Both Walmart and Target conspire to keep workers from joining unions and both use strong arm tactics and lies to do this. A number of deluded shoppers think they are going to the ‘nice’ store when they go to Target but this is a false front story that has blown apart this week when disgruntled Target workers leaked the video used for ‘training’ workers toiling for the giant ‘good’ corporation. It is a pack of utter lies designed to fool workers into voting against their own interests.
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First, good news for workers abused by Walmart: Wal-Mart loses $187.6 million appeal over worker breaks. I remember the old, old Walmart run by the founder, Walton. He would visit all the stores in his trailer and park in the parking lots there and frankly, encouraged other nomads to overnight there, too. Today, there are signs warning people to not visit Walmart with a trailer or you will be towed.
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Back then, he rewarded his workers for showing enthusiasm and would get them involved in active sales and they were truly excited to work for him and liked the fact that he would come quietly amongst them and listen to them talk about their feelings about work. Now he is dead and dead-hearted drones took over and all they care about is the bottom line and no one falls further below the bottom line than workers.
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Instead of viewed as the engine that keeps the corporation running, they are viewed as nasty appendages that have to be kept locked out of profits as much as humanly possible. There have been stories all over the place about Walmart locking workers inside and forcing them to work long hours after the store closes, for example. Hiring many illegal aliens was also another way of cutting labor costs as we see in nearly all industries here.
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Walton made a big thing about ‘selling American’ products but right after his death, it became Chinamart. The red, white and blue paint that once decorated Walton’s stores has been replaced with brown paint. The differences between Walmart and Target are increasingly, vanishingly smaller as inflation rages.
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This week was the first vote for union representation as Target Workers In New York Vote Against Joining Retail Union:
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Workers at a Target store in New York voted against joining the country’s largest retail union Friday night, but the union said it would press on and broaden its push to represent the company’s workers nationwide…Both sides said the workers at Target’s Valley Stream store voted 137-85 against unionization. A “yes” vote would have made the store the first of the company’s 1,700 locations to bring in organized labor.
The online media that broke a big story about all of this has been Gawker: Target vs. Unions: An Inside Look. Once upon a time, many newspapers had unions. These have been steadily broken down to the point, they virtually no longer exist. Even when papers had unions, the owners would have reporters nearly always pitch union stories in such a way, the unions would look bad.
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So Americans have been exquisitely trained to hate unions. Since strikes cause discomfort, many people hate these strikes. Now that a number of issues of interest to workers were turned into laws such as Social Security laws, the need to organize fell enough for owners to banish unions entirely. The deal offered by Ronald Reagan was, no unions but low taxes in return for rejecting the only entity around that would protect workers.
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Since Reagan, ‘free trade’ which was always opposed by unions for obvious reasons, took off like a rocket. Any unionized industry that could be removed from our country was decimated and shipped overseas to non-union, cheap labor locales. The goods are then imported into the country which is why, since Reagan, we have run huge trade deficits that are now bankrupting the nation.
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The deal is, now that unions are destroyed, it is time to bring back production here but only if workers earn near-starvation wages again like in the Victorian era. The people running corporations are trained in school to learn how to fool or threaten workers legally and how to concoct arguments to fool them into voting against their own interests. These arguments are honed in politics, too, to fool people into voting against their own interests.
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Gawker managed to get a hold of an publish online (at great danger to themselves, they will be sued) the actual ‘training video’ used by the jerks at Target to intimidate or fool workers into voting against union representation: Here’s the Cheesy Anti-Union Video All Target Employees Must Endure – Gawker
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Yesterday, we learnedthat friendly red-hued big box retailer Target is now the “target,” ha, of a union campaign here in New York. Goodbye, Target’s reputation as a place that liberals who don’t like Wal-Mart can shop without guilt! But just how anti-union is Target? According to former Target employees: very.
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After yesterday’s story, we heard from multiple people who had or have worked at Target. Although Wal-Mart has a longstanding reputation as the most voraciously anti-union big box retailer, these employees tell us that Target is just as bad. For example, all new hires have to watch an anti-union video as part of their training.
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This video featured union actors who asked their union representative if they should be in an anti-union video and the union said ‘yes’. Wow. Talk about suicidal! The video does clearly reveal the nonsense taught in most US business schools and universities. The notion that unions are a ‘business’ is the latest example of rebranding something to disguise what it really is. A union is a union. But they can’t say this, they have to make it into something else in order to attack it.
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I have read the literature put out by business professors. A number of them, over the last 35 years, have cooked up this idiotic idea that individuals should negotiate with global corporations as individuals because both are equal players in the game! Wow! Talk about totally, utterly insane!
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The individual has zero power. The corporation has entire governments in its control. The individual can’t bribe lots of politicians whereas the corporation owns them. The individual can’t publish full page ads with his or her own point of view, corporations do this nonstop. An individual doesn’t have cozy relationships with banks, either. At no point does an individual have any leverage at all with any corporation. The only point of power is to have a full scale revolt.
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One way to keep individuals particularly powerless is to threaten to replace all of these pathetic, weak, disorganized individuals with foreign labor either at home or removing all traces of work overseas and then importing the goods. This has been ruthlessly applied to American workers who saw many millions of jobs vanish. When they do appear here, it is at very cheap wages with few or no benefits.
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.Person 2: A union is not a charity. It’s not a club and it’s not part
of the government. It’s a business. A business that has to take in
money to survive. But it doesn’t have any products to sell. All it
has is memberships to sell. A unions only source of income is the
money they charge members.
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The average person watching this video has no school training in what a union really is so when a corporate beast snarls at them, the trainees cringe and at the same time, desperately anxious to get work, will strive has hard as possible to view things in a way that will please their new bosses. So the bosses tell them that unions are a business, they agree since they have no debate points to counter this insane definition of a union.
