Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Sunday, March 6, 2011

A NAT SCHACHNER COMIC BOOK: JOE WORKER AND THE STORY OF LABOR

With all the brouhaha in Wisconsin nowadays, labor unions are front and center in the spotlight.  I'm not necessarily a fan of unions today -- I think many of them have lost their way and have forgotten their original mission -- but attempts to strip the unions of all power and to roll back the Labor movement are (to my mind) foolhardy and dangerous.

    Joe Worker and the Story of Labor does a good job explaining why labor unions were important and why they can be important again.  Granted, this is a comic book that is painted with a pretty broad brush and simplifies m,any things that can never be that simple, but the nugget of the story is worthwhile.

About the author:

    Nat Schachner was a well-known science fiction writer for the pulps in the 1930's and the early 1940's.  A lawyer and chemist by trade, he is best known in the field for his fix-up novel Space Lawyer (1953).  He left the field to write historical novels and critically acclaimed biographies of the American founding fathers.

Here, from 1948, and in 48 comic book pages, is the story of labor in America;

http://www.archive.org/stream/joeworkerstoryof00scha#page/n0/mode/2up

2 comments:

  1. The working people of this country are being given the shaft. Why don't they recognize that before it's too late. It will take years to recover what we've lost.

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  2. The voters tend to react to sound-bites, Patti, rather than to explanations or to logic. Governor Scott "If My Lips Are Moving, You Know I'm Lying" Walker's sound bites are part of an agenda that, if carried to fruition, would go a long way to eliminating the middle class in America.

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