My great-grandfather was killed by his job.

He was an “unskilled” laborer, an immigrant. When he came to the US he didn’t know that the job he was coming to would kill him not long after he arrived, leaving his three children and a wife who couldn’t speak English behind.

In June of 1916, three years after his death, the iron ore miners on the Mesabi Range went on strike. They were unorganized at first, but the Industrial Workers of the World organized them. With the minimal records kept at the time, the data that exists shows between 7,000 to 8,000 men striking out of a total of 15,500 employed. [This data is from the MN Department of Labor and Industries]

The miners were criticized by the employers for not having demands before they went on strike (something that would be echoed today if it happened in an attempt to discredit them), but until they were organized how would they know what strength they had in numbers.

Here is what they asked for:

• An eight-hour day
• A minimum wage that increased based on the relative danger of the location ($2.75 for surface; $3 for underground and an additional fifty cents a day for wet places)
• The abolition of the contract system (ie: job security and fair, consistent pay)
• A semi-monthly pay day
• Payment when quitting or discharged
• Abolition of the Saturday night shift with full pay
• The return of all strikers
• The abolition of private mine police

“Unskilled union labor is overpaid,” they say in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, etc. “Look how much the public sector union members make!”

First, let’s stop calling labor unskilled. Non-white collar jobs are physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding. The people who clean your buildings breathe in cleaning fumes all day (without union protections, toxicity doesn’t matter), the people who haul your garbage spend their days outside in the freezing cold and melting heat and are exposed to physical dangers on the job, and the non-white collar workers who keep the jails functioning certainly risk more than you do on the job.

In 1916, the miners said that the companies constantly changed their pay rates with no notice and that they often didn’t know how much they would receive on payday – in fact, the companies didn’t even provide the men with documentation of how their gross wages were calculated and usually charged the men for the tools, powder, and other items that were used. They said the only way to get the more profitable positions (mining soft ore) was to bribe the captain with money or presents, and that the captains compelled the miners to buy tickets for raffles and other activities in which the captains had financial interests – penalizing men who did not.

These were experiences not terribly unlike what our current undocumented workers go through now. The gap between abject exploitation and a living wage existed (and exists) because of unions. Negotiating alone is meaningless. The power you have when you are not in a highly specialized field is the power that comes from banding together and facing your employer as a singular whole – rather than as myriad, exploitable people.

In the years 1913-1914, when my great-grandfather was killed, there were 42 people killed in mining accidents, and another 2,252 injured. This was a jump – the non-fatal accident rate in MN industries jumped from 5,442 in 1912-1913 to 12,084 in 1913-1914.

Of course, it’s not as if twice as many accidents happened. State inspectors increased activity in calling employer’s attention to an accident report law that (it seems) was covered in the recently enacted “Workmen’s Compensation Act” in Minnesota.

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“It’s not 1913 anymore,” you might say. You might also say that we’re paid based on our skills.

Well. Try being female.

Below is a chart that shows the median incomes for women and men with graduate and doctoral degrees (JD, MA, MS, PHD, MD, etc) in full-time, year-round positions. [Also, just a note: there are too many value labels, so the states get all bunched together. You can expand the data table for all the data, which comes from the American Community Survey 2005-2009.]

And if you think it’s any better for people with Bachelor’s degrees…

The short version of this is that life isn’t fair and – in the aggregate – our financial successes and positions in life are not equal, even when we have equivalent degrees. To say that people should not band together, that it is somehow greedy and wrong, is to say that we should take only what we’re given. That we should endure a life bestowed upon us by others and stay in our respective places.

I disagree. I think the only way we fail in life is when we think too highly of ourselves and too little of others – or when we think to little of ourselves and too highly of others. The injustices we face in this society are our doing only to the extent that we are complicit in our own alienation from each other.

We should know better than to get played like this.

We should know better than to be pitted teacher against custodian, lawyer against firefighter, web designer against scientist. We will not succeed by doing this.

We are fighting the wrong people.

You may not know who Jessica Valenti is, but it’s never too late to catch up on a strong, smart feminist voice. I bring her up because of her recent marriage and how well she has spoken about the complicated feelings she’s had about the process and institution, as well as her intentionality about constructing a wedding and a marriage that reflects her philosophies and life.

Back in January, when she announced her engagement on her blog, she accompanied the post titled “Does the personal always have to be political? (And can’t it ever be private?)” with this e-card:

It was around the same time that Megan and I told people about our engagement and dealt with a smaller scale and less vicious set of questions (asked both of each other and by others), so I found myself relating to her in a lot of ways. Why did we want to participate in the institution of marriage? What does a feminist (in Valenti’s case) or queer/feminist (in our case) marriage look like? How do you redefine something that (traditionally and still) is so interlaced with male dominance and religious control?