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Unions don’t sell a product, they represent LABOR that makes the product. Labor is not goods. Labor is humans. Since the dawn of production of anything be it hides of animals turned into clothing, knapping rocks to make spear points, the important thing that turns mere rocks or dead animals into goods has been human labor.
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Human labor is VERY profitable and when the profits are divorced from the worker via either slavery or hiring someone to do the work, the person who owns the means of production gets the value added while the worker is locked out of this process as much as possible. The ideal is a total lock out via slavery. In slavery, the labor represented by the worker is sold to the highest bidder who has then the right to exploit this ruthlessly to the point of literal death.
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The only hold preventing death is the inherent value of the labor of the slave so if the slave is valuable, he or she is kept alive, often barely, to keep on functioning as long as possible. In general, the life of a slave is short and miserable. Places where workers gain respect and power are also places where workers live much, much longer.
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Person 1: Money for initiation, dues, fines, assessments. You get the
picture. So it’s pretty obvious that the fewer members their business
has the less money they collect.
Person 2: The unions only alternative is to get more people to pay
their hard earned money to them in dues every month.
Person 1: And that’s becoming more and more of a problem for unions
every day.
[chart showing the decline of unions]
Person 1: 50 years ago one out of every 3 workers was in a union.
Today that number excluding government workers is dropped to less than
1 in 10.
Person 2: One of the biggest reasons is that workers know that all the
good things unions once did child safety laws, workmans comp, all of
that they’re all laws today. Laws protecting workers. They were
passed along time ago.
Person 1: And no body wants to pay dues for something they already
have.
Person 2: So the numbers just keep going down. You can see why the
union would want to organize us here at Target..
After Reagan broke the air controller’s union, all other unions went into steep decline. Not due to busting them up violently. This was done insidiously: breaking apart all of the trade barriers that protected US workers. Once this was completely done, all unions in all industries pretty much vanished. Within the country, all of the pro-union states saw their industries move to former slave states.
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This is no surprise: the slave bias there was very pleasing to corporations seeking to take all profits from labor and hijacking it so it would flow to non-workers. Then, they turned their efforts to suck up all profits for themselves, the non-producers, and call this ‘labor’ instead of what it really is: ‘exploitation’. So the slave owner became the worker and the workers became ‘associates’.
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The cynical use of the word ‘associates’ to describe workers was cooked up in business schools funded by rich people. Redefining what people are is done in order to reorganize their relationship with their own labor. In this case, an ‘associate’ sounds both ‘higher status’ than mere ‘worker’ and worse, makes it sound as if the workers are somehow equal to the owners while at the same time, it disassociates the workers from their own labor and makes them look as if they are mere appendages like say, the corporate lawyers who are associated with the regime, not really involved in production at all.
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The history of writing about labor is long and horrible. Karl Marx cut to the chase 150 years ago by carefully defining what labor was and its relationship with capital in his famous book, ‘Das Kapital.’ Today, the relationship between labor and capital has been eradicated via language and image to the point, corporations can openly say that unions are businesses, not a collection of workers seeking power in negotiations over profit sharing with capitalists!
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On top of this, the entire concept of ‘capital’ has been carefully erased, too. This is also been done to the concept of ‘credit’ which is closely allied with the concept of ‘capital’. This mishsmash of misidentifying of things is straight out of Alice in Wonderland. The words no longer mean anything, they have been warped into the opposite of what they were.
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This haunts all levels of finance and business to the point, we saw all of this in collapse and it is still collapsing. So long as things remain this vapid way, we will see collapse get worse and worse. When all workers lose their fight for profit sharing, we get poor workers and production that can’t be sold to anyone since modern capitalist mass production MUST go to the workers! Otherwise, why mass produce anything?
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Of course, the global warming people have the answer to all this: workers should not use energy or goods but should live quietly in straw or mud huts while the elites live like lords and ladies in palaces and all the workers walk everywhere and only the elites would drive cars or fly planes and then the world will be safe again!
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Person 1: If the unions did try to organize Target team members they
could also try and bring along there way of doing business. An old
fashioned rigid structure.
Person 2: Old fashioned is right. Being able to change quickly and
adapt to new opportunities being flexible. That’s the key to running
a successful business in todays market and we’ve got the flexibility
now.
Person 1: Right you are. No one knows exactly what could happen. But
there are lots of examples of how rigid grocery store contracts could
hurt our stores ability to serve guests and actually hurt our team
members in the process..
Football players are still unionized. They are also being worked literally to death. The star players get whatever they want due to being singular. But the rest of the ‘teams’ are not star players and are worked brutally. Since the onslaught of TV, the playing time for the labor in these games has expanded to double or more their original length.
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The toll on bodies is horrific. Players live shorter lives, are brain damaged, suffer long term health effects and are overstressed greatly. Recognition of this is only just beginning. One can’t be a player unless one proves oneself to be very, very good. The competition is brutal and the length of time in the industry, short.
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The training is at universities which exploit this free labor to the hilt to make TV profit money for themselves. The number of students injured is great and this goes on in high school, too. Players trying to gain entry into the big leagues die! Yet none are paid a penny until they leave school and of all of this labor, only about 2% or less get jobs that pay anything later on.
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Renaming customers ‘guests’ turns shopping for bargains into something else, too. The point here it to turn everyone into alienated aspects of the corporation. We get to visit them, they are not enticing us into their stores hoping for money. No, we are visitors! We don’t bargain with them, we have to accept their set up and the only power we have is to not buy anything. But if all businesses are the same, it doesn’t matter, does it?
