Alienated America

[Dill]

(03-06-2019, 08:59 AM)Wyche Wrote: People were shot over wanting safe working conditions and decent pay during the strikes, all the way into the 1970s.  There's a lot more to the story than that, and it's actually very interesting if you're into history. Forced to live in company housing and buy from the company stores, most miners wound up essentially working for room and board, and little else, and the companies got all of that money too. I don't want to seem to be diminishing what happened before the Emancipation Proclamation, but this was essentially legalized slavery in a sense.  Not to mention that the native landowners were ignorant to the value of their land when the coal barons showed up and ripped them off for their mineral rights. It's akin to the European settlers buying native lands for beads. 

Once the industrialists to the north got what they wanted out of the ground, they've abandoned these communities and left them with little from the boom days but debt, pollution, and dwindling opportunity. These people fueled the Industrial Revolution and the WWII war machine, and have largely been left to wallow in poverty and ridicule.

I'm not going stand idly by while someone criticizes capitalism, the basis of our national success!

I'm going to pitch in and help . . . .   You are describing what Marx called "free labor."  Free in the double sense that workers were freed from any means o feeding themselves (e.g., owning a few acres of land) and free in the sense they were not slaves, so you didn't have to house and feed them yourself, or care for them when sick.  Imagine slaves paying for their room and board (i.e. wages recouped by the capitalist) and that is close to the system you are describing here--except mine workers were free to leave if they wanted--and starve.

Unions mitigated this exploitation to some degree, but only to a degree. "Right to work" legislation emerges from those historical battles.  

"Ya load 16 tons, and whaddaya get . . . ?"