Thankfully, we didn’t have gossip columns and publications like Playboy weighing in on the merits of our relationship or framing our decision as a “feminist-finally-gets-hitched” story like the NY Times did. (By the way, NYT: seriously?? You could have written about so many more interesting aspects of the marriage/decisions made about it and you chose the easy and kind of anti-feminist route. But I shouldn’t expect more depth from the section that usually profiles rich, ivy leaguers with famous parents.)

Valenti just wrote a new post called Well, I’m damn sure never getting married again and it pains me that she had to write it. She thought into constructing what it meant not only to be married, but to get married, and I think that is what you would expect from someone with a track record of critical thought and political engagement.

And let me tell you, it is hard to deconstruct marriage and the cultural weight embedded in it to reconstruct it to fit your values. As Valenti said:

When I wrote about Andrew and I planning a wedding, I wasn’t doing so to make some grand statement about what feminists should do when they get married. Or to suggest that my wedding was going to be The Most Feminist Wedding Ever. I wrote about it as an individual, as a person, who was trying to negotiate her beliefs with a traditionally sexist institution and the consumerist party-planning that surrounds weddings.

…

We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we’d like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about – love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.)

Love, equal partnership, and community: that is how Megan and I felt about it.

I can’t speak for Valenti or any other feminists/lgbt folks who get married, but – for us – everything was put on the table. We broke down what things signified in general, what they signified to us, and what we really wanted rather than what may be culturally imposed. For instance: the rings. Personally, I have somewhat critical feelings about wedding rings – engagement rings in particular. As engagement rings are traditionally only given to the woman, I find them to be a societal symbol of purchase (our language supports that – an engaged woman is “off the market”) and that is problematic for me. Wedding rings have a similar problem for me as the last thing I want to be is “owned” by anyone else. And as lovely as Megan is, I don’t want to be owned by her (and vice versa).

But rings are pretty. And I wanted one. I was so happy to be marrying Megan (and am so happy to be married to her), and the idea of having something that she gave to me that I would have with me all the time made me happy. So we decided: no engagement rings, but we got really pretty and unique rings made for us that would give us each a symbol of our love and a reflection of how we’re linked that we would carry with us every day. Then, when friends gave us the stones for the rings, they also became a way in which our community supported us.

Does wanting rings without wanting the baggage of ownership – does redefining that part of weddings – make us bad feminists? I don’t think so. And I’m sure if we’d wanted to badly enough that we could have redefined the role of the engagement ring as well. Having the capacity to think critically about institutions and practices doesn’t mean that we have to swear off everything associated with those things. My perspective is that the process of critique and intentionality underlies the core of the philosophy of “the personal is political.” The decisions we make with that kind of reflection are invariably going to be truer to ourselves and our values.

Megan and I had a hard time writing a ceremony in part because every element of it was analyzed – but because of that it was also completely appropriate to us. We wrote it in Provincetown two days before the wedding and it was perfect. It was about love, respect, individuality, change, support, trust, adventure, discovery, and commitment. It was about how she makes me a better person (and vice versa). (She is so awesome.)

What I hope is that Valenti can ignore the haters to an extent and be happy that she and her husband got to put the kind of effort and intentionality into defining their wedding and marriage that they did, and know that the kind of critical thought she expressed in public was not wasted.

There’s an article in Sunday’s Washington Post by Linda Hirshman that I’ll be getting to in just a moment, but first I want to touch on something I mentioned in a previous “on the issues” post. In it, I said that the “culture wars” topics – like gay marriage or abortion – were a distraction. This is true. When presented as issues of morality they are intended to distract people and drive an impenetrable wedge between them and the people who are “immoral.”

The problem, however, is that both of these issues have very real impacts – not only on peoples’ lives and choices, but in how the people who are the objects of each of those debates is treated.

I’m not going to talk about gay marriage today, but I am going to talk about abortion. Linda Hirshman’s article first.

My generation of women has been spoiled in that we have (dwindling, but present) access to abortion. Why is this spoiling? Because, apparently, the fact that we have it makes us not care whether we have it. The anti-choice fundamentalists love to wave fetuses in your face to show you how awful abortion is, but you rarely – if ever – see pro-choice people waving around images of women dead in a pool of blood from hemorrhaging after an illegal abortion.

Sorry for the shock value, but it’s true, it’s our legacy, it’s what has happened. It’s what will happen again because when abortion is illegal, women suffer. For instance, Hirshman cites West Germany’s prohibitive abortion laws and what they meant for women travelers.

In the 1980s, when abortion was severely limited in then-West Germany, border guards sometimes required German women returning from foreign trips to undergo vaginal examinations to make sure that they hadn’t illegally terminated a pregnancy while they were abroad. According to news stories and other accounts, the guards would stop young women and ask them about drugs, then look for evidence of abortion, such as sanitary pads or nightgowns, in their cars, and eventually force them to undergo a medical examination – as West German law empowered them to do.

