#uprising of the 20000

[uwmspeccoll]

Happy Labor Day!

In recognition of Labor Day and the continued fight for workers’ rights, we’re highlighting a 1921 National Women’s Trade Union League pamphlet from our social-justice-based Fromkin Memorial Collection.  

The National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) was established in 1903 to represent women's rights within the American labor movement and remained active until 1950. The organization was notable for its diverse population of working women and upper-class reformers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who fought side by side to organize women workers into unions, provide educational opportunities to women and girls, and solidify protective workplace and social legislation. The WTUL is credited with playing a critical role in supporting the 1909 New York Uprising of the 20,000, which remains the largest strike by American women in history. Within their working-class ideology, WTUL also advocated for the eight-hour workday and supported women’s suffrage.  

This promotional pamphlet spotlights three of the WTUL’s achievements including opening a School for Women Leaders in the Labor Movement in 1911, initiating a federal investigation into the conditions of woman and child wage-earners in 1907 which lead to the establishment of the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau in 1920, and presenting its Reconstruction Program at the 1919 international Peace Conference.  

While we enjoy a long Labor Day weekend (or perhaps time and a half pay for union members), may we also reflect on the WTUL’s spirit and accomplishments and all of those who continue to fight for social justice. 

View posts from Labor Days past.

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

[dioles-writes]

TIMELINE: DIOLES

1599: EXECUTION OF EUPHROSIA BELISARIO

Mother of Dioles

First documented Diole

Italy

1958: LAW OF HIDING

It’s illegal to use powers in public because crime rates caused by Dioles have gone up

1973: DIOLE UPRISE

Dioles don’t like that they can’t use their powers in public and they start an uprise (protests, murders, crimes)

Mr Prader is 7

1976: WAR OF POWER STARTS

World War of Humans vs. Dioles

“Diole”-stopping bullets are created by Diantha Rose

If a Diole is shot by one, their powers are gone for 6 to 10 minutes

Mr Prader is 22

1978: THE GOVERNMENT CREATES DIOLE CAMPS

1981: WAR OF POWER ENDS

Humans win (because of Diantha Rose’s genius bullets)

Most Dioles are gone/in hiding

Howard Restall is 11

Mr Prader is 27

1996: DIOLE EXECUTION ACT

Howard Restall declares a world-wide Diole extermination after the disappearance of his childhood best friend Vincent, and seeing how high Diole crime rates have gotten

Howard Restall is 26

Mr Prader is 42

2011: PRESENT DAY

Diole rates have gone from 1/20 to 1/20000

Howard Restall is 41

Mr. Prader is 57

NOTE:

This society is MUCH more advanced than ours

[historyofchildhood]

The “Uprising of the 20,000″ in 1909 was a strike of shirtwaist factory workers who mostly consisted of teenage girls and young women, many were Jewish immigrants.  The strike was organized to improve working conditions including safety standards in the workplace as well as worker’s rights.  The young workers faced violence and harassment during the strike but ultimately would see all but a few shirtwaist companies agree to at least some of their demands. Unfortunately one of the few employers to resist their demands was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company where two years later 146 workers (still consisting largely of young women and girls) were killed in the Triangle Fire and even more injured.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 23 November 1909, more than 20,000 garment workers in New York, mostly Jewish women and girls, walked out on a general strike: the biggest stoppage of women workers in the US to date. Facing severe repression, they held out for 11 weeks and won big concessions. This is a short history of the dispute: https://libcom.org/history/uprising-20000-tony-michels https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1589563597895451/?type=3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 13 Mar 2020 (The third Little Brother book, Where I write, stream global news, AT&T's CEO gets millions for his failures, Chelsea Manning freed, Katie Porter vs CDC, Trump's scientific nihilism, Covid-malware co-evolution, Siennese solidarity)

Today's links

Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface: And a new Little Brother/Homeland reissue, with an intro by Ed Snowden!

