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Banned
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In 1916, a labor organizer named Jane Street developed a system in Denver that attempted to raise the wages and working conditions of domestic help. It seems that she recognized the validity of the ideas in the last paragraph of the quoted text in my last post:
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There is absolutely nothing in capitalist (neoclassical) economic theory that even attempts to compensate employees by the "real" contribution made. Capitalist economic theory dictates that wages are determined by labor markets, so how much each employee gets paid is not determined by their contribution, but rather by the market value of their labor. There is no way to determine who is really responsible for the value created. The market value of each employee's labor is determined basically by how much other people in the market are willing to sell their labor for....
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Quote:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archiv...3/msg00042.htm
The 1917 letter by Jane Street, Secretary of the Denver IWW
Domestic Workers Industrial Union, is available to us because of
a felony committed by the US government.
The Justice Department illegally intercepted Street's letter and
did not deliver it. It was ultimately stored in the Washington DC
National Archives (Department of Justice, Record Group 60, File
18701-28). It was discovered 59 years later by Daniel T. Hobby
and printed in the Winter issue of _Labor History_ that year.
[BEGIN JANE STREET LETTER]
Mrs. Elmer F. Buse
6 West Brady St.
Tulsa, Okla.
Fellow Worker:
Your letter of the 28th received, also the one of several weeks
ago, which was read at our business meeting with great applause.
I am not so presumptuous as to suppose that no method of
organizing can be used successful with the domestic workers than
the one which was used here. However, I can give you the benefit
of my experiences and observation in the work here and the
conclusions at which we have arrived.
I hope that you have secured the required number of signatures by
this time. My method was very tedious. I worked at housework for
three months, collecting names all the while. When I was off of a
job I rented a room and put an ad in the paper for a housemaid.
Sometimes I used a box number and sometimes I used my address.
The ad was worded something like this, "Wanted, Housemaid for
private family, $30, eight hours daily." I would write them
letters afterwards and have them call and see me. If they came
direct I would usually have another ad in the same paper,
advertising for a situation and using my telephone number. I
would have enough answers to supply the applicants. Sometimes I
would engage myself to as many as 25 jobs in one day, promising
to call the next day to everyone that phoned. I would collect the
information secured in this way. If any girl wanted any of the
jobs, she could go out and say that they called her up the day
before.
I secured 300 names in this way. I had never mentioned the
IWW to any of them, for I expected them to be prejudiced, which
did not prove the case. I picked out 100 of the most promising of
the names and sent them invitations to attend a meeting. There
were about thirty-five came. Thirteen of the 35 signed the
application for a charter. Thirteen out of three hundred for
three months time! So don't get discouraged.
We have been organized about one year. In this time we have
interviewed personally in our office about 1500 or 2000 girls,
telling them about the IWW and making them more rebellious, and
placing probably over 1000 in jobs. We have on our books the
names of 155 members, only about 83 of whom we can actually call
members. A great many girls leave town and some them in town
drift away and we are unable to locate them. In lining up girls
through an employment office there are a large number who pay 50
cents or perhaps $1.00 on their initiation fee and whom we never
get a chance to reach again. They agree to join and think
favorably of the union while here but their interest is not
sufficient to hold the,. We put these names on our
books -- that is, we have made it a practice to let anyone
desiring to pay their initiation fee in installments. It would be
well for you to adopt this plan also, as money is very hard to
get, especially from girls who are out of work, and if you
succeed in getting to pay anything at all on their initiation fee
they are more likely to return.
An employment office is quite expensive. You must have an office
in some good downtown location. You must have a phone, which is
quite an item of expense. You will be charged the rate for an
employment office or for an association. At first we had to pay
$4.00 a month for, I believe, 60 calls and 1 1/2 cents on excess
calls, sometimes amounting up to $14.00 a month. We now have it
reduced to $8.00 flat rate, something we could not get in the
beginning. besides this, you must subscribe to all of the daily
papers, and run an ad daily in at least one of them. We also run
a "day work" ad for our laundresses, etc. and our bill runs from
$7.00 to $10 per month. The best daily paper in Denver
discriminates against us and it would cost us three prices to
advertise in it. They will try to charge you "employment office
rates."
However, with our handful of girls and our big expenses, we have
got results. We actually have POWER to do things. <b>We have raised
wages, shortened hours, bettered conditions in hundreds of
places. This is not merely a statement. It is a fact that is
registered not only in black and white on the cards in our files
in the office but in the flesh and blood of the girls on the job.
