AnnaBR > Recent Status Updates

Just read Eveline and need to sit with it for a bit

“Growing older involves a kind of retreat. You don’t just keep rushing forward…We’re trying to find out real selves, who we are, both now and then.

“Think of ten things you still want to achieve…ten things you still have left to do.” “What did she still have left that she really wanted to experience?” “Why would she need to write down what was already posted clearly and unmistakably on the church doors of her inner self?”

“He combined patience with speed, a methodical approach with intuition.”

“The thought worried her. Measuring her activities and her best efforts in terms of people she had sent to prison - was that really the sum of her life’s work?”

“Memory is like glass, she thought. A person who had died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.”

“If all the discriminatory laws were immediately repealed, race would still remain as one of the most pressing moral and political problems in the nation… the American economy, society and government are all racist.”

“The double indignity of racial discrimination and economic oppression” “faces that are often happy but always haunted”

“Their creed is one of hatred: against the middle class leaders of the civil rights movement, the Jewish shopkeepers.” Based on a version of mohammedanism.
Paradoxically they strike more of a nerve in NY, where discrimination is veiled in egalitarian rhetoric.

Recalls the Key and Peele sketch on authentic Black American food

“Socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”

Child labor ag enforcement….

Discusses union wins and slow action on the part of DoL

Speaks to “imported Mexican laborers” working for even lower wages and the resulting tensions. Calls for government deals with Mexico “for aid or something like that.”

Frequently speaks of the federal government as the only entity that could provide recourse..

In the late 1940s, Americans spent less of their income on food than any other nation. Which turns our attention to migrant workers.

Most workers would accept humiliating jobs over welfare. If they did accept welfare, and they had been hardworking and successful, the state might claim their estate, destroying the American dream of saving forever their children.

Pensions negotiated for security tie the worker to the company/area

The pension trap… with increased idleness

“Some of them were particularly bitter because they felt the company had blundered by lowering standards and turning out an inferior product.” - sounds familiar!!

Qualifications enforced for minorities but waived for white workers, technically skill determining hiring, but not in reality.

Explains the laundry worker exemption and cites BLS statistics. “We’ve got people who make $26 a day safely covered; it’s the people making $26 a week who are left out.”
Again welfare more for the middle class but excluding many who need it most.

Late fifties employees making $30 a week and paying their employers for food whether or not they ate it - a huge change.
But difficult to organize and supervisors could cover their work during strikes.

Economic underworld - employees exempt from 1961 MW law. Domestic, hotel, restaurant kitchens- the law changed, but did the reality?