Where I Write: A column for the CBC that's really about how I write.

Stream 200+ global news channels: Each hand-picked, no registration required.

AT&T's CEO fired 23,000 workers and gave himself a 10% raise: Life on the easiest setting.

Chelsea Manning is free: But she's been fined $256K for refusing to testify to the Grand Jury.

Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing: Literally the most effective questioner in Congress.

Trump's unfitness in a plague: It's not because he's an ignoramus, it's because he's a nihilist.

Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map: Peter Watts' prophecy comes true.

Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn: A cause for hope in the dark.

This day in history: 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface (permalink)

Attack Surface is the third Little Brother book, coming out next October.

It's told from the point of view of Masha, the young woman who is Marcus Yallow's frenemy who works first for the DHS and then for a private spook outfit. It's a book about how good people talk themselves into doing bad things, and how they redeem themselves. It ranges from Iraq to the color revolutions of the former USSR, to Oakland and the Movement for Black Lives.

The story turns on cutting-edge surveillance and counter-surveillance: self-driving cars, over-the-air baseband radio malware, IMSI catchers, CV dazzle and adversarial examples, binary transparency and warrant canaries.

This week, I did a wide-ranging and deep interview with Andrew Liptak for Polygon about the book, the Little Brother series, the techlash, the tech workers' uprising (and #TechWontBuildIt), and the future of technological self-determination.

We also revealed the cover for Attack Surface, which was designed by the incomparable Will Staehle (who is eligible for a Best Artist Hugo – nominations close today!).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

Not only that, but Staehle has also designed a cover for a new omnibus edition of Little Brother and Homeland that comes out this July, and as you can see from that cover, the book has an all-new introduction by none other than Ed Snowden!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

(In 2017, Staehle also designed all-new covers for my adult backlist)

https://www.tor.com/2017/10/18/cory-doctorow-will-staehle-covers/

The Little Brother books are neither optimistic nor pessimistic about technology: instead, they are hopeful. Hope is the belief that you can materially improve your life if you take action. A belief in human agency and the power of self-determination.

The message of Little Brother is neither "Things will all be fine" nor "We are all doomed."

It's: "This will be so great…if we don't screw it up."

Where I Write (permalink)

I learned to be a writer while my life was in total chaos. Decades later, I have a beautiful office to work in, but I still do my best writing typing hurriedly on subway trains, in taxi-cabs, and airport lounges.

https://www.cbc.ca/arts/finding-comfort-in-the-chaos-how-cory-doctorow-learned-to-write-from-literally-anywhere-1.5489363

My CBC column on where I write is really a primer on how I write: what it takes to be able to write when you're sad, or anxious, or wracked with self-doubt.

Unquestionably the most important skill I've acquired as a writer.

"Even though there were days when the writing felt unbearably awful, and some when it felt like I was mainlining some kind of powdered genius and sweating it out through my fingertips, there was no relation between the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality, assessed in the cold light of day at a safe distance from the day I wrote them. The biggest predictor of how I felt about my writing was how I felt about me. If I was stressed, underslept, insecure, sad, hungry or hungover, my writing felt terrible. If I was brimming over with joy, the writing felt brilliant."

Stream 200+ global news channels (permalink)

TV News is an Android app that pulls like Youtube streams from 200+ global news channels in 50 languages, each manually selected by the app's creator, Steven Clift, whose work I've previously admired.

http://tvnewsapp.com/

You can filter the feeds by country and language and watch them as floating windows that let you continue to use your device while you watch. No registration required, either.

They're shooting for 1000+ channels soon.

AT&T's CEO fired 23,000 workers and gave himself a 10% raise (permalink)

Randall Stephenson is CEO of AT&T. Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality so that Stephenson could legally slow down the services we requested to extort bribes from us. Then, Trump gave his company a $20B tax cut.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxeg/atandt-preps-for-new-layoffs-despite-billions-in-tax-breaks-and-regulatory-favors

Stephenson used that money to raise exec pay, buy back his company's stock to juice its price and to pay off debts from earlier, disastrous mergers. He cut 23,000 jobs and slashed capital spending (America has the worst broadband of any rich country).