Think this is outlandish? Couldn’t happen here? Please.

four states — Louisiana, Missisippi, North and South Dakota — as having trigger laws explicitly aimed at making abortion criminal upon Roe’ s demise, and seven others that have committed to acting to the extent that the court may allow

And the trouble may come with crossing state lines and criminality there.

“To speak of the fetus’ ” home state, and make the home it shares with the mother “a basis” for controlling a woman’s ability to get an abortion might “make sense,” Columbia law professor Gerald Neuman wrote in 1993 when abortion rights were last in peril.

Now, the difference between Obama and McCain on this is clear. McCain has pledged to pack the Supreme Court with justices in the vein of Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas (extremely conservative). Among these men are the three youngest justices who may have careers on the court for as long as 30-35 years. They are entrenched. Any more conservative justices and the next 30 years will be a nightmare for women, people of color, GLBT folks, free speech, torture discussions, social programs, etc.

And let me remind you, on the more liberal side, John Paul Stevens will not last out another administration. The man is hanging on by his 88-year-old teeth.

Anyway, on McCain’s issues page, the very first entry on the “Human Dignity and Sanctity of Life” section (sigh) is this:

Overturning Roe v. Wade

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the benchwill overturn it.

However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion.

Blah blah blah it goes on about “strength” of pregnant women “choosing life” and faith based hoo-ha and nothing about sex education or anything that actually prevents abortion from being needed as an option nor anything about social programs to help women/families who choose to have children. So – as usual – pro-life as long as the kid isn’t born yet.

Obama’s site has a reproductive choice section

Supports a Woman’s Right to Choose:
Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.

Preventing Unintended Pregnancy:
Barack Obama is an original co-sponsor of legislation to expand access to contraception, health information and preventive services to help reduce unintended pregnancies. Introduced in January 2007, the Prevention First Act will increase funding for family planning and comprehensive sex education that teaches both abstinence and safe sex methods. The Act will also end insurance discrimination against contraception, improve awareness about emergency contraception, and provide compassionate assistance to rape victims.

So there it is – you choose between the guy who won’t tell you how to not get pregnant, force you to keep it if you do, and leave you out on your own once you’ve given birth OR the guy who will work to get you the education and the access to contraception you need to not get pregnant in the first place, give you the opportunity to make the choice if you do, and in other sections has all kinds of things about supporting families/mothers. (Obama doesn’t cynically roll together helping families and his reproductive choice section into the same thing like McCain does.)

You know, I am so sick of this. I blogged a while ago in my old Myspace blog about Lilly Ledbetter, a woman who sued her employer, Goodyear Tire, for paying her less than her male coworkers doing the same work. The Supreme Court ruled last year that because Ledbetter did not file a complaint within 180 days of her first paycheck she couldn’t sue. Because, you know, we generally find out we’re getting discriminated against within 3 months of it happening.

This is, of course, complicated by many companies barring employees from even discussing their pay (they can get fired for doing so). Personally, I think this is partially in place to allow discrimination to continue without accountability. Call it conspiratorial, but I’m just saying–women expect less and it’s in companies’ financial interests to not let us realize what’s up.

Well, today, Senate Republicans blocked the attempt to fix the legislation the Supreme Court interpreted in such an idiotic fashion.

Of the bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said:

We think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country.

Honestly? I would hope it does. The point of legislation like this is to call the companies on their behavior. It’s us saying: you can’t get away with this anymore. Don’t want lawsuits? Don’t pay your female workers 6k less than their lowest paid male peer with the same responsibilities (that was Ledbetter’s situation).

And she summed up the lasting implications of it too: a lifetime of pay inequity results in lower Social Security payouts, lower pensions, lower 401k amounts…it’s a constant, lingering inequality. And it’s just wrong.

I’d like to note that John McCain–you know, the “maverick” that foolish Clinton and Obama supporters sometimes say they’ll vote for if their candidate doesn’t get the Democratic nomination–voted with the Republicans to block the bill. McCain has a long history of anti-woman voting, so this is not at all surprising, but I thought I’d call attention to it because the “If X doesn’t win, I’m going to vote for McCain” line is bugging the hell out of me.

To be fair, I thought I’d give respect to the Republicans who voted to advance this bill. They are: Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and John Sununu of New Hampshire.

This breaks my heart. Via Feministing:

Men presidents only

I think that having a woman president would be a bad idea for our country. Women are not meant to rule countries and be in charge. They are meant to make decisions but not confirm them.

Our president deals with some countries that don’t respect or allow women in leadership positions. I wonder if the United States would have more terrorist attacks because we would be seen as weak with a woman leader. I agree that women can do many things, but leave the ruling of the countries to the men.

BRITTANY BAYLES, 13, Kennewick