NO VOTE, NO WORK!(VOX POPULIST)

• Author: Hightower, Jim

The corporate hierarchy has long tried to diminish labor activism in the United States by insisting that strikes and other workplace agitations have never had broad support or impact because they are fundamentally un-American. The corporatists cluck that, from the get-go, the U.S. cultural Zeitgeist has been grounded in a veneration of individualism, an appreciation for the financial blessings of the corporate order, and a rejection of collectivism.

In a word: Hogwash! And Horsefeathers! (OK, two words, just for emphasis.) These self-serving fictionalizers seem unaware of a momentous labor event at the nation's very start: the Jamestown craftsmen strike of 1619. Or they are aware, but don't want you to be.

Thus--shhhh--you won't find it mentioned in college textbooks or TV documentaries, or even on any of the many markers at the Jamestown Settlement's living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. So, I invite you to take a quick trip with me, back some 400 years in the nations past, to witness this bold work stoppage organized in the very first permanent English settlement in North America.

We start in 1606, when King James I awarded a royal charter to a private English corporation to possess the land--and exploit its resources--along a vast swath of Virginia's coast in "The New World" (which, of course, was the old world to thousands of Powhatan people and other Native Americans). By December of that year, the Virginia Company of London sent 120 men on three ships to establish the Jamestown Settlement--not as a civil society, but as a for-profit commodity extraction and export operation.

In 1607, things went horribly awry, threatening the imminent collapse of the business venture. It turns out that many of the settlers were English gentlemen seeking "adventure," and had no practical skills and even less willingness to do the work.

Luckily, there was Poland.

Captain John Smith, the English mercenary who wrangled a leadership role in the new settlement, knew that skilled Polish craftsmen could be, as a contemporary writer reported, "fetched... for small wages" to work as free men in the colony and so escape near-slavery at home. In 1608 and 1609, Smith recruited eleven of these artisans, skilled in glass...