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

After all that, Stephenson congratulated himself on a job well done by giving himself a 10% raise in 2019, bringing his total compensation up to 32 million dollars.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/att-ceo-pay-rose-to-32-million-in-2019-while-he-cut-20000-jobs/

I mean the guy earned it. He blew billions of dollars buying Warner and Directv, and then lost billions more on the failed aftermath. If that doesn't warrant a raise, what does?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/att-loses-another-1-3-million-tv-customers-as-directv-freefall-continues/

Chelsea Manning is free (permalink)

A judge has ordered that Chelsea Manning be released from jail, a day after her latest suicide attempt. She was jailed last March for refusing to testify before a grand jury, held in solitary for two months, then jailed again a few days later, in May, She's been inside ever since.

The judge ordered her release because the Grand Jury had finished its work.

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.412520/gov.uscourts.vaed.412520.41.0.pdf

It's fantastic to that Manning got her freedom back, but she has been fined $256,000 for her noncompliance. I just donated to her fund:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-chelsea-pay-her-court-fines

(Image: Tim Travers Hawkins, CC BY-SA)

Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing (permalink)

I am a huge fan of Rep Katie Porter. Her outstanding questioning techniques and unwillingness to countenance bullshit from the people she questions are such a delight to watch.

Here she is demolishing billionaire finance criminal Jamie Dimon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WLuuCM6Ej0

Oh, Ben Carson, you never stood a chance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVWy3q2kmNM

Steve Mnuchin always looks like a colossal asshole, but rarely this comprehensively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78zpa0hQ1aw

I almost feel sorry for this Trumpkin from the Consumer Finance Protection Board as she faces Porter's withering fire.

Almost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBaCc5VUHS8

Porter – an Elizabeth Warren protege – doesn't do this to grandstand. Like AOC, she uses her spectacular skills to elicit admissions and get them on the record, and to hold Congressional witnesses to account.

Today, Porter attained a new peak in a short, illustrious career. That's because today was the day she questioned CDC assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, asking him to clarify Trump's televised lie last night that insurers would pay for Covid-19 testing.

https://twitter.com/RepKatiePorter/status/1238147835859779584

Porter doggedly held Kadlec to account, forcing him to acknowledge that the cost of a Covid-19 test – $1,331 – was so high that many would forego it, and then to admit that these Americans could go on to transmit the disease to others, making it a matter of public concern.

Then she forced CDC Director Robert Redfield to admit – as she had informed him in writing the week before – that the CDC had the authority to simply pay those fees, universally, for any American seeking testing, under 42 CFR 71.30:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2019-title42-vol1/xml/CFR-2019-title42-vol1-part71.xml#seqnum71.30

Having laid this factual record, Porter insisted that Redfield commit to using that authority. Not to consider it, study it, or consult on it. To use it to help save the country. Whenever Redfield waffled, she reclaimed her time and forced him back on point.

KP: Dr. Redfield, will you commit to the CDC, right now, using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance?

RR: Well, I can say that we're going to do everything to make sure everybody can get the care they need –"

KP: Nope, not good enough. Yes or no?

RR: What I'm going to say is, I'm going to review it in detail with CDC and the department —

KP: No, reclaiming my time [repeats the question]

RR: What I was trying to say is that CDC is working with HHS now to see how we operationalize that

KP: Dr. Redfield, I hope that that answer weighs heavily on you, because it is going to weigh very heavily on me and on every American family

RR: Our intent is to make sure that every American family gets the care and treatment they need at this time in this major epidemic and I am currently working with HHS to see how to best operationalize it.

