part of the dispute between unionizing miners and the mining companies/their union busting mercenaries/the U.S. government. The history is too long for this post, but I encourage everyone to at least read the Wikipedia article. Anyway, the Coal Wars culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain. During the Battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War, about 10,000 miners rose up against the companies and corrupt sheriff’s department that were literally murdering murdering them on courthouse steps for unionizing. The companies and the US Army had bomber planes drop gas and explosive bombs left over from WWI on them.

Anyway, I find it incredibly interesting with this historical context that one of Haymitch’s friends is named Blair. Whether or not Blair Mountain is still known as Blair Mountain during the series is unknown, the only in universe reference we have to what placed used to be named is when Katniss mentions District 12 is in what used to be known as Appalachia. It’s just interesting to me, that a name so tied to Appalachian coal miners rebelling against exploitative companies and corrupt law enforcement, lived on.

I also want to point out that while the miners were bombed and routed at Blair Mountain, though it was technically a win for the companies-government coalition, even though it led to lower numbers of UMW members for the next few years, the fight continued on. And in the 1930s the union won most of what the miners had been fighting for. Something something, District 12 parallel.

Anyway, I leave you with some music to listen to:

[ninawolv3rina]

Bog standard dnd party, just trying to make their way through life

Characters: Celocia, Laurence, Fae and Scrip

[lovelyarps]

infopost about scriptures under solitude, one of my primary rain world sonas

[fugu-in-f]

hey, does anyone want to talk about how company scrips are coming back

Kwik trip, this is not the road we want to take

[fontriver]

Ice Breaking font designed by Edric Studio

[shrimpletin]

Me consoling a kid whose parents died

Kid :wahh

Me: think of it this way , you might become Batman

[gimbledim]

hi i have a lot of tags

General Tags-

#low light chatter - talk tag

#good art

#laugh rule

#cat tag

#cute tag

#poets and prose

Fan Tags-

#yummy dungeon - dungeon meshi

#house. - house of leaves

#cube lads - minecraft youtubers

#break the habit - everymanhybrid

#regarding one stick in the mud - other slenderverse/creepypasta

#dreegons - flight rising

#trigun - stampede mostly

#hello gordon - hlvrai

#pom of power - hades game

#homestuck day - unfortunately every day is homestuck day

#next statement - the magnus archives

#scrip - inscryption

Media Tags-

#dot mov - video

#dot html - link

#dot wav - audio

#dot gif - you know what a gif is

#dot pol - poll

[twelvebooksstuff]

Yes!! Scrip often accompanied company towns, where everything in a town would be owned by a company who employed the majority of the residents! Ultimately, this is similar to how District 12 works (although under a government supported business versus a purely independent one). But this idea of company towns can be see in the real world and in our history!! Especially in Appalachia (where District 12 is canonically located)

Some links in case anyone is curious:

Oh, wow. For those who don't know, "scrip" is an old-fashioned form of credit used to control workers. Like, imagine if you worked for Walmart and were paid exclusively in Walmart gift cards. By limiting their pay to a form of currency only usable in company or government controlled outlets, there is no way for workers to ever save up or get a different job, sticking them in a loop of total economic domination.

[lucid-graves]

heres some dnd scraps.. welcome to the new blog i guess

the glory days of this campaign are over but i have plenty of bits and pieces to upload till ive got new content lol

[junipercalle]

Inspiration in ISMENE

The store above is an A&P in Osage, WV. If you worked for the coal company, though, you couldn't buy flour (or anything else) from them; not with your wages. You got 'paid' in company scrip, which you could use at the company store to pay for flour which cost you twice that price. Your employer got to keep the difference in what they would have paid you in real money.

The minimum wage made this effectively illegal, but it didn't end the practice. Modern value-capture tactics like pay cards seem awfully similar in terms of ways to deny someone their earnings.

I wrote a bit about company scrip and how it informed the setting in ISMENE AND THE VOICE. You can read it here.

[vidrig]

Now it's 2024, and it does seem like Amazon did not in fact create a company town. However, some have argued that Amazon has created something similar through Amazon Marketplace where sellers have no choice but to use Amazon. This is of course more of a monopoly issue than anything else, which they were charged of in September. All the negative attention in 2021 does seem to have made Amazon more careful, but worker conditions are still reportedly bad. Keep up the good fight!

