Morbid Mondays - Episode 30 - Why would you riot for labor?

International workers day has come, and many any people have covered the Haymarket riot better than we could. So instead, Katy and I will discuss what a factory looked like and who worked there at that time. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

I have spoken.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Tangents aside. Greetings.

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to or welcome back to Morbid Mondays, your unhinged source for What the Fuck Moments Throughout History. We will hella. We will take turns. Stutters are a bitch.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Dude, no. Have you noticed the last couple of times that I've tried to do the intro to just bail out midway through?

SPEAKER_00 0:25

It's becoming like I don't even rick realize what's there.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

You have to rewrite the sheets.

unknown 0:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Here's a thing. We're gonna do a thing. We're your hosts. All right, let's go.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Your thing is double words and my thing. My thing is thing thing over and over and over again. I do the editing uh for this show, and my god, do I get tired of hearing myself say thing or yeah. In between everything you say, I was like, I need to.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

I imagine I imagine mine is so because that seems to be my verbal like tick. Not no, that's not the right word, but my that's that's that that is that is my verbal equivalent of um, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

So it is today. It is the 28th. Currently, while we're film film filming, there we go, filming this, and I'm well rested finally. Last time as well. Um, I thought we would do something kind of out of the box today.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

I'm so down for this. I've already told you what my next one is gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

And I I we're we're gonna have two of these episodes in a row.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

So May is coming up, and with that, a ton of conversations about the history of union rights, and not only union rights, but worker rights in general. If you like, if you're on the radio or you're on YouTube or anything like that, people will say, like, May 1st or May 8th, well, we got the eight-hour work day. And they talk about the Haymarket Square affair or Haymarket Haymarket Square riot or whatever you want to call it in Chicago quite a bit.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

And so I am I am passingly familiar with this. I ran into it while I was doing research for something I did recently. Uh I don't have my notebook in front of me, so I can't like cast my memory back or anything. But I ran into this while I was researching and I was like, that might be interesting. And then I discovered that it was everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

It is. Everywhere. Everywhere. Like to the extent to where if you if you look up an episode on a podcast, you'll have 10 of them on YouTube. There's a ton of video documentaries, half of them are like AI slop, but like, but the facts of the Haymarket Square event are so well known that you can just kind of pump this out.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Well, and I th I do I do think that it is that they are important. Like it's it's definitely it it has its place in history. However, like if it it's one of those things that is so well known that I feel like we don't need to beat a dead horse with it.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Like that that information is so vastly and widely and readily available.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Um and there's like better people at it. Like that's why I decided not to cover it.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Same.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Is yeah, is because I like I looked up like things you missed in history class or any of the behind the bastard stuff.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

I read I told you I recently discovered uh things you missed in history class. I enjoy them.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

They're really good, very thorough, very nuanced and all that kind of stuff, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Like I was I was quite pleased to listen to that hour and a half of them just chatting about uh about swell milk. Yeah, yeah, actually, I think that was that was that that was the episode for me.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah, that's when you referenced it. So I was like, there's something in there, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

So shout out to them, they're amazing. If you if you are down for history podcasts, please, please, please go check them out. I ran out of air.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yep. So so that's that's where we started. The Haymarket affair in a very general kind of way, because I'll slightly go into that, but I figured what would be better to do is I'm gonna read a quick like summary of that and then get into why they were rioting. So like what factory conditions looked like in a specific era and why you would have to maybe throw a bomb about it.

unknown 4:24

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

So like because the Haymarket is like the smallest of them. Yes, it's not even close to like you know, some of the other stuff, like like the Pullman Strike or the Battle of Blair Mountain, or or basically anything that Mother Jones was in directly involved with, who is a very interesting character. Um, but the Haymarket of Square affair, Haymarket Square affair, slash You had it, slash riot, slash protest, uh was on May 4th, 1886, Chicago.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

May the fourth be with you.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

And boy howdy was it.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yeah, it was it was something, right? Um my favorite quote from this time period is that there was a magazine, which was in German. I can't remember at the top of the name, uh, off the top of my head, it was an American magazine, but there's this wonderful ad uh or or write-up in it, rather, that says uh TNT or a dynamite is is a friend to labor. What they mean by that is like, you know, maybe throw sticks of dynamite about it when you're in a protest, you know, like when you're having to strike.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Boy howdy, the uh protests and strikes have have calmed down significantly.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yeah, nowadays it's just like an afternoon event.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

I go to protests all the time, and like your voice gets sore. There are police, but it is not anything like what some of these people went through. The the whole thing, right? Uh, for those of y'all who don't know, I'll give a very quick brief summary and then we'll just move on from it was a protest for an eight-hour workday that started as a peaceful protest and ended in in a still very contested court trial and the conviction of eight defendants. Uh, this is a brief, like wiki summary. The Haymarket Affair, also known as the Haymarket Massacre, the Haymarket riot, the Haymarket Square riot, or the Haymarket incident, uh, was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4th, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The rally began peacefully in support of workers uh striking for the eight-hour work day. It was held the day after the May 3rd rally at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, uh that is the McCormick of the Spice of Spice Fame. Um at least I believe so, on the west side of Chicago, during which two demonstrators had been killed and many demonstrators and police had been injured. There is a guy walking right at my window. He is just one of my neighbors going to the sidewalk, but he is very polite and he walks directly across the street like you should, not all crazy diagonal, where you stay in front of cars the whole time. But he goes like right across the street and then follows the sidewalk. He always parks directly across from my window. So it just looks like he's walking right at me when I live, and I'm just like, what the fuck?

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Can I help you, sir?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Ah. Anyways, back to the show. Now that my alarm bells have stopped going off.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Hypervigilance.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Yes, yes. Um at Haymarket Square rally on May the 4th, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police, and they acted to disperse the meeting. Uh, this is kind of a bad summary because the meeting was winding down, and then the police brought in like 130 cops to bust it up, and then somebody threw dynamite. So there was an escalation on both ends.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Yeah, dad did just poor choices all the way around.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Yeah. Um, a bomb blast uh an ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians. Dozen dozens of others were wounded. Um there was a statue in Chicago today that is of like a wagon and people are hiding like on top of and underneath it.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

And they used that because the speakers had nothing to do with the violence. Like many of the organizers had already left, and and we're not expecting this to be anything other than a peaceful protest. But it is uh a high possibility that many of the police officer deaths happened because the other cops accidentally shot them.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

This is before the days of like my modern riot training, like they don't know how to break people up and a you know, tear gas doesn't really exist like we think of it. That's not really gonna be a thing until like World War post-World War I. Um, so like none of the stuff that uh currently is used for like riot dispersal was around. And so everything just went all bug fuck and things went like bad. Eight guys that are associated as anarchists were put on trial for the murders. Um accidents, because again, a lot of people just died randomly. You know what I mean? Like dynamite blows up big, but by itself, it doesn't really send a lot of shrapnel, it's just a big like poof.

SPEAKER_04 9:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Like, unless you do something to it, like cover it in ball bearings or something, it's not gonna send a lot of shrapnel. Don't take these as ideas, guys.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

I was just sitting here thinking, I was like, mmm, duh. Hey Brian, should not have said that.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

It's in a publicly available small manuscript given to World War II soldiers. It is public access information. They used to give these great books that you can still like just buy. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with us. I have a manual on the Browning that you could just buy.

SPEAKER_04 9:52

What?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Yeah, on a Browning automatic rifle, a high caliber automatic rifle. It's a field service manual that they used to just give, that they used to give out to guys issued a Browning. And you can just buy them. They're yeah, gives you parts, numbers, and all kinds of shit.

SPEAKER_02 10:07

I think I figured out what's wrong with this country.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

In the in the movie Saving Private Ryan, when he's like a sticky bomb, and they're like, What are you talking about? He's like, It's in the field manual, and they're like, We're short on those. He was like, That field manual? Yes, they were just around. What? Yeah, sticky bombs are crazy dangerous. Like to the user. That's why we quit using them. Yeah, no, because they would stick to your hand. That yeah, like so it throw the glove.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

It's fine.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah. The British one came in this like jacket.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Yeah. You're supposed to stick it and pull the jacket off, but it would ooze in the hot weather and like uh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

The Haymarket affair is is often like uh it's it's the reason why there's so much on it is because it's interesting. There's a big court case, all these people. I got a lot of media coverage. Yeah, I got a lot of media coverage. There just is a lot of information, and it's very much a who-done it.

unknown 11:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Right? Like people look and they know that like the trial was kind of bunk, and so like it's an interesting thing to read about.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

That's a recurring theme here lately, these uh these rigged trials.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Yeah, that's right. Your previous, your your recent episode. Yeah, there was a lot about people being paid off. Everybody was paid off. Oh my god. So, and today, if you go to websites for like the wobblies or you like IWW The Wobblies, and and you go to or you go to like official police websites, their version of the story is very different. Of course, right? So, because they're on they're both saying like worst case scenario on the other side, it's a super contested trial. It's nowhere near the the most important labor event in US history. I mentioned the Pullman strike, the Battle of Blair Mountain, um, where train cars came in with with with strike breakers under like armed protection. The National Guard was called out for these. People were shot out with rifles. My favorite thing about the Blair Mountain thing is that at one point somebody got into a crop duster and dropped handmade grenades. Yeah, like Whoa! Yeah, just crazy shit. I mean, just wild stuff. Maybe we really do need to do a Blair Mountain one.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

