My Mom, Target, and the Importance of Labor Weeklies

Chapter One in Voices of Revolution really hit home for me due to the closeness the topic of labor unions had to my family.

My mom was a nurse for 40 years and was very active in unionization (She is now retired). As a kid growing up in NYC, I remember her coming home exhausted and would talk about her union meetings and how they were working on improving things for nurses. Sometimes it was fighting for better benefits and contract or just making sure there was a healthy nurse-patient ratio. A few times she would shanghai me and my dad to go picket with her union outside the hospital.

I remember when I got my first job at Target and during the training session we had to watch a video about the negative effects of unionizing. I remember my mom telling me when I got the job, "make sure you join a union the first change you get." I was 18 at the time......The point is, unionizing has been something I am very familiar and by realizing that, had these weeklies not pushed for these kind of reforms that gave power to the labor movements, my mom might not have been protected in advocating for better working conditions.

With this chapter, I was able to see how the mainstream media of the time was actually part of the elites, which was disturbing to me because journalism is supposed to advocate for the people, give voice to the voiceless. In this chapter, we see how out of touch and elitist the mainstream media at the time really was.

Not only was the main stream media completely out of touch with the problems of the working class, but even when it did realize the need, it worked with the elites to suppress the working class attempts at getting political representation. We see this on page 18 when it describes the onslaught of attacks the movement received by papers like the Daily Advertiser and Evening Journal to name a few, which accused them of encouraging "infidelity" among the people.

Another things that really made me see the importance of these weeklies was their push to end imprisonment as a form of justice for not paying your debts. As a millennial, the idea seems crazy. Most people I know who graduated college are in DEBT! Imagine what it would be like had the weeklies not been a force in getting ride of a law like that. How many people sent to jail would it have taken for law makers, media, elites, to realize this is wrong?

Overall, this chapter reminded me that there is not just one side to history. I thought I knew my history of of the industrial revolution here in the U.S but after reading this chapter, I realize that there was so much I didn't.