KP: Excellent! Everybody in America hear that — you are eligible to go get tested for coronavirus and have that covered, regardless of insurance

[Curtain]

Trump's unfitness in a plague (permalink)

In this editorial, Science editor-in-chief H Holden Thorp makes a compelling case that Trump is not capable of leading the American response to Covid-19.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1169

Trump has spent years denigrating and ignoring science before taking office, and it's only gotten worse, since.

As Thorp writes, "You can't insult science when you don't like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can't give on demand."

His policy track-record is even worse: "deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH…nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science."

This reminds me of an argument I often have with digital rights activists who attribute bad technology policy to the inability of clueless lawmakers to understand the technical nuance. I think that's wrong. The fact that we're not all dead of cholera, even though there are no microbiologists in Congress proves that you don't need to be a domain expert to make good policy.

Good policy comes from truth-seeking exercises in which experts with different views present their best evidence to neutral adjudicators who make determinations in public, showing their work in explicit, written, public reasoning. These processes are made legitimate – and hence robust and reliable – by procedural rules. The adjudicators – regulators, staffers, etc – are not allowed to have conflicts of interest. Their conclusions are subject to the rule of law, with mandatory transparency and a process for appeal.

It has to be this way: there's no way that – say – a president could be an expert on all the different issues that might arise during their tenure.

This, then, is the problem with inequality and market concentration: it merges the referees with the players. When an industry only has a handful of players, they all end up with common lobbying positions – a common position on what is truth. That's because the C-suites of these five companies are filled with people who've worked at two, three or four of the competitors, and are married to others who've worked at the remainder. They're godparents to one anothers' kids, executors of each others' wills.

There's no way for there NOT to be collusion in these circumstances.

And when an industry is that concentrated, the only people who understand it well enough are those same execs, so inevitably the regulators are drawn from the industry.

That's why Obama's "good" FCC Chair, Tom Wheeler, was a former Comcast lobbyist, and why Ajit Pai, Trump's "bad" FCC chair, is a former Verizon lawyer. Apart from Susan Crawford, there's not really anyone who's not from the top ranks of Big Telco qualified to regulate them.

So many of us saw the photo of Trump meeting with all the tech leaders and were dismayed that they were throwing their lot in with him.

But we should also be aghast that all the leaders of the industry fit around one modest board-room table.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/donald-trump-meets-with-tech-leaders/

The problem with Trump's Covid-19 response is that he does not believe in a legitimate process with neutral referees. The refereeship, in trumpland, is an open-field auction, a transactional process that works best when it enriches Trump and his party.

The problem of Trump taking charge of the epidemiological crisis of Covid-19 isn't that he doesn't understand science: it's that he doesn't believe in evidence-based policy.

He is part of the cult of "Public Choice Theory," the belief that there is no one who can serve as referee without eventually colluding with the players for their mutual enrichment, a cynical, nihilistic philosophy that holds that there's no point in seeking to govern well. These people project their own moral vacuum onto all of humanity, a kind of cartoon Homo Economicus who is incapable of anything except maximizing personal utility.

For these people, the existence of bridges that don't fall down and water that doesn't give you cholera are lucky accidents, not results of sound policy and careful truth-seeking. They reason that since they would take bribes to poison the water of Flint, so would everyone.

Trump isn't just a non-expert, he's an ignoranamus, but that's not the problem. The problem is that he is a nihilist, someone who doesn't believe that truth-seeking is even possible.

Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map (permalink)

Hackers have developed a malware-as-a-service that packages up realtime Covid-19 maps with malware droppers that infect people who load them.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/03/live-coronavirus-map-used-to-spread-malware/

This reminds me intensely of Peter Watts's 2002 novel Maelstrom, in which Watts uses his background as an evolutionary biologist to posit an eerily plausible and devilishly clever way that a digital and a human virus could co-evolve.

https://rifters.com/real/MAELSTROM.htm

This has stuck with me! In May 2018, I wrote about it in Locus Magazine:

http://locusmag.com/2018/05/cory-doctorow-the-engagement-maximization-presidency/

Maelstrom is concerned with a pandemic that is started by its protago­nist, Lenie Clark, who returns from a deep ocean rift bearing an ancient, devastating pathogen that burns its way through the human race, felling people by the millions.