[kingderald]

[sfadventist]

The Scriptures A Safeguard - The Great Controversy, Chapter 37

If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine. John 7:17.

https://www.upliftingchrist.net/scriptures-a-safeguard-the-great-controversy

[fontriver]

Monday Miracle font designed by Letternun

[reconstructwriter]

Your pay’s never great, better than the last job though. 500 scrip a month instead of 400. The food is army leftovers but its enough for you and your family and rooms got no bugs. New, shiny place. Massive. No old gunk clinging between the tiles or stains rebelling against twenty years of the mop.

Your last place was old. Grime sunk in too deep for any tool or chemical to get off. Bugs were bad. Rent was worse. But no one expected more than an old mop across an older floor cause even a professional cleaner wasn’t getting that up.

Not here. Everything is built of stainless polished chrome durasteel or whatever. But every speck of dirt shows. No quick swish of the mop gets it off. You hope some ‘troopers get punishment duty, but the higher-ups rarely use duty to punish. Gotta get on your hands and knees, pour the good cleaner to eat grime away like acid. Scrub off. Don’t get any on you. This is the best it gets.

Hands spasm. Knees creak. Gets harder every year.

The view outside is nice. Alderaan hovers, green and blue below you like a jewel. You wanted to be there once: free healthcare, maybe even university – if not for you than your kids. History or even religious philosophy. None o’ that now. Not for nobody. Keep your head down and don’t breathe a word. But people do. About Alderaan. On Alderaan things are like they used to be. No one knew how good y’all had it then.

Something hums deep above your head and beneath you knees. The toothbrush you scrub with quivers. Something lights up. You’re still as death.

...Alderaan!

The view is horrible. You look away, back to the one smudge of dirt stubbornly resisting all attempts to come clean. Your hands won't still. You don’t wish you were down there.

But…

Force...better than up here.

It genuinely does not matter if there were independent contractors or indentured workers on the second Death Star when it was blown up, oh my God.

Maybe for a moment rebel command thought about it and had a hard decision to make. We don’t need to see that because it would be a short conversation. You don’t let the fascist overlords have a doomsday device that can genocide a whole planet at the push of a button because then the next hard decision you’ll be making is whether you keep fighting the Empire at all when they’ll retaliate by destroying a whole planet, and another one tomorrow and another the next day. The Empire hasn’t poured a stupid amount of resources into creating this weapon and then completely replacing the first one because they don’t mean to use it lightly.

Victories in war always come at a serious cost, but of course after the Death Star is gone there’s celebration despite losses on both sides. Soldiers can celebrate victories and still being alive even when there are complicated feelings because people just died. People lived under the tyranny of the Empire for two decades before the rebellion started striking any serious blows, and it’s not bloodthirsty that seeing the Death Star go up in a huge explosion is treated as a huge win both times.

There’s just no quantifying the damage done by that conversation in Clerks and stupid takes like that becoming inescapable and taken seriously, not just put in a movie to be funny. Star Wars is about fighting fascism and it has a relatively black-and-white morality. As someone who loves some very heightened fantasy that feels like myth and folklore and doesn’t need realism in everything, I’m so tired of it being treated as a given that more symbolic and black-and-white portrayals of good and evil are inherently problematic. They’re not. There’s plenty of problems to be found in Star Wars without straining to be such an insufferable edgelord about its basic premise.

Yes, Star Wars is also about the sanctity of life and how violence and anger can corrupt people. But still every SW trilogy has been about a Jedi fighting in a war of some kind. TLJ ultimately shows DJ to be wrong with his “Don’t join” attitude, and Luke to be wrong for abandoning his duty as a Jedi, and Ben to be wrong for thinking he and Rey can carve their own path that doesn’t mean uncompromisingly resisting the dark side without that meaning they become the bad guys. The Bendu, representing neither the dark or the light, turns out to be a petty asshole whose refusal to pick sides because he’s so above it all just makes him totally useless until Kanan insults his pride enough for him to act. SW makes the point over and over that some things are worth fighting for and neutrality or complacency in the face of oppression is bad, that there’s truly not much gray area when the enemy are Sith or greedy and genocidal despots. Any civilians on the Death Star probably were there because they made a choice to just do their jobs whoever’s in power, because there are plenty of people in Imperial space like that. But by all means keep nitpicking how the particular way the rebellion stopped the Empire makes them ackshually not such good guys you know.