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People who hated Walmart ran off to Target only Target is Walmart. This is why chasing after ‘good corporations’ is a lost cause: none are good anymore. They have used the university system to create a whole new system which has infested everything. This is why the courts think corporations are ‘people’ too, for example and thus, have elevated the actions of these organizations into various legal forms that originally was only for individual humans.
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Unions didn’t mind corporations at all, this was the other organization that was operating in markets. But the unions have basically been eliminated so the corporate entity now interacts with individual shoppers and workers both of whom are cut out of the political process due to both being atomized individuals rather than organized groups vying for control of profits and markets.
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Person 2: Here’s what we mean. Let’s say you’re working in stationary
but you’re walking through domestics on your way to check on
something. A guest stops you and ask for help. What would you do?
With out even thinking about it you’d stop and give them any
assistance they required.
[scary background music starts to play again]
Person 2: But what if union work rules say you can’t work outside of
your department? What do you tell the guest? Sorry I can’t help
you? That makes you look bad. But more importantly it means our
guest doesn’t get immediate attention and they might not come back.
So everyone gets hurt. Everyone except the union. Right now team
members can get more hours based on their ability to cover more than
one area. You have the option of being cross trained and becoming a
more valuable member of your team.
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This is called ‘working people to death.’ That is, one is constantly pulled this way and that so the corporation can DELIBERATELY understaff their business. So the worker has to rush all the time. Instead of workers for each sector, all workers must cover as much as possible so they see half the staff needed which means they must do double the work…with no pay hikes!
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They are not a ‘team’ at all. They are atomized workers who have to individually cover more and more ground as the corporation makes a bigger profit by having half the workers! They are, in other words, chumps, not champs. The harder they work, the more money the corporation gets, the rewards for covering more floor sales equals ZERO profit to the workers. True, they might get a token pay raise for doing this but it is meaningless since it is based on hours of labor, not output in sales.
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Person 1: That’s right. But with a rigid union contract that may no
longer be an option.
Person 2: Also under the old fashioned union rules that really haven’t
changed in decades seniority rules. Rather than treating people as
individuals everything depends on when you were hired. Schedules, job
assignments, promotions, transfers, even days off are often decided by
seniority only.
Person 1: And that can be one of the least efficient and really not a
nice way to operate. There is no regard for individual skills and
needs of each team member. Top workers suffer because their
performance isn’t reflected in job assignments or promotions and the
company suffers because the best qualified people don’t necessarily
get the right jobs..
The corporate entity which isn’t a team but rather, is a means of extracting profits from labor and means of production, would dearly like its wage slaves to view themselves as ‘individuals’ who are totally atomized. Each striving to best the others and each struggling from day one, to gain some pay raises that are seldom forthcoming.
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Getting rid of seniority is primary for all exploiters of slaves. The Nazis would work subject people to death and this took care of Social Security for retirees: there were none. This was true of many systems in the past: the life length of workers was to die before age 60. Now that, thanks to unions, workers still have decent lives in some first world nations, they are living too long for the corporate entities which are anxious to now raise the retirement age so it comes after the deaths of most of the workers.
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People who have light labors live longer, so the upper middle class doesn’t fear early death but keeping mere laborers alive past 60 is useless to these people so there was talk yesterday of AARP joining with the GOP in cutting Social Security and Medicare going to these pesky workers. AARP quickly withdrew this scheme because the backlash was violent and swift with many seniors screaming death to AARP.
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AARP has been taken over by these corporate drones who are anxious to keep this organization going but who are really on the side of insurance sales schemes and other corporate activities. The mask has fallen and either they return to representing retired workers or the organization dies off.
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Getting rid of seniority means always firing people when they get worn out. As workers sacrifice themselves to enriching the corporations, they get literally worn out. Always replacing them with young workers means dying early and poor. So, unions have declared that older workers must stay and this is a prime thing when it comes to surviving literally as living organisms. The corporation wants older workers to literally die.
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There is a lot of misunderstanding of what Nazi concentration camps really were. They were processing points for slave labor. The children and elderly were winnowed out and KILLED on the spot via various ugly means. Meanwhile, the ones who could work were brutally abused and worked ruthlessly until they collapsed and died. The death rate was horrific and millions of people died this way.
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The slaves kidnapped from Africa had the same result: millions died while being captured, transported under very ugly conditions, shoved into brutal working conditions and then worked until they could no longer function and then left to die. This way, millions vanished in a terrifying, horrible way and the PROFITS from all of this made Europe and the colonies and the US nation much, much richer.
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This wealth flowed to the top 1% and was funneled often through various corporations and organizations of merchants, slave owning plantations and production centers as well as mining, the death rate from the mines was probably the worst of them all. These slaves were treated as individuals whereas the slave owners and exploiters and bankers all belonged to various associations, corporations and collectives. Any slave or worker trying to do the same was brutally, violently and viciously suppressed.
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People died, trying to free the slaves and outlaw slavery, many people died trying to organize unions and associations for workers. It has always been a very dangerous business, trying to remold mere individuals into powerful collective organizations. And the corporations know their power grows out of the barrel of their organization, not individuals!
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One thing about libertarians that infuriates me: they stupidly imagine that individual heroes are all about capitalism! How sad is this? Since the first hunting party was organized, power is in the hands of the group, not the individual! Ten hands is stronger than two hands! Gangs are more powerful than individuals! Armies are stronger than Rambos.
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Person 2: Once again the only winner is the union. That can justify
collecting dues from people that don’t get the jobs or hours they want
based simply on that seniority date. They don’t have to offer an
explanation at all about why someone else might be better qualified
for the job and at Target we don’t have those rigid rules. We’re open
and honest. You’ve got the desire, we’ll tell you what you need to do
to get ready for another assignment. We believe in putting the best
person in every job based on their qualifications not on seniority.
