The Stolen Valour of Unions Today
The Stolen Valour of Unions Today
How a history of modest people freezing in tents was used to launder the legitimacy of a greedy managerialist vanguard.
I have written before in a much more personally passionate way about the history of the people of Appalachia, including things like the labour movement and Blair Mountain.
While that post is more autoethnographic, I want to talk more about the fake history that I mentioned is told about us as workers. I need to remind everyone that the most important takeaway from the Battle is that we lost. Entirely. Yeah the story was great, yes we’re proud that they stood up, but they were sent running by soldiers of their own kin, right back into the freezing cold the companies kicked them out into. Until 1933 that’s how things stayed.
I have long been pressed to write about this because it’s a part of American history that is either not told, or is told in a very disingenuous and downright incorrect light. If you are African-American you know exactly how this is going to play out, because it’s the same deal. It’s like the pop history of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King; everyone thinks they know what they were about, but they don’t. They’ve been told a complete working narrative of lies that conveniently furnishes certain power structures just, because.
People are told that West Virginia was the epicentre of America’s earliest serious struggles for worker’s rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the abstract, that’s true. There were people being kicked out onto the streets for attempting to unionise, and there were gangs of thugs sent out to enforce the working order and the horrible living conditions they necessitated.
People are then thrown a sleight of hand where “workers’ rights” is married up with other very broad terms like the “labour movement”, which is then somehow linked together with socialism. Annals of the very sad 20th century European historical record are then vociferously backported onto the American scene, as if Mother Jones was a socialist icon campaigning for the proletariat. All of that is complete and utter horseshit.
We’re told that the Battle of Blair Mountain was the culmination of a struggle between the workers and capital. This is a nasty half-truth: Blair Mountain was the culmination of a struggle between the poor and the powerful. The armed thugs didn’t put an end to the uprising; the U.S. Army did. And it wasn’t until 1933 that the federal government came in to set back the clock on their victory against the powerless.
Working conditions are nothing like how they were a century ago, either. People do not live in company towns, nor are they compelled to use a company scrip. People enjoy the right to unionise, and let me tell you as someone who has worked at countless Amazon distribution facilities, they honestly should at those places. Amazon is horribly greedy and their company culture is pathological to the point of inexplicability. Local management is actively selected for useful idiots, random employees are given banhammer powers to wield against workers for whatever infractions they conjure up. There’s no transparency and no process and it’s a godsend that people have these rights, because you can’t trust companies to not be greedy.
This is a far cry from most other companies though. And it’s a long way away from assuming contempt in corporations just because they don’t have a union. Anyone with a brain knows damn well that by their own track records, United Auto Workers has a lot more in common with Amazon than either of them do with Tesla.
Elon knows this very well, and the “2 class” system he talks about is the very same skinsuit narrative I explained before with regards to Blair Mountain.
I’m here to tell you that this narrative is not real, and if you are still so sceptical, the best proof I could give you lies in West Virginia itself.
The West Virginian coal mining unions had their heyday in the middle of the 20th century. As time wore on, the fundamental dynamics of their relationship with the companies would bring them to a breaking point: at the end of the day, there is no check of power from the company against the unions. The union can always demand more, rile workers up for a strike, and literally bleed the company to the point of bankruptcy. It’s for no real reason other than that’s what they’re there to do. Human psychology and real incentive structures eventually win every time, even if the actors naively think they’re hired to “fight for people’s rights” or “protect the dignity of the powerless”.
I know this because my paternal step-grandfather was among the last of the conventional coal miners. He was a very spoiled man by all accounts and his dirty career did not help with that, nor did it help him with his eventual COPD. People younger than him didn’t work in the coal mines, not because there were other things they wanted to do, but because one-by-one, sector-by-sector, those jobs were disappearing, permanently. Coal miners made as much as accountants at the time and they hadn’t a lick of education. It was breaking the company and something had to give. Automation was their ticket out, and they took it and ran.
Do you know what the social outcome of that was? Unfettered economic depression. When the coal jobs left West Virginia, nothing was left to take their place. The state’s heart basically stopped, and the people became afflicted to an unholy extent with diseases of despair. Even today my own maternal grandmother is one of countless people hopelessly stuck up there, addicted to prescription medications. She can’t move because a psychiatrist anywhere else would send her to rehab. Her family is too distant to intervene. This is what became of West Virginia as a result of the endless greed of the coal unions. Did you know that unions could be greedy? I wonder how many people walk around this world thinking that it’s merely a corporation’s schtick.
Due to the excesses of the professionalist-managerialist culture that dominates corporate America, eddies of renegade power movements have begun to accumulate that are, for whatever their intentions, poised to destabilise the already decaying economic fabric of our society. Grievance studies, university admissions, union drama, local and state political slapfights, and more have all begun to take on a second face, as people increasingly lose honest faith in the systems that make their lives as they know it function.
It’s time to stop entertaining one-sided stories and collations of half-truths, especially about history. Quit entertaining people whose main talking point is how much they care, or how badly they want to help. They are overwhelmingly sophisticated scammers looking to take a bite out of you, or out of some headless institution, for whatever selfish motives they may have.
Quit entertaining fanfiction about Mother Jones and Blair Mountain, especially if you already don’t tolerate it regarding things like MLK and Waco. Don’t let powerful people tell you what to think. Even when things suck, the paths to improve them always begin with an honest look.
I told you the history you already know about how important and just Unions were, and I followed it up with additional history about how they became the very demons they despised. What else is out there missing critical context like this?