As Clark walks across the world on a mission of her own, her presence in a message or news story becomes a signal of the utmost urgency. The filters are firewalls that give priority to some packets and suppress others as potentially malicious are programmed to give highest priority to any news that might pertain to Lenie Clark, as the authorities try to stop her from bringing death wherever she goes.

Here's where Watt's evolutionary bi­ology shines: he posits a piece of self-modifying malicious software – something that really exists in the world today – that automatically generates variations on its tactics to find computers to run on and reproduce itself. The more computers it colonizes, the more strategies it can try and the more computational power it can devote to analyzing these experiments and directing its randomwalk through the space of all possible messages to find the strategies that penetrate more firewalls and give it more computational power to devote to its task.

Through the kind of blind evolution that produces predator-fooling false eyes on the tails of tropical fish, the virus begins to pretend that it is Lenie Clark, sending messages of increasing convincingness as it learns to impersonate patient zero. The better it gets at this, the more welcoming it finds the firewalls and the more computers it infects.

At the same time, the actual pathogen that Lenie Clark brought up from the deeps is finding more and more hospitable hosts to reproduce in: thanks to the computer virus, which is directing public health authorities to take countermeasures in all the wrong places. The more effective the computer virus is at neutralizing public health authorities, the more the biological virus spreads. The more the biological virus spreads, the more anxious the public health authorities become for news of its progress, and the more computers there are trying to suck in any intelligence that seems to emanate from Lenie Clark, supercharging the computer virus.

Together, this computer virus and biological virus co-evolve, symbiotes who cooperate without ever intending to, like the predator that kills the prey that feeds the scavenging pathogen that weakens other prey to make it easier for predators to catch them.

Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn (permalink)

In times of crisis, we typically pull together, but elite panic's pervasive mythology holds that these moments are when the poors reveal their inner beast and attack their social betters. That libel on humanity is disproved regularly by our everyday experience. As common as these incidents of solidarity are, they still warrant our notice.

The Song of the Verbena is the hymn of the Italian city of Sienna, currently on lockdown.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canto_della_Verbena

This video of Siennese people singing their hymn from the windows of their houses, into their empty street, is one of the most beautiful, hopeful things I've seen this week.

Truly, it is a tonic.

https://twitter.com/valemercurii/status/1238234518508777473

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago NYPD caught wikiwashing Wikipedia entries on police brutality https://web.archive.org/web/20150313150951/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8563947/edits-wikipedia-pages-bell-garner-diallo-traced-1-police-plaza

#1yrago Gimlet staff announce unionization plan following Spotify acquisition https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263957/gimlet-media-union-spotify-recognition-podcasts

#1yrago With days to go until the #CopyrightDirective vote, #Article13's father admits it requires filters and says he's OK with killing Youtube https://www.golem.de/news/uploadfilter-voss-stellt-existenz-von-youtube-infrage-1903-139992.html

#1yrago Spotify's antitrust complaint against Apple is a neat parable about Big Tech's monopoly https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-apple-complaint-warren-antitrust-issue/

#1yrago A critical flaw in Switzerland's e-voting system is a microcosm of everything wrong with e-voting, security practice, and auditing firms https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmakk3/researchers-find-critical-backdoor-in-swiss-online-voting-system

#1yrago McMansion Hell tours the homes of the "meritocratic" one-percenters who allegedly bought their thickwitted kids' way into top universities in the college admissions scandal https://mcmansionhell.com/post/183417051691/in-honor-of-the-college-admissions-scandal

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Empty Wheel (https://www.emptywheel.net/), CNN (https://cnn.com), Memex 1.1 (https://memex.naughtons.org/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330_-_A_Lever_Without_a_Fulcrum_Is_Just_a_Stick.mp3

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

[morphofan]

AHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!