I think so, because I don't I don't know as much about that as I thought I did, because you're saying shit that I had no fucking idea about.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

It is the thing that me and and one uh your partner really fucking will go ham on. Like we love to talk about this. It's wild, it's a wild point in American history. Um so to wrap up the Haymarket thing, lots of people talk about why unions were important and all that kind of stuff, and they briefly mention the kind of things that they struck out against. I thought I thought it would be a good idea as we are coming up on May Day and all the stuff, all the conversations around then, to actually pick a place and go through and talk about what it was like to actually be a worker before the strikes so that like people can get a chance to hear what came out of all this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

Because unions did a lot.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

A lot.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

And unions used to be so much more hands-on than they are now, because like I I I worked for a union or I worked within a union, I guess. Yeah, and like there it was, it was a running joke at work of oh, we'll tell the union rep. Because it kind of it kind of fell along the lines jokingly of like, what are they gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah, yeah, because they they had lost a lot of their power.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Because once upon a time, tell your union rep was a threat.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah, it was like, yeah, and when I said, like, you know, what's their power, right? In your in your situation, it would be like complaints.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:50

Back in the day, it was people be waking up with horse heads in their bed.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah, strike, maybe arson. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Oh, oh, yeah, maybe arson. That takes us back to um coal mining.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Strip mining.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Oh, that's in Charlie, Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

Thank you. I would all I could not get Silent Hill out of my head, and I'm just like, that's not right.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

We're gonna talk about uh cotton mill. We're gonna talk today about the Charleston cotton mill of no particular name, uh, because it got shut down several times and then brought up not for like nefarious things, but just because it's an investment. Sometimes they fail, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Uh so two or three times one of this one of these mills gets invested in, shut down, invested in, shut down. This is one of them.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Are we in the investment stage or the shutdown stage?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

We are we are gonna talk mostly about the um the in-between, right? While it's up and running and people are doing their thing, why it's run, how it's run, the dangers associated with this, all that stuff. Let's go. Day in the life. A slice of life anime.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Oh my god. It's creepy when you like literally voice my thoughts like that.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

I could see the joke forming.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Beat me to it.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yeah, yeah. Slice of life, 40k edition. Um instead of making corpse starch, we will be making cotton. Um and cotton.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

Our podcast is like 12 kinds of nerdy, bro.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

So the the the thing about cotton is that first off, it's not wool. Uh, natural fibers from animals often have a lot of like there's bugs and there's dirt and there's all that stuff with them, but usually they are they have some kind of oil in them. Lanolin. Lanolin, right. This is this is the wool industry.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

We just talked about this.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

So, wool, a lot of the technology that goes into a cotton mill like this is largely from the wool industry, but it's very, very different because it it operates very centrally around a very famous person whose name is Eli Whitney. He created this thing called the cotton gin. Before his invention, cotton had to be pulled apart by hand. Cotton is sharp in the middle, it cuts your fingers, there's like a a burr on the inside.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

So, fun fact, uh I'm I'm sure you all are sick of me talking about my childhood spent in the Navy. But uh we we lived in Virginia, uh Richmond, Virginia, specifically, and we my mother got it in her head that she wanted to go see a cotton plantation that was still functioning. Now, granted, it was it was working as a tourist trap, essentially. But uh I got to experience doing this, both picking and pulling and spinning, carting and spitting, and I I was young, so I don't remember a whole whole lot of it, but yes, can confirm. Ow.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

They cut you. Yes. Like when um in Gone with the Wind, she talks about that very recently, that her like her her hands are getting cut up. That was a thing, and so like it it was also the central reason why slavery was endemic to I say that like because it's a disease, it destroys cultures that it takes from and cultures that like employ it because it's not sustainable, it's these are human lives, you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Like what are you doing, stop it?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

What are you doing, stop it? Yeah, like that there's just a crazy idea that people had for a little while. Um and the cotton industry basically ran off of slave labor. It can't really, you know, like in before the machines, it was not possible to do otherwise. And even after the machines, slave labor was still used when slavery was made illegal. Um, the sharecropper system was put in place. So people were like living hand amount, I mean, like barely making a living, doing these kind of like rent farm situations. Uh, and a lot of it was around cotton, it was the money crop of the South, everywhere, strangely enough, except for like the Carolinas, in which rice was the name of the game.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

So, like, um, that was the like the biggest one, anyways, was around the rivers. Rice is massive. It is here in Texas for the same reason.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Uh, but and for the same reason cotton was one of the first things brought here. The six-picker machines uh in in this mill, six picker machines could each process 15 bales a day.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

That's a lot.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

It's a lot, 40,000 pounds of cotton every 24 hours.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

That's insane.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

It's a crazy amount. Ginned cotton was brought up on an elevator. Bales were four to five hundred pounds a piece, which is also true of like hay bales. Like the giant ones are real fucking heavy.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Um, not the ones we throw off the backs of trucks.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

No, those are those are 70 pounds. Yes. I got real strong moving A bales.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

As did I for exactly one summer.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah. Oh man. Um, all right. Uh picker house workers were uh at first, almost everyone in this particular mill was white. The reason why is you had segregation of jobs. Um, picker house uh workers at first were almost white, then later the mill allowed black workers. All other jobs were usually women and children. There was a stigma in parts of the South about working in a factory, um, as opposed to say working in someone's home or working in an office or working in like a business, you know, like a restaurant, something like that, right? Um, this was also true in like London. Factory girls had kind of a stigma about them. Um and by 1870, this is our first, I should have done a trigger warning. So there's not a lot of trigger warnings in this because we're just talking about the stuff that most people kind of know about. People know that factories in the 1800s weren't great places.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Uh they were kind of dangerous because they were still trying to figure out how to factory.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Yeah. And and it was entirely profit-driven and they took a lot of shortcuts. We've talked about this pretty extensively in like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the early 1900s, like because this consists up to like the 1920s, right? Where factories are crazy dangerous, and even up to today, right? So um major trigger warnings are just going to be talking about injuries for the most part. Right at the very end, we're going to talk about um stuff of a sexual nature. I'll give you a warning before I talk about that. Yeah, because 90% of this story will not will not consist of that at all. It's just red at the end. So, like, and so I'll I'll put clear demarcation around that. By 1870, 765,000 workers between the ages of 10 and 14 were employed throughout the country. This is America. This is all going to be American-centric. 47% of those are non-farm. This statistic comes from uh official government statistics of the day, uh, the U.S. Labor Board, essentially, Census and Labor Board. They clarify, I was I was really happy that they clarified non-farm, because you know, kids, kids who work on the farms are usually like their parents' farms, or they they work as like seasonal labor or or because we're talking about 10 to 14 year olds, not 15, 16, 17-year-olds. Um, little kids.

SPEAKER_03 21:12

Youngins.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Yeah, youngins, right? Like, so if you own a little sharecropper farm and you get up every day to like feed the hogs and milk the cows and stuff, that is very different from working in an industrial factory. Um, your your dangers are like being kicked or getting sick or something like that, not being mangled and spinning ginnings.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Using a hand.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Yeah, yeah. It's a little different.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Using a hand, an arm getting scalped.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

And this also differs from craft labor. So um at the height of 1900, uh 1,750,000 um or sixty uh one million seven hundred and fifty thousand children between the ages of ten and fourteen were employed in America. Sixty eight point nine eight were non-farm, meaning that they worked in factories. Factories of some form. Some of this, I need to say for like full disclosure, is craftsmen. So some people work with their parents and they are learning a trade. That is not less dangerous in this time period. Unless you are like a bookbinder or a printer or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Even the printing presses.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Even the printing presses. Yeah, because we're no longer in we are no longer in stamp and press territory. We have like newspaper machines.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

That is kachunk.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Yeah. We we are now in the days of if you work at a furniture, if you if your dad or mom makes like furniture, right? You now work in a factory that makes furniture. It's not in a little room where you're like a leather maker, right? Where you're a a tanner or an upholsterer or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

Honestly, the most as far as I can tell at the moment, like it would be making paper would be like one of the safest.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

And even then, that's that's still Yeah, it that's a slow much slower industry. Yeah. That's why. But in this time period, we have moved on to wood pulping.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Where you're just like grinding loblolly pines to make paper. This is like we are full in the industrial age. And in in a shitty kind of way. Yeah. So uh between 1870 and 1900, about six percent of all workers were between 10 and 14. Many of these children throughout the industrialized world were leased uh from poorhouses or orphanages. So to explain that to our listeners, maybe that don't know what a poor house is, if your parents are in a lot of debt, uh today you get sued for not paying bills, you declare bankruptcy in America, your credit gets rocked, but nothing really happens to you. You just can't get credit.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Um it's considered a violation of credit, right? They can sue you for your belongings to recoup some of their losses, but debtors' prisons aren't really a thing.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Most of them don't, though. Like they just kind of like take the hit.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yeah. They most, yeah, because usually it's credit companies. Yeah. Right? Or they do what's called repo. Yeah. If you got credit for like you, a TV.

