r/nottheonion • u/PrintOk8045 • 3d ago
'Stressed' Amazon driver abandons 80 packages in Mass. woods during holiday shipping rush
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stressed-amazon-driver-abandons-80-packages-mass-woods-holiday-shippin-rcna18534321.5k Upvotes
117
u/erossthescienceboss 3d ago
Uh. No? Which specific ones are you referring to?
I’m assuming you’re referring to the farm workers’ protests in the 60s? I’m not diminishing their importance at all — they closed an extremely important gap in union protections. But you’re skipping a substantial chunk of history here, and labor protections absolutely existed in their modern form prior to those.
Modern trade unions started in the Industrial Revolution in the UK. We first start to see national labor unions there in the early 1800s. There’s literally an entire political party formed around those progressive ideals, and that party’s been in power on and off for most of the last century.
Labor unions came to the US in the late 1800s — the AFL was formed in the 1880s.
The modern labor protections we see today — like protection for collective bargaining, a five-day/40 hour work week, first show up in the US in the Philadelphia general strike, when Irish coal workers struck for an 10 hour day.
30 years later, Chicago struck for an 8 hour day. The government granted it to federal workers, protections that ensured their overall wages wouldn’t go down when they were moved to 8 hours passed. “Eight hour day, with no cut in pay!”
Basically until the end of WWII, all major labor strikes were based in the Northeast, because they actually had mass factory labor. The west coast didn’t. The concept of a living wage (bread AND roses, as in — not just enough to eat/survive, but making enough to afford luxuries), protection from retaliation, pensions, overtime, etc was fought for in that time period, and codified in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937.
The thing is, these worker protections had a great big gap: farmworkers. Agricultural workers were VERY explicitly and deliberately left out of these workplace protections. That’s what the 1960s strikes were about: bringing fair labor standards to everyone, regardless of industry. So, so important and cultural impactful — but to say that they invented progressive ideals and labor protections that existed 30 years prior is a bit absurd. And unions existed two HUNDRED years prior.