On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.
U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.
The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.
The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like "insurrection" and "Bolshevik revolution". Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General's injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.
Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.
The US miners' strikes, 1919-1922 - Jeremy Brecher
:worker
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I wrote a whole diatribe about toilet seat etiquette as a reply to a comment in /c/askchapo but the thread got deleted so I guess I'll dump it here.
If you go to sit down but someone's left the seat up and you don't notice, you can straight-up fall into the toilet. Never happened to me but I'd be lying if I said I'd never had a close call in the middle of the night. Also, even assuming equal sit-pissers and stand-pissers in a household, since both will need to poo sitting down, seat down is going to be the most used configuration. I opt for the more radical lid-down option--less splash when flushing, more aesthetically pleasing, and less risk of accidentally dropping something in the toilet.
Tbh even though I'm a penis-haver I've been a sit-pisser since I was a teen--don't have to worry about aim, split streams, or backsplash, and the toilet stays clean. No matter how good a stand-pisser's aim is, there will always be spatter on the lip of the bowl and it gets especially gross by the hinges; on the rare occasion that I stand-piss, I actually wipe the lip of the bowl down, but I've got to be in a vanishingly small minority. If I could enact a petty dictatorial rule it would be to make everyone sit-piss when using standard toilets.
🚽 the toliet emoji (on my device at least) literally has the seat up, we must stop the seat-left-up propaganda
it renders seat and lid down on my device
However you conduct your toileting, I insist on lid down especially if your shitter is in your bathroom. If you flush with the lid up, your loo becomes a pooticle (poo-particle) volcano, scattering micro-turds across every surface in the bathroom, including the communal toothbrush.
sit piss gang
I can't empty my bladder sitting down.I can put the seat back down after, but I will be peeing standing up always