That helps to keep our employees productive and our guests happy..
Person 1: And speaking of our guests they can also be a Target of the
unions. Some day you might come in to work and find pickets telling
guests to not shop at Target. Or you might read articles about unions
threatening to boycott our stores just to scare away our guests and
encourage them to shop somewhere else. None of that helps you or any
other team member. After all every one of us depends on our guests
for our jobs.
Person 2: That’s right because the union needs your dues money at some
point you might be asked to join. We’ll talk about the tactics
organizers might use in a minute.
Person 1: But first it’s important for you to know Targets philosophy
on unions.
Jim Rowader (Target Director, Labor Relations & Sr. Counsel): Hi. I’m
Jim Rowader. Team members have the right to join unions, but they
also have a right not to join unions. Experience has shown us that
after learning the facts Target team members agree union
representation is not in their best interest. In fact not one group
of Target team members today has chosen to be represented by a union.
Ultimately what works best for Target and our team members is the
ability to meet challenges, resolve issues, and grow the business
together. With out the interferance of a union or other 3rd party.
3rd party representation, trying to divide us, is contrary to our
company philosophy and beliefs. Our team environment strives to
create a clear direct path of communication. We believe in solving
issues and concerns by working together. All of us. Team members,
team leaders, group leaders, supervisors, and managers will work
together to insure an environment open to discussing and resolving
concerns. Target celebrates the success of team members and strives
to recognize excellent performance. We do these things because it is
the right thing to do. And because we believe working together with
out union representation is the best way to grow and flourish. I’m
convinced that a union would not improve anything at Target. Not for
our team members, not for our guests, and not for our company. Bottom
line at Target you don’t need to pay dues to a third party to have a
work place where world class team members work together, listen to
each other, and treat each other with dignity and respect.
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Note how the slave labor has to be building the business of the owners but are told, they are in this together even though the owners will kick the slave labor to the pit of hell if this brings more profit to the corporation. The workers need corporations to stay alive but corporations do NOT need workers as individuals, only as a concept, a pool of labor. So, if the pool is full, they can merrily fish out more workers at will and the workers know this so they fear for their jobs.
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Placating the owners is the way of doing this; pleasing them means keeping these jobs but as it dawns on the workers, they get no pay raises while inflation rages, they get no time off, they are running around like mad and getting nothing for the extra work being piled on in the name of ‘productivity’ then they discover their leverage over their bosses is nil. Their investment in time and labor in the corporation is zero. They are kicked out with nothing except past laws protecting labor passed when we had unions.
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Laws which the corporations work day and night to eliminate or suppress or make impossible to enforce! This is where bribing politicians gets into the picture. We see this process first hand, daily, in the US as the corporations devour everything in sight while being more and more, international entities that hate us as individuals and as a nation.
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Person 1: You may not realize it, but your signature on that card or
petition is very valuable to a union.
Person 2: It’s true your autograph can create a legal contract
obligating you to the union.
Person 1: And that won’t be what a union organizer tells you though.
You may hear statements like your signature isn’t important it’s just
to get more information. Or just sign the card every body else is
doing it.
Person 2: The card its self is not dangerous, but the words printed on
it are. Lots of times union cards or petitions contain words like I
hereby authorize the union to represent me or I hereby accept
membership when you sign one of those you may be joining the union.
Person 1: Your signature could be used by the union to get the right
to legally represent you and collect dues with out even letting you
vote.
Person 2: Some unions have even gone so far as to use signatures to
force themselves on employees even after the majority of employees
have voted against the union representation.
Person 1: Right. You may be wondering ok, why is that such a big
deal? It’s a big deal because when a union becomes a team members
representative that team member loses the legal right to deal directly
with the management team.
Person 2: No more open door. With a union you no longer have your own
voice. Have a great suggestion? You can’t take it directly to your
manager. You have to go through the union layers. Need help with a
problem? Same thing. Someone else will do the talking for you. And
there’s no guarantee you’ll like what they have to say.
Guarantees. Guarantees and promises. That’s something else you might
hear from a union. Unions often make big promises about wages and
benefit increases if the team member will only sign their card. Those
are promises they can’t keep.
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So, according to the organization of the corporation, if an individual is being represented by a union lawyer, this is an evil thing for the worker? HAHAHA. Try hiring a personal lawyer to fight a corporation! Impossible. And they know this perfectly well indeed.
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Of course, if the majority of workers vote to be a union, all are part of the union. Even the fools who vote against this. Try being an individual going the other way from the majority of the shareholders in a corporation…they get rid of the irritating individual very fast. There are no individuals in business. There are groups, alliances and above all, organizations of all sorts. Think that lawyers don’t have ‘unions’ of their own? Of course, they do!
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The ‘open door’ for corporations is a one way trap door: you can go in to ask if you can work harder for less. Anyone coming in to complain about the corporation are booted back out again, into the street! On the other hand, you CAN complain to a union and maybe have some sort of action! This, the corporation fears above all else.
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As for unions promising raises and benefits: absolutely, this works! As unions die off, wages collapse and benefits have been disappearing fast. And the corporations know this perfectly well. In NY, workers voted against the union only slightly more than voted for it due to this dishonest video. They really don’t understand how unions work. And it is the job of union organizers to watch this video closely and learn how to change the language being used by the corporations to get workers to sign their own death warrants.
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And here is an example as to why we need unions: Man Fired After Disclosing Wife’s Cancer To Employer. The ‘open door’ is a trap door to hell. And the corporations love this. Very much love this. 
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Just like colonialism is alive and well in the modern world so is feudalism. The same mechanisms are still present just cloaked and hooded in various invisibility mechansims and packaged in modern PR and propaganda/school/university brainwashing.