SPEAKER_02 24:12

A TV, a car, uh people are gonna be real familiar with with the image of getting cars repo'd.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Yeah. Somebody shows up, takes a car back. Yeah. Fair. I didn't pay for it. Yeah. That's the thing. And then they resell it and they make a lot of money doing this because they're gonna sell it at the original price.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Or close to it.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Because, like, you know, if you bought it new, yeah, the devaluation's still a thing.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

But besides the point, medical bills, they don't yeah, you you get passed around to collections, your credit gets hit a little bit. Back then, you would go to a jail type situation where you would make things for money to pay off your debt. This is way more akin to prison.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Boy howdy, when you're only making like 15 cents a day.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

Yeah. A lot of if you talk to a lot of people who are very conscious of labor-oriented things, they will consider this slavery with extra steps.

SPEAKER_02 25:01

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

And and they are right. They are yeah, they are right.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

There is no escaping that one. They are correct.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

This is a quote from LDHI website, which is a website that that has a lot of information on this particular mill. Um, their studies kind of around this mill. They are largely who I am quoting from today. This is where a lot of this information came from. Women who guided the fiber through machines that cleaned, smoothed the cotton into laps or rolls, which were uh which were then folded by machines called finishers. The laps went into the main building and were formed into strips around three inches in diameter. The belt conveyed the strips into the railway head, a machine that condensed ten strands into one preparing them for spinning. In yarn, uh in the yarn mill that occupied one floor of the building, the strips were drawn even finer, wound into spindles, twisted into various sizes of yarn, and divided into twenty pound bundles or hanks. Workers tended each of these machines as the cotton fiber worked its way through the system, clearing obstructions, moving empty spindles into place, and uh taking filled spindles to the weaving area. Now the reason I mentioned the statistics around kids is because I wanted anybody listening to this to keep in mind that a solid like six percent of the US workforce was kids. Yep. And a lot of the so a lot of the people who are doing the work that I just described, and I'll go into detail because that was like a big block of information that made no sense to most people, are going to be 12-year-old girls specifically. Yeah, it was like you're looking at sub-13 young women in like these big dresses trying to work factory labor.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

And and and do meticulous and like must be careful to not get caught in moving parts.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Yes, and even then earlier when we talked about the bales, right? A hook comes down, grabs the bale, you move it on to a conveyor. That conveyor is like a big freight elevator that many of us have seen in buildings. Uh that freight elevator goes to the top um and carries these four to five hundred pound bales. The kid moving that into place, uh a lot of those are kids. They're like little boys. So, like, yeah, if it falls on them, they will die. Like, that's how that works, right? So to describe this process a little bit better, what is happening is um cotton comes in in these like big compressed sacks. Uh that's how it they load it when they pick it out in the fields from the gin. They put it in these big giant sacks. The gin is this little spindly machine that moves what kind of looks like a round hairbrush really fast, but it's made of metal. You put you put the cotton into it and it separates the cotton from its hull, its like shell part. That gets compressed into bags in wool. Um, you literally build a big bag up and guys like jump on top of it to get it compressed down in. That goes, so they make these bales, the bale goes up, it it gets shredded, it gets washed, and then it goes through a system of things called cards. Now, cards makes it seem like they're big flat things for some reason. No, they are not. If if you I know you are very familiar with carding from because you work with yarn a lot. Yes. And you can buy hand cards. People still do this.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

There are, there are also, I I've I have also seen this this kind of industry in motion, I guess. Like, once again, it was a tourist trap, so it was very, you know, I'm sure, dated.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

But it I I've I've seen this in motion, and it is it it's a spiked wheel.

SPEAKER_04 29:03

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Like, and it's not just like like a single like attire or anything. No, no, no. It's it's feet wide and it's full of like these tines.

SPEAKER_04 29:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Like, like a pet, like you know, you know, the the metal pet brushes, like if you have like a long, a long-haired dog.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

That is exactly what I thought of.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Yeah, same brain.

SPEAKER_02 29:25

Same brain.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Uh like spinning, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:28

And it spins, and there's usually an another either a flat piece or another wheel that is going in an opposite direction, that is uh basically forcing the fibers not only to separate out of clumps into a more uh organized kind of sheet.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 29:46

Because it it sort of felts it while it's combing it.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Right. It's it's the point of it is to draw it out into linear strands. That you yeah, so you you want all the fibers to move in one direction so that later you can make it into some kind of like actual roping material, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:05

And it's also like the sixth process in pulling like random stuff out of it.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

And you can also if you're if you are in in the fiber arts industry that we know today, like if you are if you if you're one of those people that handmakes yarn, this would also be where you are adding in different colors of fibers or adding in like tinsel or any any sort of like the decorative additives, this would also be that that section where you would put that in.

SPEAKER_03 30:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Because it it it organizes the fibers and puts them into uh what what we call hanks that you would later that you will later spin into actual yarn. And on an industrial scale, this is a very, very dangerous section of things because you know, you're working with wheels that weigh a thousand pounds and are covered in metal, thin metal spikes. So if your hand gets in there, or your hair, or the corner of your apron or dress.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah, you are being pulled in.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

In fact, they are a It's giving mangler. There are yes, exactly. It is a spiked mangler. And there are many stories of young women. When you see young women in these photographs, you'll notice that they almost always have short hair.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

Short hair or they are back in a bonnet.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

Yeah, and and many, many stories that I have read is somebody gets caught in a wheel or in one of these machines, and somebody comes up and just yanks their head. Because having the hair pulled out is definitely preferable than having your face anywhere near these machines. Yeah, because these are in the 1800s, most of these machines are open-faced. Yes, they're not like covered in metal boxes or anything.

SPEAKER_02 31:43

And on top of the fact that you are an you are you are a factory worker, and I guarantee that the factory owner at this point in time is going to care more about the product that is now covered in blood than your scalped nugget.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Absolutely. And so, like, because to get further into this, I talked about how they with the little belts, right? Earlier in that brief description, we talked about these three-inch belts that were moved to what is called the railway head. So these are not ropes, right? They're not thick. When we think of these belts, what we're thinking is after they go through this process and they're all unidirectional, you have a paper thin line of material that is moving around uh what looks like a belt, but it's actually like a bunch of strands. And that group of strands is about three inches wide. Uh, it goes into something that kind of looks like the bottom side of an umbrella, how it has like a bunch of these like metal arms and it spins around. And and if you were a kid collects it.

SPEAKER_02 32:47

This is it's it's a yarn winder.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Yes, it's a yarn winder, it's a big giant yarn winder. If you had one of these as a kid, maybe where you made like um used to have to do it manually in between all the little spokes. Yep. Um, it does that. It does that, but super fast and uh with a bunch of spider arms.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's we it's it is fascinating to see these things in motion uh in a modern sense, but I can imagine that it would have been harrowing back in the day.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

Yeah, because you set it and then it just kind of does it. Yeah, and then it winds it into ropes that go down further, and then those ropes, which is actually just like individual parts of a what will be yarn, and then that gets roped again and again and again until it is something approximating like a couple of inches in width.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Right? Like so all of these things are just like big moving machine parts.

SPEAKER_02 33:45

And this isn't even like the weaving section of things. This is just the the processing of making the the fiber that will become fabric.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

Yeah, this is not the dangerous part. Yeah, we are actually in the safe zone.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

Yeah, which is crazy, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:59

The the little boy loading the 400-pound veil of of cotton onto the elevator has a pretty fucking normal job. I move around things that weigh hundreds of pounds all the time.

SPEAKER_03 34:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

On it on a jack, right? Like so, and we still do. This is what forklifts do, right? This that's the normal part. We're not in the non-normal part.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

We're not in the scary part yet. No, like that's as scared as we are.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Yes, all of this stuff is like when you see somebody who is actually working one of these like spike tines that is separating um all of this fabric out or this, these, these, these bulbs or wool out, it looks pretty normal. It looks like somebody dropping something into a wood chipper. As long as your hand doesn't get in there, you're probably fine. One of the reasons for like the plate that's over the top is that you drop it in from that side.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

And then you have something to brace yourself on. Also, if something pops and flies at your face. There's something nowadays we have like metal enclosures and big plastic screens.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Yeah, the big plexi screens and stuff. Because uh cotton is is grown out of a like almost wood fibrous bulb. Yeah. And it it has it has a very spiky, hard, sharp inner core because the the fluff, the pull the thing that you pull off of it, yeah is a byproduct of yeah, it's basically like um like a cattail has like stuff on the inside, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Um, the gin takes most of that out, but there are parts left by, and uh the first real job in this whole thing is that as they're doing that and it comes down through the various layers of cards, there's a person called a picker. And the picker literally stands there and they look for wood fiber and they put their hands down there and they physically remove it. Uh, this is done at multiple stages in this time period. Um, and that's why it's like a kid job, is because that's all you do, is you just do this. It that's it also requires nimble fingers. Yeah. And so, like, and to even today, we talked about this before we filmed, even today in modern wool production, there is still a picker.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Now it's a grown adult who is there, who's like just very fast, and they watch it as it moves down the line. It is now completely safe. You might get a pretty bad finger pinch from it, but it's not likely to remove your arm. Um, like that's it's it's maybe grab a hold of your finger. So it's still like there's still a danger in it, but people wear gloves and then they they stand there, and if they see some like discolored part of wool or or whatever, they reach down and they pull it off. Uh, it's still a thing. We have not found a better way to do this.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

