The 1941 Disney animator’s strike was bitterly fought, as Walt Disney
refused to grant the concessions that all the other animation studios
had agreed to, and instead grew paranoid and accusatory, convinced the
“Communist infiltrators” had turned his animators against him.
One poorly remembered – but vivid! – moment from the strike was when
Chuck Jones led Warner animators came to join the picket line in
solidarity, bringing with them a working guillotine with a mannequin
styled to look like Gunther Lessing, the Disney attorney.
As Gizmodo’s Mat Novak notes, we tend to gloss over the more radical
elements in union history in our contemporary retellings of famous
strikes, but these were not polite, timid affairs. Unions attained their
goals through radical, relentless action that put them at risk and
brooked no compromise.
An old tumblr post said something that stuck with me:
“Labor unions were created so the workers didn’t just barge into the owner’s office, drag him into the street, and eat him in front of his family, and corporations seem to have forgotten this.”
The sentiment is hyperbolic but the message is clear.
In the past two weeks since Mr. Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of the MPD, Minneapolis has seen community members step up to fill the gaps where our city, state and county systems have failed us. We’ve created community fire brigades, a people’s ambulance, a transit support system, food banks and hot meal bars, and community safety and defense teams. There have been informal teach-ins, and petitions to cut MPD contracts from museums, business events and schools. Neighbors are talking to each other and actually getting to know who lives on their street.