The agenda of the Bilderbergers (which is just one tool among many for the elite) is basically the same as the old feudal lords was, as is the top 1 % (and their underlings/henchmen and -women) profiting from today’s policies in the US/Japan etc, that is to fleece the masses as much as possible with the masses accepting the situation as unchangable reality.
No sooner had the Tories grabbed power in the UK before the same old started. Just like in the US when Dubya grabbed power (thanks to the corrupt US Supreme Court) there are now accusations in the UK that the right wing government does not have the mandate to push through the far right wing policies (a throw back to the dark old days of Thatcher). Just the other day there were finally signs of a fight back with the Unions mobilizing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/18/biggest-strike-100-years-union
Germany was forced to swallow the Greece bail out package by the IMF (now led by Lipsky – ex Wall Street shark and butcher of Chile in the 70′s) and the current EU head Juncker of Luxembourg (Luxembourg which itself is simply an enormous tax haven for (the top 1% again) old money/tax evasion/money laundering – like the channel islands etc of the UK). Juncker threatened Germany with a “Lehman style “credit event”" that would ruin the euro project through contagion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/17/greece-bailout-germany-private-banks
Target probably has a strong case for copyright infringement. Jury selection would be crucial, because it looks like the only real issue would be damages.
It isn’t obvious Target can prove substantial actual damages, and if the jury awards the statutory minimum, Target will be the loser.
In Quebec ,a while back, a Walmart store was unionised. A short time later the store was closed.
Unions can become too powerful, just the same, find out about “Featherbedding”
Target added to the “no shop” list. Quite honestly these big box stores are a waste of my time as I travel the length of a football field in search of an item that usually isn’t stocked. As the baby boomers age, I really can’t imagine many of them wanting to traverse a football field interior for the out of stock sale item back to the service desk requesting a raincheck and do it all over again. I think alot of these superbox stores will quickly become dinosaurs.
As for Reagan’s illegal anti-union air traffic controllers intervention, it came on the heels of our anti-union southern president Jimmy Carter and the first Chrysler bailout. This was the beginning of union concessions, anti-union workers rhetoric (greedy UAW workers) and seduction of union leaders by the corporate pimps to undermine union workers rights. Carter’s self imposed penance of Habitat for Humanity as the goodwill counter will never redeem the amount of harm he had inflicted on the past, present, and future laborers of this country, Never.
Last point, corporations are the updated version of the southern plantation slavery model. With the same goals, enormous profits earned on the backs of human labor paid as little as possible as the genteel slave master relaxes on his veranda berating those no good for nothing lazy losers who’ll rob you blind. In fact I’d say Jack Welch’s book Winning is the bible of the corporate freeloading CEO’s and top management. I can’t wait for one of these corp CEO’s waiting in the ER grabbing their chest as the doctor leans over and says Jack Welch is my hero, Winning is my bible. The hell with on the job training, residency, and years of learning medicine. Profit is my number one priority and so are shortcuts! Don’t worry I got this one………where the hell is my cost-cutting scalpel, Dont worry I got this one, surgery is much more profitable without the extra’s like nurses and sterilzation……..
Excellent post, Elaine. This one should be printed up and handed out with those union check-off cards to open the eyes of workers.
Gosh, this story gives me more reasons to shop locally!
Politics is really different here.
We just got a new government:
Spending cuts, higher taxes but also 100€ more per month to the poorest citizens to make up for inflation.
And unions are a part of nearly all national decicions.
The system is called collective bargaining between industries, unions and the government.
New program for 2011-2015:
“The six-party programme focuses primarily on the stabilisation of public finances, reduction of poverty, inequality and discrimination and building lasting economic growth and employment as well as increasing competitiveness.
The incoming government plans to strengthen state finances to the tune of 2.5 billion euros, half of which will come from spending cuts, while the other half will come from taxation.
The right to mortgage interest reductions will be gradually reduced, while capital earnings taxes will be applied progressively, meaning that higher earnings will be taxed more heavily.”
http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/news/2011/06/new_government_coalition_presents_its_agenda_2671553.html
Elaine said “Human labor is VERY profitable and when the profits are divorced from the worker via either slavery or hiring someone to do the work, the person who owns the means of production gets the value added while the worker is locked out of this process as much as possible. The ideal is a total lock out via slavery. In slavery, the labor represented by the worker is sold to the highest bidder who has then the right to exploit this ruthlessly to the point of literal death.”
This is not 1800 anymore Elaine. Slavery is but the owning of labor, you have to take care of the slave: provide a roof over his head, feed him, clothe him and make sure he stays healthy. This was way too much hassle for the capitalists. So, they got rid of physical slavery and decided that they could still own us via the capital control of labor, by controlling wages, which can be achieved by controlling the money.
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ELAINE: That explains why the southern slave owners fought to the death? I beg to differ here: ‘roof over the head’ when it is a flimsy shanty, barely enough food to stay alive, that is an expense? Barely!
“IF this so-called science Political Economy, did not
busy itself with that with which all juridical sciences are
concerned, with furnishing an apology for violence, it
could not fail to overlook the strange phenomenon that the
distribution of wealth and the exploitation of some men by
others are dependent upon money, and that only by
means of money do some people command the labor
of others nowadays, that is, to enslave them.
” In antiquity, with its frequent conquest of nations
and the absence of human equality, personal slavery
was the most wide-spread method of subjugating men.
” In the Middle Ages the feudal system, that is,
landed property and the accompanying serfdom, par-
tially supplants personal slavery, and the centre of
gravity of subjugation is transferred from the person
to the land.
