Eat the Rich!
In what’s being called historical levels of disparity by financial experts, income inequality in the U.S. is one of the highest among rich countries. The top 10% of Americans own more than 70% of the country’s wealth. Globally, billionaires and multimillionaires are on the rise while the middle class shrinks, the bottom 50% slips deeper into poverty, and the average retirement age increases. Income and wealth have direct impacts on politics, the environment, gender equity and social justice. As the World Inequality Report states, “Inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”
Comics have a long history of illustrating class struggle, labor movements, and protests surrounding wealth inequality. On display here are comics that depict historical labor uprisings, such as the 1913-14 miners strike in Colorado where workers - unionized under the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) - stopped work on the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) company after years of deadly working conditions and low pay (1). We see the 1917 workers strike in Australia where the combination of wages falling by 30%, unfair labor practices, and the government attempting to conscript (i.e. draft) workers into compulsory military service led more than 150,000 working class people in multiple industries to walk off their jobs and hold mass protests for six weeks (2).
We learn about Mary G. Harris Jones, sometimes called "the most dangerous woman in America" due to her success in organizing labor strikes, securing bans on child labor, and co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) international labor union (3). We follow a journalist inside Occupy Wall Street, a 2011 protest against economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on the government, that lasted 59 days (4). The occupy protests and fight to raise the national minimum wage are also depicted in Action Activists (5). Fictional examples include a special “Occupy Riverdale” issue of Archie (6), and even superheroes hit the picket line, protesting unfair labor practices that are disempowering them and preventing them from working (7).