[slydiddledeedee]

tagged by: @eastdemons thank you!!!

Nickname: Steph!  Only a few select people call me this though, usually I just go by Stephanie

Zodiac: Aries

Height: 5′5′’ (?) I think I’m 5′5′’ now

Time: 2:20PM

Favorite band/artist: Billy Joel, even now

Song stuck in my head: I’ve been listening to Cabinet Man by Lemon Demon a lot, as well as Dearly Departed by Shakey Graves so I guess those

Last movie I saw: The Addams Family (1991)

Last thing I googled: "1909 speeches uprising of the 20000″ i’m working on a paper in case you can’t tell

Most iconic song: Oh Jeez I do not know....maybe Uptown Girl?  I’d have to ruminate on this more 

Other blogs: @oldenglishsongs which i did for all of two weeks two years ago, @bullyyourgayuncle when i watched wordgirl for all of exam season last spring

Do I get asks: On occasion!  Usually from people I know

Why did i choose this username:  It really is just nonsense and i think that’s neat

Following: 264.  Some are inactive now and I should probably unfollow them but like Who’s Got The Time

Average amount of sleep: I’m gonna say 8.  It’s been a good semester for sleep for me

Lucky number: 7 maybe?  I don’t really think about lucky numbers

What am I wearing: Tank top and workout shorts bc I have a dance class later today

Dream job: Forensic accountant?  History professor?  Unsure...I’ve got time

Dream trip: Not to cop @jay-catsby‘s answer but driving Route 1 from Maine to Key West!  After that, maybe a cross country east-west road trip!

Favorite food: Probably the latkes my mom makes...those Slap

Instruments you play: I sing, I’m decent at piano (I can teach myself songs if given enough time and motivation).  Once upon the time I tried to learn the flute

Eye color: Brown

Hair color: Brown

Languages you speak: Only English fluently, but I’m like...okay? at Spanish

Describe your aesthetic: floral shirts, iced coffee, maps and charts, kind of an amalgamation of knick-knacks.

Random fact: I’ve been painting my nails every Sunday since the beginning of the summer in late May/early June (in an effort to stop biting them), and I’ve been doing all sorts of cool patterns and colors and things!

I’ll tag @malheart bc @jay-catsby tagged the others I would’ve tagged and @eastdemons already tagged tabs

[empowermentofusworkingwomen]

Remembering the Uprising of 20,000

Image Source: My Jewish Learning

On this day, one hundred and ten years ago – on November 23, 1909, 20,000 immigrant women (the vast majority in their teens and early twenties) commenced an eleven-week strike against New York’s shirtwaist industry. Known as the “Uprising of 20,000”, the strikes were sparked by grievances regarding wages, hours, workplace safety, and gendered discriminations.

The women were opposed by three factors including the manufacturers, police, and the courts. Countless arrests, fines, and abuse ensued during the strikes. It is reported that over 700 women are arrested during November and December; 19 are sentenced to the workhouse. The strike cost $100,000 (equivalent in purchasing power to $2.7 million in today’s standards).

The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) organized mass rallies throughout the city fundraised, scheduled meetings, and distributing leaflets and benefit demands — all throughout the cold of winter. The league spent an average of $1,000 a day for bail. 

Towards the end of the eleven-weeks, many firms reached settlements with the strikers. Of the Garment Industries 353 firms, 339 signed contracts accepting women’s demands for negotiated wages, a fifty-two hour work week, equal division of work during seasons, four legal days of holiday pay, procurement of materials and tools without fee, and no discrimination against union supporters.

The Uprising of 20,000 marked a victory for women laborers and established them as competent union activists. It was the largest strike by women to that date in American history becoming an important precedent for collective action against big business and support for women’s suffrage.