Well, yeah. There are some things that uh that machines cannot replace humans in picking and crochet.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Right. So workers started by creating finer and finer threads uh with more cards and spindles. The thread was run through uh what's called liquid sizing, which stiffened and protected the fibers because we're talking about cotton here. Um there's like a chemical bath that it runs through, and in different kinds of fibers, they use different ways of doing this. The inside of these places is super humid and very hot.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

Because it's wet everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Yes, and it has to be washed. So it's like steamy, humid, the air is filled with these like solvents and oils that are keeping all the machines lubed. And then if you work in the wool industry in this time period, the smell of just animal everywhere because lanolin is a thing on wool. Yes. Part of the washing process is removing the excess lanolin. According to uh uh the medical journal The Lancet, noted in 1863, the carter seldom lives uh in a card room beyond 40 years of age. Meaning if they die at some point, um, many have given up working much younger. This is because of white lung, cotton dust uh that gets lodged in the lung tissue uh when reduced uh to micro cotton when it gets reduced to microfine particles and dried out and all that stuff in the washing process and in the looming process, it just kind of goes up into the air in this time period.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

It's a reason that workers wear now wear masks.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Yeah. It's a it's a big thing if you've ever like driven behind a cotton gin out in a place that does cotton, there's just cotton everywhere. It gets all over the road, it goes into the air. So it's like that, but much, much finer. And so you've got that, you've got smoke, you've got the heat of the area, but all this crap gets in their lungs and they don't have a tendency to live that long. This this is going to be pretty thoroughly investigated in in uh England, and there are many websites you can look on, you know, the dangers of working in a cotton mill in the industrial age.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

All of them.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

All of them. Because children were often used as what's called a scavenger, quickly running between spinning spinning mules or spinning gennies as we might know them. Um, those are kind of two different machines, but like that's what people recognize. What they did was they picked up waste cotton, fallen to the ground. Anyone who's ever seen a industrial age English movie with like the little kid running around underneath all the like there's a big, what looks like a giant tapestry machine, like a big loom, and you see these kids running under. So this is more dangerous than that. Because the loom heads are largely stationary. The what what they mean by this the by the automatic or the spinning mule is that those looms, when they're actually in use, they go back and forth, stretching the strands out uh as they're spinning it into yarns. Uh, this keeps them from bunching in the spinning process. And so they they'll go and they'll gather and they spin while they're pulling away from the wall. So think of like something moving towards and away from the wall over and over and over, like a tapestry, like when someone's using a hand loom, how they move the shuttle up and down, or they move the the directional, the the base goes like up and down to reline the fibers. Just like that, but a giant spinning industrial version. And as it comes away from the walls, little kids run underneath and grab all the stuff and run back. And if they don't make it in time, they get bonked.

SPEAKER_02 40:16

They get bonked, or get sucked into it.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Yeah, or get strangled, or you know, in one terribly horrific incident, uh, get their head cut off by the wheel. Because it's moving on tracks on the ground, like a rail car, right? It's going back and forth, and these fast-moving spindle lines are going on. Mostly what happens is the spinner head like comes and like whacks them in the head or or or they get burned or it grabs a hold of their hair or something like that. Uh, but there are a few horrific instances, thank you, of uh someone's arm getting pulled into one, other horrible things. The thread was dried and wound on large drums before being sent to the looms, where warp and wolf threads were wort woven into the cloth. This is just like a tapestry machine.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

And like, but a giant one that I could not have gotten through that sentence with that tongue twister in the middle. I know that I don't know how you did that with a stutter, too.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

Bruh. The wharf and wolf.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

I'm I'm so impressed right now.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Damn. Um well done. Appreciate it. Brian was locked in. Yeah, it was just like the wharf and wolf. It's not even wolf, it's wolf. Woof. Wolf W O O F. Um workers who tended the looms required more training than any other operatives, and their wages tended to be higher. Can't imagine why. Right. And again, I want to I want to get into this. When we talked about the children earlier, about how many kids were industrial workers. Most of these jobs are like uh log pullers, log jammers, uh, I work in a sawmill, I work on in a grain factory. It's not just cotton, right? It's not just uh um it's not just textiles.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Or if you're the British Navy, powder monkeys.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

Yes, there's a lot of kids working in a lot of different industries. We're focusing on this mill, but that makes me the reason why I bring this up is because in mills, especially in the South, where you have a lot of, and this is the beginning of what people would associate with the South, right? Um a larger and larger section of these are going to be young girls because these are not jobs that require brute strength, right? So you're not gonna get a lot of like 14-year-old boys. You're you it's not required for this. They often require dexterity, which Yes, which women are often more keyed into just because of their own raising, right? Like because of the cooking cleaning tasks that are usually assigned to girls, they're just kind of better at this and also cheaper.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 42:58

They don't get paid as much. Glass ceiling from the start, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Literally.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

So uh and also they have a tendency to come along with their mothers. So if your mom works there, girls gotta be somewhere, right? Yeah. So yeah, so you you you get that, right? So I talked about their wages tended to be higher because they had to learn how to use these machines. When I say use, I mean reset, slight maintenance.

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Not they probably had to thread them too.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

Yeah, you you have to know how the machine works. You 14-year-old girl, need to know how this machine works.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Jesus, I just figured out my serger.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 43:36

No.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

You need to work this industrial stamp press, young man. Like, so it's like that's what we're talking about here, right? Some of these are adults, but many of the people who are just like, you know, like there's some stuff that requires a lot of experience. So if you work in like a stamping factory where we make, let's say, pans, the person who's applying the heat treatment probably in Adult that requires some level of like advanced skill and metallurgy, right? Um, at least you need to understand like how the metal turns color as it's getting hotter, that kind of stuff for iron and steel, right? Yeah, but the kid who's stamping the initial shape is just pushing a lever and it comes down and crushes the pan over a mold. That doesn't require a great deal of training. It does require a great deal of maturity, but that doesn't affect the bottom line. So, like, how quickly can you get a person to do a thing is what they're concerned about. So that kind of stuff goes to kids in this time period. There's someone like crushing, you know, what will be like copper pot lids or whatever on a big pneumatic press. That's terrifying. That is a child. Yeah, like a child is doing this. And also, we'll mention this a little bit later. None of this is electric. Yep. These are steam-operated machines with coal fires.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

We are we are fully in the steampunk era.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

Yeah, unless you live in New York, in which case, you know, like some of the river base generators are a thing. Um in the South, this is not a thing. These are all coal fires. Yes, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:16

We we are in the everything is run on steam.

SPEAKER_00 45:19

Yeah, if you live in or around Virginia, it is much cheaper to use coal at this time period. So the air is thick and smoky and dirty, and sometimes the steam-powered lines that run your pneumatic machines burst. Yep. Yeah, like and boiling water shoots out of them. Because that's how this usually works. Now, that's not super common in a mill, and here's why. We actually touched on this in the Magdalene laundries where we looked at a picture, and I was supposing that the big metal line above them was not a fire thing, but was probably a crankshaft. So the way that this works is that you have a big centralized boiler, you're burning stuff, you're making steam power, that turns a big piston, right? So uh that piston is a spinning wheel. Uh after the piston head goes up and down, just like a car, it turns a big wheel. That wheel has a bunch of like rubber or or rope pulleys on it. It goes to big centralized crankshafts which run over the factory floor. Those crankshafts have in turn belts that go down to the machine that you're using. So it's a big like wheel-powered thing. And if you touch that strap, your hand will spin at like hundreds of revolutions per minute with enough torque to run a several thousand-pound machine.

SPEAKER_02 46:45

So it's coming off.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Yes. Yes. Cut the chase there. So think about like you open up the top of your car, you turn the motor on, you leave the engine running, you take the cover off, and you're watching the serpentine belt go round and round and round. It works just like that, and then stick your hand in it. No, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't do that. Because if it gets caught in one of those wheels, it's gonna get smashed or cut off, right? And that's that's what we're getting into. But I mentioned that their wages tended to be higher. So what was that wage? So I looked it up.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

It's gonna be like 30 cents, I already know.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

Uh, kind of, actually, not too far off. Um, in 1860, the average annual wage for a worker, for an industrial worker, was $288. That works out to about $4.38 a week. Uh and then the Civil War happens. In 1870, the uh annual wage was $377 because inflation.

SPEAKER_02 47:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:45

That's why I mentioned Civil War, right?

unknown 47:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

We have national banks and stuff that are starting to like become an idea.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

You imagine making $300 a year.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

It's pretty crazy. In 1870, $377, uh, after the Civil War, after the Panic of 1873, which we have briefly talked about in our very first episode. Oh my god. The Love Canal, 18 uh Panic of 1873 happens because a major railway collapses, and that causes a like damn near global uh problem money. Yeah, in both Europe and America. The wage in 1880 was 345. Ooh, it actually went down. Uh from as as an annual wage for industrial workers. Um, and that's because people need work. Need often drives. So if you have too many workers, if like there's a labor surplus, wages usually go down. If there's a major economic panic, they usually go down. Uh 1890, it was 484. Look at that. Inflation's back up. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So uh so the wage is higher, but the buying power is not necessarily higher. After the panic of 1893, that's where we kick off our Love Canal story where the banks pull the guy's money. Um the 1900 wage was $337, again down. Now, some of that is because the dollar picks up a little bit of strength, but mostly it's because we are thoroughly in the age of like early immigration. Yeah. So labor is abundant and therefore doesn't cost very much. Now, what does that work out? Uh, that very last one at $437 a year, it works out to about $8.40 a week. Throughout this entire time period from 1870 to 1900, the average cost for your daily food per day, like this is per person per day, um, worked out to about a dollar.

