Just
this week, three Senate Democrats blocked the confirmation of David
Weil to lead the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, which is
supposed to protect workers. Mr. Weil held the same job under President
Barack Obama and earned a reputation for trying to do it — for example,
by seeking to prevent companies from improperly treating workers as
contractors. Employers did not want an encore.
“I heard from a lot of business owners,” Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, one of the three Democrats, told Politico by way of justification for his opposition.
Tellingly, the share of workers who would like to be in unions is much higher
than the share of unionized workers. The government has cooperated with
employers to frustrate that desire. Almost as soon as it had legalized
collective bargaining in the 1930s, Congress began to backtrack,
constraining American unions more tightly than unions in other
democracies.
The government has
gradually granted employers wide-ranging powers to frustrate
unionization campaigns through propaganda, via threatened and actual
mistreatment of workers and by closing operations if workers vote to
unionize. To the extent that some tactics remain illegal, companies
rarely suffer anything more than token penalties….
The
circumstances were extraordinary, which is what it takes to win under
the current rules. A parallel organizing campaign at an Amazon warehouse
in Alabama mounted by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union
appears headed for defeat.
The
victory is still incomplete. The vote establishes the union as the
official representative of the JFK8 workers. But companies often refuse
to negotiate. An analysis
of union votes in 2007 found that among the roughly 900 groups of
workers who voted to engage in collective bargaining, fewer than half
obtained a first contract within the following year. Three years later,
almost a third still had not obtained that first contract.
even after unionization succeeds, corporations have a variety of levers to suppress worker struggle. since the employer has control over hiring and firing, it can remove pro-union workers, hire ones more likely to be anti-union, fail to negotiate in good faith resulting in a poor contract, and then call a decertification election. given that amazon warehouses routinely fire their entire workforce yearly, this will likely be their tactic.
One thing I always find fun explaining to people is the sheer size of things when related to Ancient Egypt. They’re huge, and you’re told they’re huge, but you don’t really take it in. This is further compounded by tiny close ups of scenes in tombs, which you think are containing the whole image of what’s being talked about, or at least most of it. Turns out not so much! So I thought I’d illustrate this with the shock I had when I visited Beni Hasan for the first time.
Now, Beni Hasan is famous for it’s rock cut Middle Kingdom tombs that are all beautifully decorated. They truly are stunning, and if you can find someone who’s taken photos of the interiors in high quality, then they’re well worth a look. Anyway, one of the more famous tombs, the tomb of Baqat/Bakat III (Nomarch of the 16th Nome of Upper Egypt), contains what most Egyptologists know as the ‘wrestling scene’, which in every text book or site you look on tends to look a little something like this:
[image id: close up of the wrestling scenes in Baqat’s tomb. The same two figures perform multiple different wrestling moves over two registers. End id.]
90% of the time it’s this particular close up of it that you get, which makes you think that the wrestlers are off in a corner somewhere in the tomb doing their wrestling thing. It’s the same with a lot of scenes like baking or brewing, they just occupy one register in one small area.
Tomb of Baqat III, though? Nope!
[image id: photo of Baqat III’s tomb taken from the entrance. There are 4 columns; two in the foreground which are whole, and two in the background where one is missing a section. The ceiling is slightly vaulted and covered in painted stars. The back wall has a niche for the statue of the deceased. Surrounding that niche are many depictions of wrestling. They cover the whole wall. End id.]
These walls are at least 4m, if not 5m, high! I’m guessing this based on when I went I was shorter than the broken column, and I’m 5ft4. Newberry lists the columns as 15ft6 which is roughly 4.7m if my maths is right. The dimensions of the tomb are 12m x 17m, I think. Newberry measured the columns in feet but the rest of the tomb in inches, so they’re roughly 650/700inches by 500inches, which is pretty big. The wrestling scene covers the entirety of the 17m by 5m east wall and some of the back wall. It’s huge.
[image id: Plate V of the East wall of Baqet III’s tomb taken from P.Newberry’s 1893 book Beni Hasan. Parts I-IV (image from Part II) published by the Egypt Exploration Society. Image shows the entire wall covered in depictions of different wrestling moves across 6 registers. The bottom two registers are of soldiers fighting and defeating enemies. End id.]
So, what look in a book to be figures that are only 10cm high, are in fact 6 inches high or more!
TL;DR: Egypt is of size large
That’s a lot of images of wrestlers and hand-to-hand fighters. Like, that’s enough for some very solid training manual references. Have any modern wrestlers or martial artists been able to reconstruct their wrestling style from these images, or at least the moves depicted? That would be fascinating to see an ancient sport revived.
I’ve no idea. My specialism is late New Kingdom, so in depth studies into the Reden und Rufe/Speech Captions and scenes that appear in Middle Kingdom tombs hasn’t been on my radar. I doubt it, outside of maybe reddit discussions, since these scenes are not exactly very widely known. There are a lot of articles written on the wrestling scenes that are in French/German which I have no energy to read today and check if anyone has done this. I should point out that a lot of the wrestling depicted in these tombs appears to be part of combat training, as these tombs are from the end of the First Intermediate Period/start of the Middle Kingdom, which means there was a lot of fighting/skirmishes occurring and this is likely a representation of ‘training’ the tomb owner took part in.
Somehow, 50 million anticapitalists is a ‘low turnout’, yet 50 people milling around in Florida is proof that Cuba lost the mandate of heaven. This is around 12% of the working people of India! Imagine if 12% of US workers went on strike!
This boycott of a weapons delivery shows once again that workers are capable of ending the war. Elsewhere, as in Pisa, Italy, airport workers have refused to deliver weapons, ammunition, and explosives to Ukraine. In Belarus,
too, railroad workers have refused to deliver urgently needed supplies
for the Russian army. Now Greek workers have joined this international
call. They are showing everyone that everyday workers can stop the war.