For a number of housegirls to simply own, collectively, a
telephone and to use it systematically is to raise wages all over
a city. For instance, if you want to raise a job from $20 to $30
dollars. You can have a dozen girls answer an ad and demand
$30, -- even if they do not want work at all. Or, it can be done
in an easier way. Call up the woman and tell her you will accept
the position at $20, that you will be sure to be out. Then she
will not run her ad the next day. Don't go. Call up the next day
and ask for $25, and promise to go and do the same thing over
again. On the third day she will say, "Come on out and we will
talk the matter over." You can get not only the wages, but
shortened hours and lightened labor as well. </b>
In regard to our employment office: We keep a record of every job
advertised in every paper. very few employers ever apply at our
office. It is not an advantage anyway. As when the advertise in
the papers, a girl can go out to them without their knowing that
she is in the IWW at all. And, of course, they are not anxious to
get IWW girls. We make a note of the wages, the size of the
family and the house, etc. etc. To give girls this information is
to save them a great deal of time, carfare, telephone money, etc.
and to attract them to your headquarters. That means that you
soon take them away from the employment sharks, who begin to
fight you and lie about you to the girls at the very beginning.
However, you actually in a very short while practically close
their officers as far as domestic "help" is concerned.
This means a tremendous advantage. <b>If a girl decides to shorten
hours on the job by refusing to work afternoons, or refuses to
attend the furnace or to use the vacuum, etc. as a rule her
employer does not fire her until she secures another girl. She
calls up an employment shark and asks for a girl. With the union
office in operation, no girl arrives, the shark's business having
been crippled. The employer advertises in the paper. We catch her
ad and send out a girl who refuses to do the same thing as the
other girl.</b> If you have a union of only four girls and you can
get them consecutively on the same job you soon have job control.
The nerve-wrecked, lazy society woman is not hard to conquer.
However, it is necessary to have rebels who will actually do
these things on the job. Your employment office functions in this
direction also, as you can force workers into rebellion through
having, after a fashion, control of the market just as the old
shark forced them into slavery.
It is a hard matter to get girls outside the organization to
attend a meeting. Their hours are so long and they have so little
time of their own that they are either not inclined to [or] are
too tired to comes. Laundresses can do a lot of job agitation,
but otherwise most of the agitation must be carried on in your
office.
It was one of my pet schemes to have a club house. I figured that
the association of the girls with each other would make them more
rebellious, and that with a home to come back to they would be
more rebellious, that grocery bills when off the job would
diminish, etc., etc. We tried this for three months. We lost so
much money that we are now almost swamped with debts. We got a
nice rooming house at only $40 per month furnished. It was out on
the Hill in the very midst of the enemy. The house only contained
ten rooms with only six to rent. The girls who really made use of
it get along fine. From the revolutionary standpoint it was a
success. The girls missed it when we had to give it up. They used
to come in there not only when they were off of a job but would
in evenings when they were working and would have some place to
go and get used to shortening their hours. But financially it was
a failure. Coal was so high that even if we had the house filled
all the time, which was not the case, that it would not pay
expenses.
In Oklahoma you have the advantage of dealing with women workers
who have had some previous knowledge of organization. They had a
rather strong union there, I am informed, about six years ago. It
extended over several cities. I understand that they once had a
club house and an employment office. I think that they excluded
the negroes, who therefore served as scabs against the union. I
know a man here who was the husband of one of the organizers and
I can get you some more data on the subject if you desire it. The
Socialist women got in on the thing and weakened the fighting
spirit by teaching political action.
We have formulated no scale of hours or wages, for the reason
that we could not enforce them. We are able however to raise
wages and shorten hours on individual jobs by striking on the job
and by systematic work at the office.
I would advise you strongly against trying o have your
headquarters in connection with the other IWW local there. You
are not dealing with women rebels -- scissorines having all the
earmarks of slavery and the prejudices of bourgeoisie philosophy.
Sex can come rushing into your office like a great hurricane and
blow all the papers of industrialism out the windows.