” In modern times, since the discovery of America
and the development of commerce, with the overflow
of gold made the universal money token, the money-
tribute has become, with the strengthening of govern-
mental authority, the chief means of the subjugation
of men, and by it are determined all the economic
relations of men.”
COUNT LEO TOLSTOI.
The same reason Big Business interest groups–like the Chamber of Commerce–fight unionization is also why they so fiercely oppose health care reform. On its face, opposition to healthcare reform by Big Business doesn’t make sense; the skyrocketing costs of health care would seem to be a powerful driver FOR HCR by business to dump the current, costly system. Not so. The C of C is firmly opposed to a single payer type system. Why is that? In one word: POWER. If an employer can have the power over its employees to strip them of their jobs AND their health care coverage, this is a powerful incentive for employees to comply to the employers ever increasing demands. Demands for working longer hours, working for less or no benefits, demands for greater productivity,etc. The Big Corporations in the US know full well that taking away health care coverage gives them tremendous leverage over their employees. And they exploit this advantage to the full. Make no mistake. If the US Chamber or any of the other powerful business lobby group wanted health care reform, they would not hesitate to voice their feelings. And the business lobby is extremely well funded, so they certainly could marshal the resources to make a big push for health care reform. They don’t do this because they don’t want to; it’s not in their REAL interest to promote cost cutting measures in health care.
Our would-be feudal masters really yearn to have slaves; and they won’t be satisfied until slavery is a reality. The impulse of capitalists is inexorable, and pulls them more and more toward this desire to completely control people. I saw a documentary on PBS World about young workers in a Chinese textile factory. When the floor bosses (one of whom is an ex-policeman) try to bully the workers–mostly young women and girls–to do a long overtime stint after their payday has been delayed and they are financially desperate, the women confront him, start yelling and really get in his face, and are at the point of refusing to continue until there is some commitment to pay them. And they succeed in getting a pledge to pay them.
Just contrast this to the story Elaine tells about the psychological work that is done to the psyche of American workers by employers at Target. Language itself is twisted and words are manipulated by company propaganda, to convince workers that the union is trying to get its hands on their hard earned money and frustrate their potential as individuals. The solidarity and bargaining power workers would achieve in their union is described as a threat to themselves, the company, and the customers. Corporatism, as we know it, is an instrument of psychological warfare against the workers, an act of persuasion that manipulates people into defeating their own best interests, using fear and misinformation to confuse and alienate them.
I knew Target had gone right-winged when it was revealed in the 2010 runup to the Teagbag election that its CEO had contributed to a right-wing rock band set up as a Christian nonprofit that advocated that the state execute gay people! I haven’t been there since.
I know what these elites want: they want fascist feudalism where all are slaving in concentration camps that are not run by the state but by private interests as debtors’ prisons. And if their plans backfire, of course, they will all flee to israel, even the WASP, Catholic and insane end-time born again Christian elites, the last of whom are at this very minute plotting and scheming to turn that place into Jesusland. In order to bring on the Second Coming! Sheesh.
That explains why the southern slave owners fought to the death? I beg to differ here: ‘roof over the head’ when it is a flimsy shanty, barely enough food to stay alive, that is an expense? Barely!Elaine
Still stuck on the Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich fantasies?
You can’t explain away the obvious. If slave owners hated owning slaves, why on earth did this fight to the death for the right to do this? Duh.
The rest of your belief system collapses when you figure this simple fact out.
They fought to the death against an alien invader. A gang of blue coated rapists, murderers, child killers intent on enforcing tariffs designed to beggar the agrarian states.
The war of northern aggression had nothing to do with slavery. It was about tariffs and other assorted forms of northern theft.
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ELAINE: The Civil War began because the Supreme Court said the North had to return escaped slaves! So…who is forcing who to do what? The slave owners forced the free states to capture and return slaves who did NOT want to live in that hell hole.
Oh the war was about slavery alright. It was also about Southern paranoia, which was centered in classic guilt complex, where the deep-seated guilt was revealed by an astonishing wave of religious hysteria and revivalism in the South in the years just prior to the war. I think guilt in the psychiatric literature is somewhere described as the child’s subconscious desire to be punished for wrongdoing.
The paranoia was mostly among the northern industrialists. Trying to hide behind a huge tariff wall and realizing that if the southern states left the union, the northern states would face a very pourous land boundry that would make ineffectual their tariffs.
It is difficult to “seal” a land border. You can see that in the USA from San Diego to Galveston. Porosity = profit whether you are smuggling English Industrial product or Mexican serfs.
And the most ironic thing is that here we are 150 years after that war, and our biggest exports are ag products, and scrap metal.
Slavery was an irrelevacy. The cotton gin, the stationary steam engine, the mechanical rice planter were making chattel slavery an economically losing proposition. Wage slavery on the other hand was moving up the ladder of appropriate enslavement methods.
The psychological projections are risible.
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ELAINE: We now have no tariffs and incidentally, NO INDUSTRIES. I wish people could figure out simple stuff.
Good explanation of modern day wage slavery, CK.
Master will never give up his prerogatives as long as he can lift up the flap of the tent or enter the slave quarters after dark to pleasure himself. Read Lincoln’s second inaugural address about the sins of the lash too, and the expiation in blood, for that sin. Don’t efface the moral content of life with the blather about slavery being irrelevant.
The Southerners of that time were paranoid, having gone to their Old Testament to dredge up justification for enslaving black people whom they considered lesser, and not quite human. Yet they used the slave women for sex and their own descendants issued from the loins of same. This makes for real psychological conflict. Hubris, greed, the desire to possess limitless land for slaveholding, the desire for a kind of domination that crosses all moral and rational bounds, and the complete refusal to put up with Northern tolerance for their peculiar slave institution in slave states: these were the causes of the Civil War.