SPEAKER_02 49:50

If fucking only.

SPEAKER_00 49:53

But also your pay is between, so on average, right, in this entire time period, your average pay per week is six bucks. So at the very beginning of that in 1860, that was like a dollar for your family.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

At the end, it was like a dollar per person. So at the very beginning of this industrial system, where this mill is open, you don't have a lot of money because it's like four bucks a week.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:18

At the end, you still don't have a lot of money because it's a dollar person and it's like eight bucks a week, eight, nine dollars a week. Either way, your paycheck for one of your workers, who's probably your dad or mom, goes entirely just to feeding you.

SPEAKER_02 50:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 50:33

That's it.

SPEAKER_02 50:34

Fuck.

SPEAKER_00 50:34

Your whole paycheck is just food. So the kids have to work because if they want clothing, books, any level of entertainment, if someone gets sick.

SPEAKER_02 50:46

And education. Yeah. Because at this point, there is no free and public education.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

Right. In fact, that gets brought up in the in the arguments against the industrial system and in many of the outcries, they talk about the craftsman system. There were problems in that. And in in the your kids go to somebody they apprentice under because you get all kinds of abuse scenarios under the apprentice situation. However, for the most part, you're you are apprenticing to your parent, right? Like your parent is a cooper, your parent is a leather worker or a mason or whatever, and you learn from them. So wages are within the household. It doesn't really matter how much you pay your kids because it's your household family income. Yeah. Uh so they get paid, you get paid, everybody gets paid. The money stays inside of the house. Uh also you learn, right? If you are, say, a woodcutter, if you if you're a carpenter of some form, you have to learn the math to be a carpenter. So your parents are teaching you how to do things. If you're a farmer, you are learning how to be a farmer, which requires like fixing things. It requires math. It requires, you know, all the stuff that you need to learn to effectively be a farmer. Like crop rotation and shit like that. You start to learn how things work. You might not have an extensive education, but you do have one.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:09

You can read, you can write, you can do basic math, you can do all that kind of stuff, right? And then go from there. The industrial system takes all of that away. Because, like the little boy in the pan factory, you need to be able to pull this lever. And that's it. That's it. Um, this is like the end result of like, you know, John Locke and Adam Smith's nail factory. You know, like it's what's called specialization of labor in economics, and it makes things easier, faster, more profitable. Uh, it also allows you to make more quicker, but it does have a human cost when you don't have an eight-hour workday or free education or anything like that. Hazards include uh from working in a factory like this. Hazards include becoming deaf from factory noise. Yep. We talked about the steam and and fire lines and all that other stuff, burns, mangling, smashing hands and feet, limb loss, lung disease, because the coal fire is still a thing. Um, cancer and also the the weft from all this cotton and whatever. Cancer from the lubricants, which we did not have really the ability to test for, so that one is just kind of like we're learning.

SPEAKER_02 53:23

Yeah. Carcinogens are in everything.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

Yes. And the physical abuse from overseers.

SPEAKER_02 53:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:30

Because back then, like, works didn't have any rights. Sometimes your boss would just hit you. And a lot of what were called floor bosses were picked strictly for their meanness. You know, like um, if you've ever seen anything like a match factory in a movie or anything like that, you'd have a bunch of women doing something, and then there's just like one guy standing on top of the stairs being.

SPEAKER_01 53:50

One great big brute.

SPEAKER_00 53:51

Yeah. He's just there to intimidate you. Like, that's kind of what that's for. And we talked about this before, but like and blindness from particles and explosions, because remember, this is steam and coal power in most factories. Um, and sometimes just chemical process. A lot of these places that were making like new chemical solvents and all kinds of stuff like that, they didn't really have any handle on how to be safety data. No safety data sheets.

SPEAKER_02 54:21

How did any of these people survive?

SPEAKER_00 54:22

Well, a lot of them didn't. Mortality rates were very, very high in factories. And we we have talked about this in other episodes, but sometimes you have stuff that is unforeseen initially, but because it makes a lot of money, the factory owners will just kind of swoop it under the rug.

SPEAKER_01 54:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

Ratathor, uh, phosphorus, depletion of the jaw from match heads, uh, the radium girls. Yep. Or the owners know, and then they just conveniently don't tell you. Or they find, in the case of uh many, many young women, a convenient socially uh determining thing, like they would say that, oh, it's from syphilis, and they would discredit you as a person. Thankfully, that kind of shit not super common in loom factories. But rather than uh raising wages to handle any of this extreme disparity, managers revised the idea of providing company housing. This is something I talked to you on the phone about.

SPEAKER_01 55:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

Uh, and we'll revisit here very, very quickly. Assuming that workers who lived in buildings owned by the factory could be more easily controlled. The company built a small cotton factory village made of gray artificial stone, cinder blocks. That's what that means. Sounds like gray artificial stone arranged in a court that fronted on Drake Street. Rent was fifty cents per room per week. Now you remember that wage.

SPEAKER_02 55:48

Yeah, you're six dollars a day or a week.

SPEAKER_00 55:51

A week.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

So every week almost entirely went to feeding your family or yourself.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

And now fifty cents of that is gone. And this is company-owned housing. So this is like we're talking about in a major city. Charleston is not small. It's it's I mean, it's smaller than say Houston is, but it's not little. There are other jobs around. If you lived in the middle of nowhere in a company town, they could really take advantage of this. And so, like, and they did a 50 cents a room. Most families end up living in one large room. Uh, we see this in plenty of paintings and and advertisements. If you've ever seen the cover of the baking soda can, the clabber girl, if you look at it real closely the next time, you'll realize that everyone's in one room. There's a cradle, there's a little girl making biscuits out of fucking flour because that's what they're eating. This was like a Great Depression advertisement. Because this is how people lived.

SPEAKER_02 56:48

It's fucking crazy. That like I modern sensibilities have a hard time like establishing this because you know, we kind of have social boundaries built in, especially even even within family union units.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

Yeah. Largely you like even if you have multiple kids to a room, it'll be like girls and boys. Yeah. Like girls have their own room, boys have their own room, for the reason of just like privacy, yeah, and and and bodily autonomy, right? And for the long, for a very, very long time in history, most houses had like one or two rooms in them. And so, like, if your parents were doing the thing, you knew. You knew you were probably in the same room. And like that that really sucks. But if you look at like, you know, the the birth rate of most people was like five kids, you know, like so.

SPEAKER_02 57:36

Well, granted, infant mortality rates were also very high. So you may have started with five, but you only raised like two.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

Yeah, life was in your face all the time. In addition, in trying to hold down the cost of labor, the company ensured that factory jobs did not really pay enough to guarantee gratitude or loyalty. Workers often left the Charleston mill just when they had learned how to operate the machines because they would just move around to other jobs.

SPEAKER_02 58:03

Yeah, they're following the work and following pay.

SPEAKER_00 58:05

And and they should, right? Modern plant and factory labor works like this today. If another job opens up that pays better, you just go there. Yep. Unless they offer like retirement packages or incentives or something to keep you there. Yeah, there needs to be something to keep you there, right? In Charleston, they could do this because there was other workarounds, seasonal farm work for picking and loading the new refrigerated trucks of the era, uh, housework, child care, cooking, etc., all the stuff that you see people doing, like you know, housework and and restaurants and all that shit, right? Laundries. More remote locations uh were at the mercy of script town structures. To briefly describe that to anybody that might not know what that is. When you live in the middle of nowhere for a factory town, it was legal for a long time for them to pay you in what was called company script. You would go down to the company store, and it was basically like company money.

SPEAKER_02 59:01

It was a video game that just did this in the last few years.

SPEAKER_00 59:05

Where you're in space or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:07

What what what why can't I think of it?

SPEAKER_00 59:11

But like, yeah, you you go asleep and then you wake up somewhere else, and then like they charge you an exorbitant rate, and you're basically a slave to them to like a mining company.

SPEAKER_02 59:20

And you're only paid in like company credits that can only be spent at the company store.

SPEAKER_00 59:26

And yay.

