On this day, 21 November 1945, 225,000 autoworkers in the US went on strike in support of a 30% increase in wages with no increase in prices. It was to make up for a big decline in real wages during World War II, during which prices had risen much faster than pay.
While the United Auto Workers union wished to avoid a strike, by early September workers at 90 auto plants around Detroit had already walked out. After General Motors offered a pay increase of only 10%, the UAW ordered a strike vote, and a mass walkout began on November 21. It grew to include 320,000 workers at its peak.
Over the coming months, millions of other workers joined them in what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics called “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history”.
More information in this excellent book about the strike wave at the time: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/strike-jeremy-brecherhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2141373252714480/?type=3
Tonight I took some photographs of the night sky and the landscape. I wanted them to feel beautiful and bleak and magical and also just a tad disturbing. It was cold standing there taking them but I love the results.
That Internet would be a bastion of freedom of speech.
But social medias belong to private companies, and as such are more concerned with profits than with freedom of speech, and can always be bought by spoiled, unscrupulous millionaires like Elon Musk.
ALT