The Southern position was utterly irrational. Tolerance to paraphrase Lincoln, was unacceptable to them; from the Free States they demanded a complete acquiescence.
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Checkmate:The Real Great Emancipator at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference in 1865
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson6.html
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…Unknown to all except a few insiders of the administration, meaning that members of the Congress did not know, the president had already issued secret orders on April 1, to send a fleet of ships to Fort Sumter in order to provoke the South into firing the first shot in order to start the war. (For more details see my chapter “Lincoln and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception” in the book Reassessing the Presidency.) Lincoln stated that he could not wait until the seceded states decided what to do and added:
“But what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery? Am I to let them go on?”
Baldwin replied:
“Yes sir, until they can be peaceably brought back.”
Lincoln then replied:
“And open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry, with their ten percent tariff . . .” (as opposed to the much higher forty percent Federal tariff). “What then would become of my tariff?” (For more details on this meeting and a subsequent meeting with President Lincoln by other delegates of the Virginia Secession Convention, again see my chapter “Lincoln and the First Shot”)
The original Constitution, still in effect before the war, prohibited all “direct” taxes on the people, i.e. income, estate, gift, etc., so almost all the revenue to operate the Federal government in Washington was derived from an “indirect” tax on imports. The South, being agricultural, had to import almost all manufactured goods from Europe (primarily England) or buy the products from the North. The higher the tax on imports, the more protection the North got to raise its prices for its manufactured goods and for this reason a high import tax was called a “protective tariff.” As long as, the import tax was ten percent or less it was classified as a “revenue tax” to which the South did not object. In fact, the new Confederate Constitution adopted in March of 1861, placed a maximum tax on imports of ten percent. However, when an import tax or tariff exceeded ten percent, it became known as a “protective tariff” for the protection of domestic (Northern) industry. Shortly before the war, the Chicago Daily Times was only one of many newspapers predicting a calamity for federal revenue and business in the North if the South was allowed to secede with its ten percent limit on import taxes which would attract trade, especially from abroad, to the South rather than the North. In an editorial it stated:
“In one single blow our [Northern] foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade will pass into other hands . . . We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories will be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue (ten percent or less), and these results would likely follow.”
In a debate in England, two notable British citizens, Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, took opposing views on the cause of the American War Between the States with Mill stating that the purpose of the war was the abolition of slavery and Dickens maintained that “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”
To rewrite the Civil War as a fight over tariffs is odd and dishonest when Americans had already begun killing each other in Bloody Kansas over slavery. The power of the schism was already dividing families and was so potent that it was becoming internecine before the first state proclaimed secession. Slavery is even mentioned in some secession documents. You guys are fooling no one.
I think it was Fredrick Douglass who wrote about the corrosive effect on the character of those who were otherwise decent people, as soon as they became slave owners. This kind of absolute control over people ruins the character of those who become tainted by it. I find it astonishing that such a historical crime, with so many victims,– whose legacy has followed generations of Americans like a miasma or a curse,– into the Twentieth Century, with Night Riders and lynchings, and has so polluted us in a moral sense, that we still have not completely purged it, can thus be trivialized and lightly flicked off with an arrogant shrug.
Those who will not take responsibility for the history of their country have some explaining to do. Look at the electoral map of the South in the elections of George W. Bush: the same states stick out like a sore thumb. The map of 1860. There will not be a checkmate, Dupree, because the board has already been cleared. As long as some men define their freedom as the right to put other people in bondage, we have a problem.
“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.” –Abraham Lincoln (Second Inaugural Address)
Yes, they try very hard to hide the slavery issue. No surprise. Slavery became very profitable after the cotton mill, etc because it was cheap! Even factory workers could strike, could leave, could move out of the country. Any slave leaving work was KILLED. A HUGE DIFFERENCE which surprises me how southerners evade understanding this.
On the other hand, anyone who supports slavery can come to my mountain. I need a few slaves! Lots of work here! Come, please. Remember: I get the right to kill you if you try to escape again.
The support for slavery is in the old and new testaments, true Jews and Christians can probably cite the relevant books, chapters and verses.
No one here is supporting slavery, I was trying to point out that as a cause of the war of northern aggression, slavery was not even in the top three.
By the time of his second innagural, Lincoln needed something with which to whip up the losers in the North. Federal Slavery ( known as conscription ) was indeed unpopular.
@EMS: Indeed the fugitive slave act was the motivation for most of the NORTHERN states to attempt to Nullify federal law. Wisconsin I believe did officially nullify. Other states more or less nullified by inertia.
You should read the US tarriff handbook someday Elaine. We have thousands of tarriffs on millions of items. Each one a “special pleading” for some inept or inefficient local industry. Oh protect us from the foreign devils who can grow wool better and cheaper than we. Oh Woe is Us alas alack. We wants the pretty bah bah bahs but cannot raise them as efficiently as others so we must be protected. So we can sell our wool for more than its worth to folks not allowed the option of buying from more efficient producers.
The USA has never had free trade, never will.
And contrary to your claim, slavery was only profitable so long as there was no mechanization in the rice and cotton industries. One machine replaced dozens of slaves. The machine didn’t need to sleep, to eat, to poo; didn’t need clothes or wetnurses or midwifes.
Once the machines appeared the slave system was over. One might notice
that the same thing happens in other industries, robot welders in detroit don’t buy the cars they build. Industrial Age Machines replaced chattel slaves, Information Age machines replaced wage slaves.
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ELAINE: The south, not the north, shot first, big time. No one could ‘nullify’ slavery because the Supreme Court FORCED them to return slaves. If slaves could flee the south, it was OK. But once this was prevented, it became a life and death struggle. When the sheriff in Troy NY tried to return a run away slave in 1860, right before the war, there was a riot as people fought to prevent the arrest!
