The Wrongologist

Today, we review the song “Sixteen Tons”. Here is the chorus:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

The song is about economic exploitation of coal miners. Depending on your view of history, the song was written by Merle Travis in 1946, or George Davis in the 1930’s as “9 to 10 Tons”. Of course, older readers know of the 1956 Tennessee Ernie Ford version of the song. It sold 20 million copies as a single!

Part of the exploitation was that miners were paid in scrip, not in cash. Scrip is non-transferable credit vouchers which could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store. Workers also lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. This had the feature of lowering the costs of labor for the mining companies, while making it impossible for workers to accumulate any cash savings. In the US, the associated debt bondage persisted until after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.

The Massacre was the result of a strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and the Victor-American Fuel Company. The strike resulted in the violent deaths of at least 19 people.

Howard Zinn in The Politics of History described the Ludlow Massacre as:

The culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history

The Ludlow Massacre quickly evolved into a national rallying cry for labor unions and eventually helped lead to New Deal labor reforms. But over the years, the tragedy in Ludlow Colorado has been largely forgotten.

Here is the Wrongologist’s favorite version of the song by Jeff Beck and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, who toured together this year. They are supported by Tai Wilkenfeld on bass:

Note that the performance ends at 3:49.

Now, please ask yourself how much you are worth. Then look around you and realize that you are also a part of the most underpaid workforce since the days of the company store.

If politics is about power, then the powerful will always have the advantage. There will be an endless loop of the more powerful crushing the less powerful, with any change in the balance of power simply a random fluke, like what happened after Ludlow catalyzed the United Mine Workers.

If politics can be about policy, then power will not have an insurmountable advantage, and progress can happen again.