Industrial Dispute Quotes
This was a description of the famous Lawrence, MA, textile mill strike.
This quotation became a slogan of the miners. Lewis did not originate it. It has been referred to as early as 1902 in the bitter coal strike of that year. Generally coal mining strikes have involved more force and military than most labor disputes. While labor representatives maintain that force does not help, mine owners have believed that force is absolutely necessary. See Richard B. Mellon’s testimony to Congress in 1937--{563576}.
Mitchell had warned that the strike was coming (see {607760}). The strike lasted 29 days and ended when the miners received a 10% wage increase. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the dispute.
It was fairly common at the time for the management of a company undergoing a strike to hire goons and gunmen to beat up and even murdering strikers to intimidate the strikers. But some state and locall governments supporting private companies began to do that as well. Sometimes they even used the police and the state national guard.
The Concorde was a French supersonic passenger plane that required a passenger fare of twice the normal fare in order to pay for the increased costs. The plane served an elite niche market but never captured enough of a market to sustain the program. Complicating the situation further, the sonic boom that could be heard on the ground when the Concorde flew over, made American communities reluctant to allow the plane to overfly their area. The result was that the U. S. would only grant permission for Concorde flights to land / take off from New York / Washington and Los Angeles / San Francisco where the approach would be over the ocean. Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City and other natural American markets were closed to the Concorde. As was the lucrative New York to Los Angeles market where the Concorde could have made the trip in under 3 hours. The French have attributed the Concorde failure to American policy which they claim was protection for Boeing and the domestic aircraft industry. When the Airbus program began in Europe, the United States objected to a variety of “illegal” subsidies that France, Germany and other EU governments were giving to Airbus contrary to the international trade rules. The Europeans countered by observing that the U. S. in effect subsidized Boeing via large military purchases without which the cost of the Boeing civilian plans would have been much greater. There has been a low level trade war over aircraft manufacturing from the beginning. See {634597} for some of the other reasons.