It is the CRITICAL difference between being a laborer and a slave: you can be worked to death and if you try to leave, they arrest you or kill you with impunity.
And before Reagan, yes, the US didn’t have free trade. And virtually no trade deficit. Except after 1970, in oil.
The machine couldn’t pick the cotton.
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Any slave leaving work was KILLED. A HUGE DIFFERENCE which surprises me how southerners evade understanding this
A slave brought something like $4000 in 1840 at the auction block.. Why would he kill that slave. Fugitive slaves were hunted down,” but hardly killed.
Have you been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin again?
Try reading Allen Huffman’s , Mississippi In Africa:The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and their Legacy in Liberia Today.
There were efforts by plantation owners as early as 1830 to repatriate African slaves back to Africa. Huffman traces such a plan by the Ross family of Prospect Hill Plantation, Mississippi to repatriate his slaves–if they so chose–back to Liberia. At Ross’ death, his will stipulated that the plantation be sold and the proceeds were to finance the slaves journey back to Liberia. However, the descendants of Ross fought the will in courts, still monies were allocated to the slaves that went to back to Africa. They named their new home, Mississippi. They retained the Ross family name even today.
The basis for Huffman’s research was gleaned from public court records of Jefferson Davis county, memoirs and letters found in records of the Ross family estate.
A slave in hand was worth a lot. An escaped slave was worth nothing. They KILLED these slaves to SCARE THE OTHERS into not running away. Got that? Sheesh! What is the matter with people? Read the history of slavery! Read ROMAN history! Slaves who fought or ran were crucified or fed to lions.
Even George Washington’s slaves ran off. He tried to fetch them back, too! My god…I am just flabbergasted about all of this.
The slaves mainly stayed put due to NO CHOICES. They took the family names because most of them WERE family: via slave women sexually used by slave masters. This included American Presidents who had sex with their slaves. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom really were aunts and uncles. Not someone else. This is why most American blacks (not recent immigrants from Africa) were nearly uniformly ‘mixed blood’ rather than fully ‘black’.
@EMS
Sometimes you do that purposefully ignorant schtick just for the laughs I think.
Wisconsin nullified the fugitive slave laws imposed by congress and ratified by the supremes. Slave made it to wisconsin, the wisconsinites didn’t do squat to help repatriate him or her to suawanee. The relevant question being how many divisions does the supreme court direct. The court might have ruled something legal, the abolitionist states didn’t much care.
Blockade runners do get shot at. The North tried to run the blockade and the south tried to enforce its secession and ownership of fort sumter.
Lincoln succeeded in getting the south to shoot first. Hooray for the rail road lobbyist turned president.
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ELAINE: What on earth did Lincoln do?
Eh???? He got ELECTED! Immediately, the South went into revolt and the FIRST DAY he got into the WH, the military arm of the South began to prepare to ATTACK. It was an ATTACK. They shot first. Sheesh.
As for Wisconsin going against the Supreme Court ruling: that was illegal and this is why Wisconsin supported Lincoln in doing something about the slave state guys wanting to expand slavery into all Western states.
This is why most American blacks (not recent immigrants from Africa) were nearly uniformly ‘mixed blood’ rather than fully ‘black’.~Elaine
The mixed blood were described as “high yallers,” and the “pure blacks” were “blue-gummed.”
So, Elaine, why did the freed African slaves in the South not pick up the machettes, axes and pitchforks and slay ther white masters and family as many bible-thumping abolitionists must have prayed for in their “places of worship.”
The first victim at Harper’s Ferry was a black freedman murdered by John Brown and his bible-thumping abolitionist mob.
Your problems with racism is obvious. Slaves were easy to spot due to being darker skinned so even FREE slaves who were no longer slaves were treated virtually the same (they had no equal rights at all). Now, the lack of a slave uprising is simple to understand: most of the Civil war was fought in the south so these slaves were surrounded by heavily armed white males.
Ask me why people in say, Burma or Vietnam or the Philippines didn’t kick out the Japanese in WWII? Same answer: they were disarmed by the Japanese and were disarmed by the European colonialists before the Japanese came in and so fighting was VERY DIFFICULT.
See? You try fighting with no arms and see what happens.
Yeah those unarmed vietnamese are an example of the inability of a people to fight. If memory serves, the Vietnamese spent over 300 years unarmed fighting various invaders and colonizers the Chinese, the Siamese, the Lao, the French, the japanese, the French again and the US.
Lincoln sent federal troops and ships into south carolina sovereign waters to reinforce and rearm the troops at fort sumter. The south carolinians indeed fired upon the invaders … it’s what sovereign states do, they protect their land from invasion.
Very little of the civil war was fought in the plantation states, Louisiana, Miss, Ala Fla and Georgia until way late in the war. Most of the first years of the war the battles were in Virginia and the border states and on the waters.
The high point for the south was their attack on Gettysburg which is in PA.
The men and boys of the south were away and yet the slaves did not revolt against the southern belles and children?
The civil war was fought to save the Protective Tariff for the northern banks and fledgeling industrialists, slavery was a non issue to the Lincoln administration until it looked like the North could lose on the battle field.
Enslaving northern white immigrants into the military did finally win the war for the North. More cannon fodder for the federal government, all of it so that banks and companies would not have to face a level playing field.
It worked. The northern railroads were transcontinental just after the war ended ( 5/10/69), the tariffs kept prices high and profits higher. The ex-slaves now had to buy their own food, buy their own clothes, provide their own housing and medical care but they were sorta free to become sharecroppers and enjoy Northern Jim Crow and Southern Carpetbaggery.