21st Century Trade Union Conspiracy Trial

http://insurgentnotes.com/2016/09/21st-century-trade-union-conspiracy-trial/
Date Written:  2016-09-23
Publisher:  Insurgent Notes
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20029

It's fitting that the return of the trade union conspiracy trial would take place in Philadelphia, the city of the infamous Philadelphia Cordwainers Trial of 1805, the first known trade union conspiracy case in America. Beginning with the genesis of the first combinations of wage labourers in eighteenth-century England, trade unionism has been perceived and prosecuted as a conspiracy against private property -- and rightly so. What is a trade union but a permanent conspiracy against private property and the inviolable right to private property? Friedrich Engels designated trade unions as schools of war in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1845, and the processes underlying workers' control and workers' power made manifest in trade unionism then remain in operation today.