SPEAKER_02 59:28

So you are you are essentially renting yourself from the company.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

This opens you up, though, to a this is where I give that second trigger warning about sexual assault. In this country, there was a system in many factories and script towns in which women could sell themselves as prostitutes to the other workers through the company itself. In other words, they could work for the company-owned brothel in order to pay back debts and make a little money on the side. This is institutionalized sex work. It was made uh illegal very quickly, it was made illegal because people threw dynamite into buildings and killed their boss. Like not beating around the bush about it. If they did not get violent, this would not have ended. Unless there was some religious or social push by the ultra-rich that would cause this to change. That would not have stopped. Because the reason why I mentioned this part, um, script towns were bad for many, many reasons. One of the reasons is that they would just drive up the cost of of goods. Anything. Yeah, and you you had no other stores, there was nowhere else for you to go. Um in one of the stories that we covered actually, someone started by uh building a bar outside of a script town.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

Yes, and then that that was our Silent Hill episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:51

Yeah, that's right. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And so like script towns sometimes turned into legitimate towns. Most of the time Centralia. Yeah, right. Like and then most of the time they just died, right? They whatever resource they were there to to strip from the earth would run out and they would die. Thankfully, during the Western expansion and like the gold rush, most of these towns were just kind of started by the people who lived there, not by a corporation or a company head of any form.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:22

Like the the biting towns.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

Yeah. So it's just like people owned stakes, right? They would buy land from the government, they would um portion those out. Some people would come in and build a hotel or a laundry or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:34

Or a bar.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34

Or a bar. Yeah, like this is actually how the the police like this is how Wyatt Earp got started. Wyatt Earp was a prospector that became a like a local sheriff and then moved out to become a prospector again. And then he bought like a laundry in a hotel, and then he ended up after a fight with the local cowboy gang, becoming a cop again. Like that's kind of how that works.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:58

That is a fun series of words.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:00

The local cowboy gang. The what?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

In fact, the cops in that time period were usually organized into what were called law gangs. Yeah. Because it was just usually you and your brothers. There was no like city police, it was just like the local toughs, the municipal badasses. Yeah, the government will pay you to not be a problem, and you get to deal with the other problems. Um, so like that's that's what that worked, that's how that worked. Um, and some of them really cared. You know, they were legitimately like sheriffs and marshals that were uh the very famous Bass Reeves in this area. Like first, first well-known black marshal, like going around killing murderers. It's a good name, too. Bass Reeves is awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:45

He's amazing. Yeah, anybody listen to this, like flick up Bass Reeves, he's fucking awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:50

We'd love to hear it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

So, in all that script town structure, you've got there's a there's a word for this kind of like company ran prostitution that's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember it. You've got those things. Another thing that happens widely around these housing scenarios and around script towns and around factory work in general is that because you're living so day-to-day, you can't really have any complaints. So bosses become physically abusive or sexually harassing. Men would stand outside of factory factories just to harass women because they couldn't they couldn't complain. So, like men who worked at the factory would stand around at the front when the whistle blew and everybody went to work to harass women.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:34

How how did none of them catch like a weapon to the face?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

Well, sometimes they did.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:39

Because we're still in the hat pin era.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

Yeah, this would happen, uh, but here in America, because of the way that we have always kind of been structured, there was never really a lot of that until you start getting into, I guess you could say it it didn't take off as much. Like in London, around the suffrage movement, you get a lot more of women learning judo, literally learning judo, flipping cops, both the Lord's side, the wealthy money side, and the gangs that kind of came up against them were really bad. Like it was not uncommon for women to be what we would now call like to be shanghai'd, to be like drugged, kidnapped, wind up working somewhere. All that kind of shit, right? These are the trappings of not having social services and other things around an industrialized world that a lot of people just never saw coming. Like there were a great deal of people in power that were just kind of left with their heads in their hands around how the fuck to even organize this, how to organize like water and gas and housing.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:44

Yeah, because we didn't get we didn't get uh like plumbing plumbing until what 1890?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:49

Yeah, like later, later. And and I mean there was a job in England for a long time called the ragman. Anybody who's like familiar with like, you know, kind of like jig type music, uh the ragman's ball. A ragman is a person that goes around with a ladder and a lighter and lights street lamps.

unknown 1:05:07

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:09

That's that was like your whole job. That's what you did.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:11

They lit them at night and put them out in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:13

Yeah. Uh there were people who were like, you know, hired to wake you up in the morning by throwing rocks at your window. Like all that kind of shit. Factory life caused a lot of people to move in in what's called like, you know, urban migration here in America.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:27

Yeah, we just covered this with uh with soil milk, too.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:30

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Suddenly there was a ton of people in cities, not a lot to do otherwise. So in some cases, you might even say, like, this is part of the how we get to where we are now, as far as having all the creature comforts that we have. A very painful few first steps.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:46

Yes. Because this is when they're still figuring out like how multi stage chimneys work, indoor plumbing, um, water filtration.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:56

And like sanitization.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:57

Yeah, how to make a gray water facility. Yeah. You know how do you how do you turn 10 million gallons of like of of wastewater water and put it into the river without it being toxic and nobody can get near it?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:09

Yeah. Um that's what happened to the Thames.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:12

That's right. That's right. Yeah, it's what happened to the SEN. It's what happened like you couldn't swim there for a long time. Um the dollop has a great episode on the New York sanitation department.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:23

That is something I need to read about because like I got I got real curious about it when I was working on uh our last episode.

unknown 1:06:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:30

Because that that I mean you you you're fighting microbes in a in a time period where like germ theory isn't really a thing yet. Like we we spoke about it last week where like pasteurization was only like just kind of in its infancy.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:47

And like people are getting sick, and people have always gotten sick in cities because of sanitization, yeah. And they're figuring out how to fix all of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:01

Because factories are like are becoming the lifeblood of of civilization.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

Yeah, towns are built around them.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:09

And in so, like, it actually in in opposite to all this, because of I've just we've just spent however long talking about how fucking horrible this one factory could be, and how bad a script town could be, and how bad like factories in general are with like the amount of people who get injured, which is in the millions, by the way. When you look at like how many people got injured in a in at their job in this time period, most people didn't work after 40, not because they couldn't work, like not because they didn't want to or they could afford to retire. They couldn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:40

Yeah, they were they're bodily they they were bodily broken.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:44

Their spines were bent over, or they had a limb missing fingers, lost a limb, had been grievously injured.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:51

In the railway industry, it was actually how you got if you if you signed up for a new job in the railway industry during Western expansion, you were paid more if you had less fingers. It was a sign of experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:04

That's crazy. I did not know that. That's wild.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:08

That's this is how bad. Those little like hand, those little the the part where you see two trains come together and it looks like two clasping hands. The couplings. The coupling, yeah. That was invented to stop that shit from happening. Because you used to have to guide it in with your hands and a hammer. Yeah, in fucking sane.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:26

Yeah, no. And especially consider like the weather conditions and stuff too. Nah, fuck that. All right, so now that we've so now that now that we have focused on the let's let's get to the other side of this.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:39

So the other side of this is the other side of this is that like labor union strikes worked. In fact, this particular place, the Knights of Labor were heavily invested in.

unknown 1:08:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:49

At the time they were the largest labor union. Later on, it's going to be the IWW because of the Haymarket Square affair, actually. They they get their name slandered a bit as like radical communists.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:02

I mean, as unions often did.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:04

Yeah, and they the crazy thing is they weren't, they were all anarchists. Yeah. They weren't like that. There is a very clear distinction in the difference between those two things. One is centralized authoritarian state power, and the other is very much not.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:17

And modern communists, even, are not centralized state power. They they are very much, they learned people learned a lot from Joseph Stalin.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:26

They just went, oh, this can go bad real fast. This means uh the average communist today is more like an anarcho-communist. They they don't believe, they don't trust the government at all. So even modern-day socialists are just like, no, we should really have a lot of checks and balances in place.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:44

There isn't such a thing as like a Leviathan anymore, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:48

Because of that, the Knights of Labor fold into other organizations. Eventually, everybody, a lot of them fold into either working with directly, being a part of, or whatever, with the people called the IWW. The the while, you know, like the international workers of the world. Yes. All those great Woody Guthrie songs are largely about the IWW. And the shit fucking works. Today, the average job is eight hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:13

To to to clarify part of this, your your average working day before before the unions got like fuck you involved, uh, you're looking at 12 to 14 to 16 hours every single day.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

Yeah, six days a week if your boss was religious.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:33

Yeah, if, if. And that was, and honestly, most people abandoned religion in in the name of profit.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:40

Yeah, you have seven day awake a week jobs. Most of it is like you couldn't get a bunch of Germans to work seven days a week, they wouldn't do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:48

These are all like Lutherans, right? And like Catholics won't work on Sunday in this time period, right? That was not a fucking thing. But you're right, like twelve, twelve to sixteen hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:58

And this is this would be entire families worth of people, too. Like not only the children, but the parents working these insane hours, which is a large portion of where the the unions began their complaints. Yeah, you get I'm trying to be real PC about this for some reason.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:18

You get your a lot of early stuff comes in in France because France has always been the place for revolution under anarchist theory of of people like Joseph Proudhon and and and uh later on it's gonna be like Marx Engels and and the unions of London and all kinds of stuff, right? Um yeah, that this this was so crazy that like there were buckets of cold water that were kept in most factories, so that when you started falling asleep, someone would throw water on you, or you dunk your head in water because as a child working 12 hours, you would start falling asleep.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:52

Yeah, it it was crazy. And to be perfectly honest, like I I find no fault in the extremes some of these unions had to take.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:00

When you hear, well, I know you can't pay your grocery bill this week, your daughter can work in the brothel if you need to pay your bills. Fuck them, shoot 'em.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:10

Like, yeah, blow them up.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:11

