You..ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Wednesday June 17, 1903
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Mother Jones Will Parade Striking Children to City Hall
Mother Jones is in this city where 100,000 Textile Workers are on strike, 16,000 of them children. Mother Jones considers child labor to be the worst of the industrial sins. She will lead a parade of striking textile workers to City Hall today with the striking children in the lead. She states that she will demonstrate that:
Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children.
She has been at the Textile Union Headquarters where she reports seeing:
Little children..some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle..stooped little things, round shouldered and skinny.
Meanwhile,
The Wellsboro Gazette published this news item today:
War has been declared on child labor by the authorities in this state. The great textile strike in Philadelphia disclosed conditions that are astounding in this particular, showing that there has been perjury relative to the ages of children employed. State factory inspectors are instructed to hereafter demand a birth or baptismal certificate with every minor's application for work and the next Legislature is expected to pass a law making it unlawful to employ any child under fourteen years of age at labor in any factory, store, shop or mine and requiring in any case a certificate of the record of birth for every minor child.
SOURCES
The Wellsboro Gazette
(Wellsboro, PA)
-of June 17, 1903
Mother Jones: The Miners' Angel
-by Dale Feterling
So IL U Press, 1974
Tuesday June 17, 1913
Charleston, West Virginia - T.L. Felts Testifies before Senate Investigating Committee
T. L. Felts of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency testified before the Senate Investigating Committee yesterday. He was asked by Senator Maritine:
Would you rather have a man who could shoot well or pray well?
He replied:
I would rather have the shooter for our kind of work.
Felts admitted that his detective agency assisted the coal operators through a system of espionage that tracked the movements of union organizers.
The union called witnesses who testified regarding abuses committed by the mine guards. The attack on Holly Grove was described by three miners who were there the night of the attack. A Holly Grove merchant testified about his arrest by 15 mine guards. His crime was to allow evicted miners to pitch their tents on his property. He was also guilty of allowing the furniture of 40 to 50 miners to remain on his property after the mine guards had dumped it there.
SOURCES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
(Cincinnati, OH)
-of June 17, 1913
"Guns, Thugs and Heroes"
Originally published in the July, 1979 issue of The Roanoker
http://theroanoker.com/...
Monday June 17, 2013
From Alaska Dispatch: A Bangladesh labor activist’s journey from Tazreen to Savar
Saydia Gulrukh, labor rights activist of Bangladesh, works non-stop and with great courage on behalf of injured garment workers and their families:
When labor rights activist Saydia Gulrukh closes her eyes, it isn’t the images of the ruined Rana Plaza building that haunt her. It’s the sounds.
“I can still hear people scratching on the inside of the walls, praying and reciting the Koran,” she says, her dark eyes downcast.
After the eight-story building collapsed in April, killing 1,127 people in the worst industrial disaster in the country’s history, Gulrukh rushed to Savar. She comforted gravely injured garment workers sandwiched between broken slabs of concrete before heading to the Savar Enam hospital to assess the damage.
“My initial impulse is always to go to the hospital,” she said. “The government will steal bodies to minimize the loss.”
At the hospital, wards were so overbooked that family members were not allowed in. But Gulrukh ferried people into the hospital for hours, connecting injured workers with their loved ones and collecting flyers of those still missing...
“Things like Tazreen and Rana Plaza are reported as an ‘unfortunate event that happened.’ But when a similar event happens over and over, it’s not an accident. It’s structural killing.”
Read full article here:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/...
Mike Stout:
"When you don't have a union, you don't have a chance,
Death and injury will come to dance."