Strike!

On August 24, at midnight, 20,000 AT&T workers walked off the job. Big strikes are surprising enough in the post-Reagan era, but this one spanned nine of the 13 states that once made up the Confederacy. Although slavery officially ended in 1860, the political elite in the South never let go of the idea that large numbers of people should work for extremely low wages with little to no rights or protections on the job. The legal structures that first endorsed slavery and then Jim Crow finally settled on an...