Dynamite, got it.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:13

Yeah, every every person who's ever said that, you know, like that the uh and and this is right now, um, this is a great time to bring this up. If you are so inclined to to back up unions, there is a union forming in Las Vegas around sex work. Because currently, if you work at a ranch, the ranch structure is how prostitutes work legally in Las Vegas, uh, around Las Vegas and the county land, there was a recent thing that said that their intellectual property was basically forfeit to who they worked with.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:47

So no.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:48

Yeah, so if you were an artist being a sex worker so you could still do your art, they owned that. You are considered their property. That is turning a human being into property. Fuck those people.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:01

Yeah, no. That's so yes, support unions, like at all costs.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:06

And uh yeah, and then fuck those people. No, I'm kidding. I'm just joking.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:10

With an axe.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Yeah, yeah, but like it it's crazy that like it this this kind of shit persists.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:18

This is 2026.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:19

How the fuck are they getting away with this? Yeah, they also have, just like strip towns, limo services, which the girls must pay for. They are not part of their job. They are basically done like hairdresser stations where the hairdresser you have to rent your station. And it's like, all right, so you've got some fat slob at the top making tons of money off of women being sex workers, which I really need to pin on. It's like this is a job that largely prohibits them from having any other kind of job because you can't put it in your resume and yeah, and uh not on top of the social stigma around it, which what the fuck?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:57

Yeah, and the danger.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:59

Yes, your job largely is capitulating towards men who who you know what I mean, like that being a sex worker is like the most dangerous fucking job you can really have outside of I make explosives for a living.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:14

Yeah, you know, like that or I or or I diffuse explosives for a living.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:18

Yeah, right. It's like unless you're a special forces member, this is probably the most dangerous thing you can really do. Uh especially if you're in the trans community, right? So then on top of all this, there's some asshole that's trying to take your intellectual property, script town you because your your sheet turning service, your limo service, your room the room that you rent to do your job.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:43

And you in some cases you might actually live there as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:46

Yeah. All all this shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:49

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:50

Fuck that.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:51

Yeah, union up, union up, girls.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:53

On TikTok right now, you can search it up, Sex Worker Union. It'll probably pop up. There's a very goth-looking woman with a necktie and a uh side cut, very small rock. Yeah, exactly. Yes, ma'am. I saw her and was like, okay. Yeah. Get a black suit on with a red tie. We were the same person in another life. Yeah. Jesus. And I was like, so help them with their union. And then like maybe you too will have a shot.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:21

Like just I'm just saying that like unions, unions are for the people. Yeah. Specifically. Like, and like that was that was how and why they were begun. And while they have lost a lot of their teeth over the last century and a half.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:35

You can also the the biggest the biggest argument against unions is like, well, they don't really do anything and they take money. It was like they take a little money. They take a little money. I've been a part of a union. Same. It was like 20 bucks a paycheck. And also ours wasn't even that.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:48

Yeah, actually, I think my union dues were 10 were $10, maybe five. I paid double because I also had my partner on my insurance. That's what it was.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:56

So that covers their fee for them too.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:59

And the crazy thing is, when when they're fully involved, the police workers union, that union fucking works. And and also like the prison guard union, which I have been a part of, because very briefly I was a prison a prison worker. I was in their union. They gave me free, free, like free lawyer coverage. Yeah. Outside of the union fees, which were tiny. And if you don't like your union, go to another one. Like you, as a a group of people who are a union, can just switch your representation. It it's not like if they're shitty and they're not doing their job, you can say as a union, vote to reduce your fees. Or because they're not doing their job.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:41

You can, in fact, go higher than your union rep.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:44

And be like, yo, this rep isn't doing their job. Fix it. And nine times out of ten, they will.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:50

Yeah. And and and really when I say like switch, I mean like as a as an entity, right? Like the whole thing isn't doing its job.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:56

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:57

But like, yes, go go above their head. Become the rep.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:01

Oh, yeah. We just had this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:04

Right. But become their boss. Yeah, just become right. If if if your boss isn't, if if you're stuck in a shit job and your boss is like sitting back doing nothing while everybody has to work, fuck take their job. Like, I know that's that's like a fucking sharp capitalist way of looking at it, but like at the same time, if if when you're talking about union stuff, like, yeah, you can you can you can be a rep. You can also like if you're if your company has a union that's not doing its job, court other unions. Employ the weapons of the enemy. You know what I mean? Like competition changes a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:39

I worked for Starbucks, or rather, I I worked, I worked, I worked at a Starbucks under another company, and there was this whole great, in fact, it's still going on, this whole great kerfuffle of of Starbucks trying to unionize and the company itself doing everything it possibly can to shut that down. I need our listeners who are probably like-minded as we are, who I I need you guys to understand why that's such a big deal. They're frightened of unions because unions, when when unions are working correctly, can tell companies what to do. Yeah, can shut shit down, can make changes. Unions are excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:20

Another big argument about unions is that like, well, you can't have a thousand bosses, you need one boss. The thing that's false about that argument is that unions almost exclusively deal with safety and wage. They don't tell like necessarily tell the comp countr company how to do their marketing or what products to produce or anything.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:40

Yeah, the closest thing that you're gonna come to a situation like that is if there's a strike, in which case you will have to uh you will have to make the choice to stand on the picket line and take the the the weekly kind of what's the word I'm looking for here, compensation from the union, which will be less than your pay if you if you go in and work.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:00

Yeah, because unfortunately strikers insurance isn't really a thing on a mass scale. Yeah, unfortunately not. Now it is through a union.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:06

But often, often, very often, as speaking as someone that worked at a company that stared down the barrel of six strikes, companies will fold in the face of a strike.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:20

Yeah, if they're if they're long enough and hard enough. Do you know what kind of took the teeth out of unions too? This is why this this this whole thing about like unions don't do anything always pisses me off. There was a very famous strike of the FAA. It was specifically the union of people who were doing air traffic control, right? They were about to strike for for better wages in the 1980s when inflation was really bad. Because as federal workers and really as anybody else, if they don't give you a cost of living increase, as remember, they are making more money in inflation because people are still using their services. So especially essential things like air traffic control. So they they struck for better wages and and also like hours issues because air traffic control people often work crazy amounts of hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:09

Yeah, you're looking at like seven twelves.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:11

Yeah, and it it's stressful, it's very stressful.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:14

Seems unreasonable, especially for the people that are like directing air traffic.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:18

Yeah, because if you can't find someone else to do it, there has to be someone doing it. It's like being a doctor, right? Like in that it's super stressful and your hours are crazy, and because it's such an essential job, normal labor stuff doesn't really apply, right? Like it's it's like because you can be called in at any time. It's like like National Guard is very similar, like they can be called in at any time. It's not so they struck, there was a governmental push to stop the strike, and Ronald fucking Reagan. He's his name comes up a lot in shitty stuff that really changed us for the worst. That is like the landmark case of when the unions kind of lost their bull. That was the point at which they were court ordered to go back to work, right? They're federal employees, they're not like regular employees, they're federal employees. So either they were gonna really go bug fuck or not. And that was gonna break a lot of union activity. Post that case, unions lose a lot. It's that and it's um a scandal around the Teamsters Union around a mob-involved guy called Jimmy Hoffa. Still a big thing, right? Like the Teamsters Union is still around, by the way, and still does good work. Like the the uh IWW still has a page. You can go to the IWW. Um recently in California, home workers, so like these are your people who come in and clean your house or or cook for you or whatever, like that, right? Maids, maids, nannies, stuff like that. They unionized. Period. And won. Let's go. They now have a minimum wage in California and several other states. And largely they didn't have a lot of representation because many of them could not speak English. Other places weren't giving them great coverage, like they were they were standing on on business as far as like their political side, but not on their wages. And so you know like Lulac, for instance, doesn't usually really get involved with wage stuff. It's usually like workers' rights or citizens' rights, not necessarily like how much you make per hour or your or your safety precautions, but they fucking won. It really looks like the sex workers are gonna win, as from what I've seen. At minimum, fuck the ranches because all these girls are getting so much exposure in their fight that they're able to transition other stuff. That's awesome. Like they're able to do the art they wanted to do to begin with, which is fucking amazing. And I hope I hope they get it. I hope, you know, like I I really do. I hope they get a large fandom. That's my spiel.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:01

We took a we took a we took a hard ride at unions there for a second. This is I don't know if y'all have realized this, but this is something that we're both very po passionate about. Um I have called more than one coworker dumb for not joining the union. Uh, because a union will go to bat for you if the company tries to fuck you over. Yeah. And I've seen it happen. Like in front of my face. This ain't right. Call the union right now. Record this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:27

There is a reason why um, like there are some companies, very big mass retailers that don't allow them at all. They'll shut down a location. Starbucks.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:36

And I will call them out so hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:39

This is how afraid of unions they are. The biggest one, which I cannot name um for legal reasons.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:45

Consistently higher in pay, consistently higher in benefits, and doing a lot in-house because they don't want one. Oh, yeah. Every time there's a big national push for allowing in unions, there's like new shit gets added. Oh, free mental health care services. So shit like that. Yeah. Every fucking time. Which good. They're doing what they're supposed to do, which is when they don't, when when when they're not being competitive in the market and they're driving costs low, people rattle the savers a little bit, they fix the problem. This is normally what unions do, and they're still doing it, they're just doing it indirectly. The fear of them even being there is enough to fix the problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:24

