Dear Progressive Reader,
Last Friday night and Saturday morning tornadoes swept through six Midwestern states, killing nearly 100 people and damaging homes and businesses in what Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called a “level of devastation . . . unlike anything I have ever seen.” Two locations where tragic deaths occurred that could have been avoided were an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, and a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky.
In Illinois, six died when the warehouse building collapsed. The incident is now being investigated by both OSHA and the State of Illinois to see what safety rules and building codes may have been violated, and to determine what new rules might be developed given the increasing danger of such storms due to climate change. This comes at a time when Amazon has its highest volume of sales, and workers across the country have been calling for an improvement in working conditions, as three authors note this week in an op-ed for our Progressive Perspectives project. “The holidays, workers in Amazon warehouses tell us, is not a time of cheer,” they write, “but backbreaking labor and relentless pressure. It can cost them their health and rob them of time with their families. In many ways, the ‘holiday crunch’ is all that is wrong with the company’s labor model, but amplified.”
Meanwhile, the deaths at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in Kentucky harken back to some of the worst labor tragedies of the last century. The factory had been “going 24/7” to meet the Christmas demand, according to Kentucky representative James Comer. One worker, Elijah Johnson, who survived the tornado told CNN that his supervisor said, “'If you want to decide to leave, if you want to leave, you can leave, but you're going to be terminated. You're going to be fired.” Eight other workers were killed when the building collapsed. Keeping workers trapped inside a dangerous workplace immediately brings to mind the March, 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York. La Follette’s Weekly (our original name) covered the demands of these workers for better conditions extensively during their 1910 strike. On April 23, 1910, the magazine covered “The Strike of the Shirtwaist Girls” in a long article with photos of the New York strike. The author, Women’s Trade Union League activist Elizabeth Dutcher, wrote, “If the little pickets had been left alone to pursue their lawful avocation there would have been no big strike. Instead the masters tried intimidation.” She described what became a general strike of more than 30,000 workers. Eventually 352 shops settled with the union for shorter hours and better conditions. “It was,” she wrote, “a real victory.” But almost exactly a year later, with doors chained shut to keep the women from leaving the factory, more than 100 would die in a huge fire, as the late Brandon Weber described in his piece for our website in 2017. “Although the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire occurred more than a century ago, workers around the world remain vulnerable to low wages, abuse, and treacherous conditions. We need to live up to the true spirit of unionism and do everything we can to provide for the safety and well-being of workers everywhere,” he wrote. This week, workers in Mayfield filed a class-action lawsuit against their employer.
Other news this week includes the contempt citation for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows following his on-again-off-again compliance with Congressional subpoenas—as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates. Also, Bill Blum talks about the new report on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the urgent need to regain balance in our highest judicial body. Shaan Sachdev looks at the huge military budget recently passed by the U.S. Senate (billions of dollars more than President Joe Biden’s request) in spite of the fact that we just ended our nation’s longest war. And, James Goodman says the Biden Administration needs to lift barriers that keep asylum seekers from having their day in court.
In international news, Jeff Abbott reports on the possibilities for changes in Honduras following the election of a new president. Edward Hunt examines growing tensions between the United States and Russia over Russian actions in Ukraine. Sanket Jain describes the recent victory by Indian farmers against laws enacted last year by the government of Narendra Modi. And, an op-ed by Sarah Holewinski of Human Rights Watch explains that “Human rights are the key to democracy.”
Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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