Employment negotiations exist as an alternative to violence.
Not as a favor. Not as charity. Not because owners discovered kindness. Negotiations exist because the alternative is workers burning everything down. Killing the people in charge. Taking what they need by force.
The deal was simple. Pay people enough to live. Treat them with basic dignity. Give them a fraction of the value they create. In exchange, they don’t come for your head. They don’t burn your factory. They don’t drag you from your home and tear you to pieces in front of your family.
This is the history of labor rights that owners would prefer you forget.
For most of American history, violence went one direction. Owners beat workers. Owners shot workers. Owners hired Pinkertons to kill strikers. Owners called the National Guard to fire on miners. Owners blacklisted, fired, and starved anyone who asked for better.
Twelve to sixteen hour days. Child labor. Company towns where wages were paid in scrip only usable at the company store. Wage theft. No safety. No compensation for injury. When a worker lost an arm in a machine, the owner hired a new worker and paid nothing to the one who lost the arm.
When workers asked for better, they were beaten. When they organized, they were shot. When they struck, they were fired and replaced. The violence was one-way. Owners to workers. Always.
Then the violence started going both ways.
Haymarket in 1886. A bomb thrown at police during a labor protest. Eight anarchists arrested. Four executed.
The police had killed strikers.
The bomb was the response.
Homestead in 1892. Armed strikers fought Pinkertons. The Pinkertons had come to break the strike. The strikers beat them back. Workers killed. Pinkertons killed. The violence went both ways.
Ludlow in 1914. The National Guard fired on a tent colony of striking miners. Set fire to the tents. Women and children burned alive. Eleven children dead. This wasn’t a riot. This was a massacre. And it radicalized workers across the country.
Owners were assassinated. Bombed. Shot. Managers were dragged from offices. The violence that had been one-directional became mutual. The concessions came after. Not before. The eight-hour day came after Haymarket. The weekend came after decades of strikes. Minimum wage came after workers demanded it with force.
The New Deal was not benevolence. FDR didn’t grant labor rights because he was kind. He granted them because the alternative was revolution. The system was cracking. Workers were organizing. Communism was rising. The Depression had created mass suffering. The New Deal was the compromise. Accept capitalism. Accept the system. In exchange, you get basic rights, protections, a wage you can live on.
Employment negotiations became the alternative to violence. That was the point. That was always the point.
Then, employers forgot.
They forgot what came before the negotiations. They forgot why the negotiations existed. They dismantled the unions. They stagnated wages for fifty years. They eliminated benefits. They treated workers as disposable costs. They broke the deal.
“Fight for $15” started in 2012. That was fourteen years ago. Inflation has made $15 a poverty wage. The living wage in most cities is now $25 or more. Employers haven’t just ignored the ask. They’ve watched the demand increase while doing nothing. The longer they wait, the higher the number goes. They’re not just refusing. They’re falling further behind every year.
The warnings were explicit. Workers have been saying this for years. Pay us enough to live. Give us basic dignity. Treat us like human beings. The warnings came in petitions, strikes, union votes, campaigns. Employers ignored them. They chose to break the deal.
Now they’re finding out what the alternative looks like.
Luigi Mangione allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Brian Thompson was shot in the street. The public response was not horror. It was memes. Jokes. “Deny, defend, depose.” “Thoughts and prayers to his money.” People laughed. The lack of sympathy was the story. A healthcare CEO was killed. His company denies claims. People die from denied coverage. The public watched a billionaire get shot and felt nothing. That’s the signal. The social contract is broken. The alternative to negotiation is showing up.
Chamel Abdulkarim burned down a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. A million square feet. Destroyed. On video he said, “I am not paid enough to live on.” His co-workers initially blamed robots. They didn’t consider that a worker would burn the facility.
They should have.
The conditions guarantee it.
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”
This isn’t a demand for luxury. This isn’t a demand for comfort. This is rent. Food. Survival. The bare minimum. Employers couldn’t even do that. They couldn’t pay workers enough to afford housing in the cities where they work. They couldn’t pay workers enough to eat without food stamps. They couldn’t pay workers enough to live.
The alternative to survival is what? Employers are finding out.
They told you. Workers told you in 2012. They told you with strikes. They told you with union campaigns. They told you with petitions and demands and warnings. You didn’t listen. You broke the deal. You dismantled the alternative to violence. You took away the negotiations. You left workers with nothing.
Violence was always the alternative. That’s what employment negotiations replaced. That’s what the New Deal bought. When you break the deal, you don’t get to act surprised when the alternative returns.
The violence went one direction for most of American history. Owners killed workers. Then workers killed owners. Then the deal was made. Now the deal is broken. The violence is going both ways again.
All you had to do was pay us enough to live. That was the deal. That was the warning. That was the request. Not luxury. Not wealth. Enough to survive. You couldn’t do that. You wouldn’t do that. You chose to break the deal.
Now you’re finding out what happens when you refuse.
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There is a paralell dynamic with today’s authoritarian movement on the right.
I remember well my high school government & history teacher saying “Politics is a proxy for violence”. We agree to a set of rules we think is fair for decisionmaking so that we don’t make decisions by actually fighting each other.
As we see the authoritarian state under Donald Trump unfurl, even conservative voices have wondered aloud “do they really think they will always be in power and not have to answer for all this corruption” and the answer is Yes. They DO think they can corrupt out electoral process and never give up power. That IS their plan, it is in motion as we speak.
But its a plan based on the same blindness you talk about here: They assume that the plurality of the company will just let them do it. They think they can do the outrageous, the illegal, and the other side will agree to be the victim. We obviously wont. Mass protests are already happening, general strikes have started, and a wide variety of more agressive responses remain open to us if they really want to push it. Americans are extremely adept at extending the middle finger.
Similar of Arrogance / Indifference / Failure to understand that the other side has an opinion too, that present in both contexts.
“Luigi Mangione allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Brian Thompson was shot in the street. The public response was not horror. It was memes. Jokes. “Deny, defend, depose.” “Thoughts and prayers to his money.” People laughed. The lack of sympathy was the story. A healthcare CEO was killed.”
Yeap – from the same type of people who advocate for gun control on any other day.
I guess it depends on “who” is getting shot.