This past summer, we stayed at Oakland House Seaside Resort, in Brooksville, Maine, along the Eggemoggin Reach in Penobscot Bay. The property is large and consists of several business entities. We lodged in the hostel,…
A Lucky Man, Episode 4 (last one!)
VII. By the time Clyde got the letter telling him the date of the arbitration hearing, he was nearly out of money. He’d made house payments, but the rest of the bills were overdue and…
A Lucky Man, Episode 3
V. A factory is a battle zone. Nothing better illustrates the slogan that “time is money” than the daily struggle between workers and bosses to squeeze a little more free time or a little more…
A Lucky Man, Episode 2
III. Like everyone else, Clyde Yassem remembered what he had been doing on December 7, 1941. Sleeping. His parents and two of his younger brothers rushed in to awaken him and tell him the news. He…
A Lucky Man: Episode 1
I. [Note: This is a story from my book, In and Out of the Working Class. I am posting it in episodes, so stay tuned!] Sometimes a random event can change a person’s life. Clyde Yassem…
The Rise and Fall of the United Farm…
After reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November…
Ludlow, Colorado/Windber, Pennsylvania
Minerals and raw materials are the building blocks of industrial capitalism. No industrial revolutions would have been possible without iron, coal, copper, rubber, and similar substances. The extraction of such materials from the earth has…
The Tree Trunks Are Rotting in the Groves…
One thing that struck me when I became a teacher was the high degree of control that professors had over their work. We had considerable say about what we taught, when we taught, what went…
Control is the Name of the Game
The writer William Burroughs made the theme of “control” central to his work. He spent most of his life obsessed with the idea that he was under the insidious control of outside forces, and by…