References:

Michels, Tony. (20, March 2009). Uprising of the 20,000. Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women’s Archive. Retrieved November 21, 2019, from https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/uprising-of-20000-1909

Sachar, Howards. The ILGWU Strike of 1909. My Jewish Learning. Retrieved November 21, 2019, from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-international-ladies-garment-workers-union-strike/

Weatherford, Doris. (1997). Milestones: A Chronology of American Women’s History. Facts on Files, Inc. New York. 

[finlaylaverygc]

PhotoJournalism Research

Journalism Research

Photojournalism is the way of communicating information of an event or subject as a news story while it unfolds naturally without any input or interruption by the photographer. Unlike photography in a studio where everything is staged, is set to be a certain way and can have multiple reshoots and therefor artificial, Photojournalism is the complete opposite end of the spectrum where it’s subject can only potentially only happen once and can not be reshot, but it is still import for the photographer to be positioned and have their image composed in way to perfectly illustrate a story or part of a story to be used in the Journal, hence the combo of Photo and Journalism.  

The event in question can range from something as quaint and trivial as a small village fête or something shocking and world changing like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. Photojournalism has its origins in reporting details from war zones during the mid-1800s, the first officially documented photo used to illustrate an article on the June Days Uprising in Paris, 1848 where a photograph of some barricades on rue Saint-Maur were engraved in an evening edition of L'Illustration in July of the same year. As cameras became more compact and film negative developing techniques improved, the editors of the newspapers were able to have a quicker turn around time from the photos being taken, development and then publication, thus giving the editors more choice as to which images to use and what will make eye-catching front-page news. This would increase tenfold with the coming of the digital age to the point where the photos can be published live on an online article while the news story continues to unfold.        

 Magnum Photographers Research

 W Eugene Smith

World renowned American photographer William Eugene Smith, born in Wichita, Kansas USA 1918 and is claimed by some to be the most important photographer in American photojournalism and photo editorial essayist history. At the age of 18 he began working for a local newspaper taking photographs and eventually working as a freelance photographer for Life come the 1930s. In 1955 he became a member of the Magnum photo agency where he would take on assignments that would define his career. In Pittsburgh he was assigned to work for three weeks and take 100 photo to mark the city’s centenary but he ended up staying for three years and produced over 20000 photos depicting Pittsburgh and it’s dramatic industrial landscape. His most famous work however took him to the Japanese town of Minamata where he documented industrial pollution of water where a local factory and polluted the town’s water with Mercury, causing health problems and crippling physical defects on the local population and new-borns. He died not long after this ordeal aged just 59 in 1978.

  Ref:

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/w-eugene-smith?all/all/all/all/0

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/w-eugene-smith-minamata-warning-to-the-world/

William Vandivert

Co founder of Magnum began his career in his native Chicago, where in the 1930s he started as a newspaper photographer for the Chicago Herald Examiner. At the outbreak of World War 2 he moved to London where he gained notoriety as a photographer for Life magazine where he would capture photos of the London Blitz as well as horrifying scenes of Concentration Camps across Germany after the war had ended, as well as Hitler’s Bunker in Berlin. 

ref:

https://www.life.com/photographer/william-vandivert/

https://www.magnumphotos.com/about-magnum/history/

[rudolfmuehland]

Reposted from @workingclasshistory On this day, 23 November 1909, more than 20,000 garment workers in New York, mostly Jewish women and girls, walked out on a general strike: the biggest stoppage of women workers in the US to date. Facing severe repression, they held out for 11 weeks and won big concessions. This is a short history of the dispute: https://libcom.org/history/uprising-20000-tony-michels https://www.instagram.com/p/CH4lkDIgG5Y/?igshid=1o7mlz2lwrg6g

[nhlabornews]

Labor History in 2 is brought to you by Labor History in 2:00

[historybizarre]

Click through for a digital exhibit about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory labor strikes and fire.

[baldessariyourlife]

the uprising of the 20,000

[nhlabornews]

Labor History in 2 is brought to you by Labor History in 2:00