[Publisher’s Note: Today, most of the low paid jobs in the hospitality industry in the USA belong to Hispanics and blacks who get paid about $5 an hour. Calls for a living wage of $15 an hour are shouted down as being communistic. You don’t have to have slavery when you can buy labour at $5 an hour and throw it out into the street without an adequate safety net if people get sick or old. ]
Come and hear the little-known story of the fight by the workers’ movement in Britain to beat slavery in AmericaIs this email not displaying correctly?
You are invited to attend:
Workers Against Slavery: British workers in the American Civil War
Thursday, December 10, 2015 from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
150 years ago, in December 1865, chattel slavery was abolished in the United States at the end of a four year Civil War. $3 billion dollars of property, in 1860s prices, was expropriated without compensation – and four million human beings were liberated from being property.
Yet when the war began, both sides, North and South, said they would preserve slavery. What changed? One thing was mass action by the slaves themselves, forcing their way into the conflict and helping to transform it into a battle against slavery.
Another was the growing strength of anti-slavery and anti-racist movements in the North. The third, little known, factor is is the inspiring solidarity of the British working class. Faced with a government that wanted to intervene militarily in favour of the slave-owners, thousands of British workers across the country mobilised in mass protests against intervention and against slavery. Their action helped the struggle in America win, revived the British labour movement and had enormous consequences for politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Sacha Ismail, author of a new pamphlet about this, “Workers Against Slavery”, will lead a discussion.
Indian YMCA41 Fitzroy Square
London, UK W1T 6AQ