And so, like so that should be reason enough to support unions just to keep other companies in check.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:31

At the very minimum, your legal rights to join one.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:35

Right? I was gonna mention a whole thing about Scottish factories and how like this kind of stuff worked even before the factory that we were just talking about. In the 1830s, people were already offering housing and education to workers within the job. So, like if your kids, they wouldn't hire you under the age of 14. This is in Scotland, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:58

This was incentive to keep their to keep their workers there and to keep them happy.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:03

Because this was an age where where people, the population generally followed the work.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:08

Yeah, and and uh I'll probably do another episode on a guy called Robert Owen, who is gonna be one of our heroes in this. Yeah. Uh that I just didn't get a chance to talk because I was talking too much about other shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:19

Honestly, I mean, not a bad episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:22

Yeah. I I I wanted I wanted to talk about all this stuff because this labor conversation is coming up. Just to fucking remind people.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:31

Honestly, yeah. Like you know, like I know that the that many of us are a little in current events, a little a little beaten down, a little downtrodden, because it feels very much like we don't have a whole lot of control over a system that is designed to give us the majority the control.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:50

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:51

On a personal note, I want to remind all of you that you are the lifeblood of this country. Your work, your money, your time, your effort are what make everything go. So when we as a collective stand up and say no, we get shit done.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:10

That's right. And if if you are um thinking, well, that was so far in the past, that could never happen today. Remember that just a couple of years ago, Amazon workers were leaving packages of piss on people's door because their bosses wouldn't let them slow down long enough to use the restroom. That was that's recent history. My mom got one of them. It's not like a crazy thing. She had a bottle like by her trash can that was just some guy pissing in like a um a styrofoam cup because he couldn't stop long enough to use the restroom.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:46

Yeah, and like there was there was a a recent, relatively recent, I say that it was like four years ago, an expose done on like the we keep bringing up Amazon because Amazon got into a lot of trouble with all of this, but like like the processing facilities for Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:03

Oh, the person that got like crushed to death because they you're in like people are like, Well, they were in headphones. I was like, it's a very loud place. There's a bunch of things moving around. Um they they took a wrong step and got in front of one of these big moving walls that's picking shit up and got killed.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:21

And on on top of like people not getting lunch breaks, and like I I can vouch for that one. There there are times when like you're you you are on a time crunch to get something done for j for your work. So you will skip lunch to continue to do the thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:39

And then doing it once becomes twice to maintain said expectations.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:44

Yeah, because they always go up.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:46

Mm-hmm. And so don't do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:48

Take your lunch. People people bled and died for your 15 minute break.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:54

To to borrow from pop culture, act your wage.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:57

Yeah. Yeah, like if If you if you were gonna if if you're worried about like moving up, move up with leadership and integrity. Speaking from personal experience, if you move up strictly on speed, you will burn out. Like you'll burn out. And I did. I had to step down from a job that I was in because I was working like a maniac for 12 hours, 12 to 15 hours a day. It was never appreciated. Like it kinda was, but like I still got talked to like an asshole. Like I was wasting their time because I didn't do it in 10 hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:34

Literally, literally. The amount of times that I got chewed out over overtime, over unavoidable overtime, because there was no coverage or there was no there there was no way to avoid it, to continue to maintain the pace and the demand that we were at. Ooh, we're just air in laundry now. Yeah. Uh yeah, the the sheer amount of times that I got chewed out for staying at work for 12 to 13 hours because I I couldn't leave.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:02

Yeah. Yeah, there's no one here. What do you want me to do?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:06

You want you want me to you want me to just leave at noon? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:08

And if you do, they get mad that well, you didn't have coverage. Well, that's your fucking job, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:13

You know, like that's you're running us on a skeleton crew when all of your rules ooh, I'm mad still. I'm still mad. It's been a year and a half. I'm still mad. All of your rules say that it demand that there has to be two to three people here at all times. Why am I the why am I the only person here?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:30

For eight to twelve hours.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:31

Why? And also, if you were of the opinion that like, well, eight hours, like eight hours labor, like we could work a little longer, we'd probably get more done. Here's the thing your optimal efficiency in most tasks is four hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:44

Four to six.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:45

Four to six, yeah. If you are if you are prone to let's say doing something creative or something that you actually like.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:53

A little longer, right? You're on you're on the six side. If you're doing menial labor, any plant person knows, you gotta take a lot of breaks. Yep. Because your body will just stop. And sometimes your brain will just go, no. Yeah, you just get you just get tanked out. You can't think. You know, like and yeah, high stress jobs demand a lot of breaks.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:13

So yeah, unions are awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:14

Yes. They should, there are plenty of workers. There is no such thing as a worker shortage. There just isn't. You know, like that's that at any given, and I say that because at any given time, if you raise wages high enough, people come out of retirement to work. There is never really a shortage of people.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:33

And I cannot tell you how many times a day I see posts on Facebook, Instagram, uh, fucking all of the social media of people looking for jobs. Yeah. There is no such thing, uh, the boomer thing. Well, nobody wants to work anymore. Yes, they do. The problem is nobody's hiring because they don't want to pay people.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:53

Or they wanna they want to hire them for like 20 hours a week.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:58

Not a sustainable, like great for a second job if you need a second job.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:02

A second job or some kid after school.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:04

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:04

But the problem is is those hours that are available for 20 hours a week aren't after school.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:09

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:10

They're in the middle of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:11

Yeah, they are in the middle with split days off. Yeah, like that's there's a lot of shit like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:17

I got opinions on this still.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:19

Unless, and now granted though, Katie, if you if you are willing to, you know, sell all of your opinions to the fucking wind, you can go work for ice for 50.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:27

Absolutely the fuck. The only reason that I would work for ice would be to sabotage.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:32

Burn it from the inside. And you know what the crazy thing about all that is? Like, from a surely economic argument, when you have a surplus of labor, the price of labor goes down, right? So there are points in the conversation where you might say, well, we need to control labor. However, that's not really what they're doing. A lot of the people who they are currently harassing came in completely legally, could not get a case fast enough. There wasn't a clear path to citizenship that didn't cost thousands of dollars that they do not have.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:04

Yeah, and they came here for refuge.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:07

Yeah, there's a lot of them are just asylum seekers.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:10

We got a great big fuck off statue that says that's what we're here for. Right. I'm mad. I'm angry.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:16

And also, such a dumb fucking thing. Like this, this will irritate me, and then I swear we'll stop, guys. Like we're like an hour and 40 minutes in.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:24

Oh my god, are we really?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:25

Yeah, we don't even have a lot of editing to do in this episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:28

Oh shit. Factories used to be very, very scary. Uh, and cotton gins are woof.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:35

Yeah, the the the whole mill structure, uh, along with coal mines and along with, you know, like a lot of other places, early chemical factories, a lot of them had these same issues. And we're just kind of lucky that throughout the world there were a lot of people in power that also sided with workers' rights.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:55

And where we weren't lucky, they got the fucking dynamite. Yep. Right? Like that's that's what happened. And we won.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:03

And if we band together, we will continue winning.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:06

There's there's no reason to have a trillionaire in the world. There isn't. I I can make a case, I can make a moral case, a ethical case for a person having millions of dollars. One good invention, right? Adele is a billionaire. Yeah because she sings real good. That's what it is, right? So you can make an ethical case for a person having a single billion dollars, you know, like one right. Once you get past that, the way that you get past that is by having factories and shit like that, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:35

And you are not investing back into your into your people or your community, which you should be doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:40

Because once you get into the hundreds of billions of scale, which is really where I have a real problem, right? A person has ten billion dollars, you might have that because you invented something, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:51

A person who has you invented you invented a plastic polymer.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:55

Yes, that literally happened, right? Like the the I mean the Nobel Nobel invented TNT and was crazy rich forever. But when you get to the hundreds of billions of scale, you are crushing someone. There's a sweatshop somewhere, you are killing your competition through nefarious practices, you are doing illegal things like tax evasion because you can't hit that ethically. Like the JD Rockefellers of the world were one guy, and we are creating those one guys right now the Sam Altmans of the world, the Jeff Bezoses of the world, the even fuck even the Bill Gates of the world, at their level of wealth, someone's getting fucking stepped on. The only reason why it's been less obvious is because like a lot of those people, like Bill Gates, right, built computers. So like Apple built computers, so most of the people who worked for Apple were doing things like software jobs and not things that like poison you. But hell, Apple recently had there was a big thing about the sweatshop flavor. Yep. Someone somewhere, yeah, like Bill Gates is a weird example because it was like five guys in a you know that didn't five guys in a basement. Yeah, that invented software, right? Like, and that software was just so revolutionary that they were like a a ri a Nobel type where like they revolutionized the way everything works, and now they're super red.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:22

All right, well, thank you guys for joining us. Yeah, we appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:25

Be a wobbly.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:26

Support support your local unions, support it unions, go on TikTok, find the Sex Workers Union, support them.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:32

Yeah, definitely. That's like that's my that's my like thing I'm real passionate about right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:38

Keep keep people keep lives safe. Because, like, anyway, all right. So before I launch into another spiel on that, because once again, I'm incredibly opinionated. Thank you so much for joining us. We do appreciate you, and we will catch you in the next episode.

unknown 1:35:52

Bye.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:52

Bye.