The Mixed Local here in Denver has done us more harm than any
other enemy, the women of Capital Hill, the employment sharks and
the YWCA combined. They have cut us off from donations from
outside locals, slandered this local and myself from one end of
the country to the other, tried to disrupt us from within by
going among the girls and stirring up trouble, they gave our club
house a bad name because they were not permitted to come out
there, and finally they have assaulted me bodily and torn up our
charter. They have probably told some big lie about us to
headquarters because we have not yet received a charter although
we have been without one for over six weeks and headquarters has
refused us credit. I presume that it will necessitate an
investigation that will cost more than our whole per capita dues
for the time we have been organized. And we have done nothing to
be "investigated" about.....
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Was there anything underhanded about Jane Street's tactics.....IMO, no more underhanded than upperclass employers of domestic workers dictating wage levels, work day and work week length, and working conditions....
The point is that there is power in numbers who support a labor, or any political movement. Those who do not have then numbers, supplant that shortcoming with resources....money, lawyers, lobbyists, political contributions to election campaigns. Those with money and influence are simply better at "the game", than unorganized, apolitical, individual minimum wage earning workers are. There is nothing to debate about the power of sheer numbers of voters, IMO, being swept aside by a small class of moneyed interests that buy the political clout away from the hands of the workers.
<a href="http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=2712">ACORN</a> was the organization behind the successful minimum wage referendum in Florida. When elected representatives refuse to represent the interest of the working poor, this seems a logical development to catalyze grassroots efforts....and they are active again in several states in the coming elections:
Quote:
http://www.chieforganizer.org/index....;showUid]=1552
Wade Rathke is the Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN and SEIU Local 100, AFL-CIO. The views expressed on this website are his own
October 25, 2006 10:57:32
Low Wage Worker Battlegrounds
New Orleans We are on the countdown now. Having toiled in the vineyards almost two years in the wake of the surprising statewide minimum wage increase victory in Florida in 2004, we are now almost to “raise day” for low wage workers on November 7th in Arizona, Ohio, Colorado, and Missouri...
.......The WSJ makes a point that in all of these states there are competitive Congressional or gubernatorial races. True several governors are running for re-election in these locations, but to say there are “competitive” races in Congress is simply stating the obvious since that point could be made all over the country now. There is talk of a “wave” effect when one party or another takes a bushel of seats in a Congressional election. The WSJ quotes some flak from the Employment Policies Institute, better know as the “evil EPI” to most of us with ACORN (this was the same outfit that tried to trash our convention in Columbus this summer with a rolling billboard and talk of a “rotten” ACORN), saying that “They believe it will turn out progressive voters.” The WSJ concedes, “Maybe so.”
Progressive or not, we absolutely believe these minimum wage measures will turn out normally low voting and undercounted lower income voters who need to be at the polls and need to be part of decisions making on Election Day. Our people do not vote as much as higher income groups. Over and over our members tell us with some well earned cynicism that they don’t vote because they don’t think it matters and because their voice is not heard. These initiatives are all about democracy and making sure – win or lose – that the people – all of the people – get heard.
We will not call the victory until the voting is done, but we hope that if people are able to see that their vote counted and they even felt the difference in their own pocketbook, maybe it will start our folks thinking that voting regularly is a habit worth picking up and one that might do them more good than some of the other habits that have come our way.
The day is coming when the poor might just understand that voting pays for them, just like the rich have always known.
October 25, 2006
www.raisewages.org
www.sevendaysatminimumwage.org
“You take it from here to there.”
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If you're not objecting to the consequences of capitalism....or of the political influence that those who control the means of production, routinely buy, and
you agree that,
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Capitalist economic theory dictates that wages are determined by labor markets, so how much each employee gets paid is not determined by their contribution, but rather by the market value of their labor.
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....what could you object to with regard to organized workers successfully achieving ballot initiatives....referendums that are "end runs" around legislators who have agreed to be bought by their wealtheist constituency, instead of serving the best interests of the voters who elected them. Did credit card interest rates come down, after Sen. Joe Biden (MBNA-DE) voted for bankruptcy "reform", along with 14 other democrats and more than 50 republican senators...all ignoring a Harvard study that found that the majority of bankruptcies were illness related....they voted down an illness exemption and passed the "reform...."
<a href="http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA022306.1E.foreclosures.17009671.html">Bankruptcy Rules Feed Foreclosures</a>
Why are those who object to legislated minimum wage increases, not also objecting to draconian bankruptcy "reform" that benefited only banks like MBNA, at the expense of the poor, the laid off, and the sick, of Biden's Deleware constituency?
Last edited by host; 10-31-2006 at 08:23 PM..
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