Part One: The First Labor Strike: How the Tomb Builders of Deir El-Medina Started It All

0:01 Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff. You're a reminder that as long as there has been labor, there have been labor strikes. As long as there's been wage theft, there's been road blockades, and as long as there have been bosses stealing from workers, there have been workers stealing from bosses. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week we are going back the farthest we've ever gone. Well, okay, almost the farthest. We did do an episode about the domestication of dogs and why dogs are great, and that one goes back even further, but this one goes as far back into the written record as it is possible to go, because this week we're going to talk about the first labor strikes that

0:50 we know about in history, the first ones that were ever written down. And with me is my guest. You you're my guest, So I invite you to speak aloud while listening to this. Interrupt me. Ask any questions that you have just wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this. I won't hear them, but it's entertaining to me to imagine you all doing that. There's no guests. This week.

1:14 This is one of those ones where I just wanted to sit down and write this and get it out. So that's what I'm doing. Just like humanity, the labor movement was born in Africa, which shouldn't surprise anybody specifically. Now we're going to talk about this as the first labor strike. I actually going to make an argument that this is the first labor strike that we know about because it was written down and there's actually a decent reason to suppose that this was common elsewhere, because okay, well we'll get to it anyway, this is the first one we know about. The first strike happened in Egypt.

1:50 It happened on November fourteenth, eleven fifty two BCE. That is more than three thousand years ago for those of you keeping track at home. It happened in a town of skilled workers who built the tombs for the Pharaohs, a town called Dierra al Medina, which fortunately for us, is one of the best preserved ancient towns in the world.

2:12 In this case, the town was preserved because it was far enough back from the Nile that it didn't flood. People were building their houses with earth with mud, they would say, right, and so millennia. Flooding destroyed anything that the river could reach, but it couldn't reach here. And so when I say best preserved, it's not like you whatever.

2:29 You can see pictures of it. It's like not totally there, but it's not not there. You know, it's doing pretty good for three thousand years. I'm not going to look so good three thousand years from now. Although this is also a story about mummies, so I guess there are people who look like mummies. I guess three thousand years later.

2:45 That's besides the point. I am willing to guess that if you're not a big egypt fan, and we'll talk about the complications of ancient egypt fans and Orientalism later, I'm willing to bet you who grew up being told the Pyramids were built by slave labor. I grew up being told that the Pyramids were built by slave labor.

3:06 I mean, if you're lucky you got told that versus Aliens. But I just sort of assumed that any other Egyptian tomb had been too. But the thing is, slave labor wasn't involved in any of these things. We tend to have this flattened, simplified understanding of the past, of the ancient world, and in order to understand the origins of labor, of wages, of strikes, of organizing, we're gonna have to unflatten everything. We're going to have to do context my favorite thing. But don't worry, it'll be fun. This context is going to include ancient dream interpretations and it has grave robbers who were stealing from work, so can't go wrong with that. All right, we're gonna talk about ancient Egypt.

3:54 There is a problem. We're going to talk about it again at the end when we talk about Orientalism. There is a problem with the way that people distinguish between ancient Egypt and modern Egypt as if they are like completely separate, you know. And it's used basically by the British to sort of justify stealing all the artifacts and all that shit, because they're like, oh, it's like a totally different thing, and it's not. But obviously ancient Egypt, with hieroglyphics and shit, is different than modern Egypt. We're gonna talk about ancient Egypt. Egypt has been around for a really long time. It is more or less the oldest thing still going that we know of the oldest country.

4:37 You could say people have been living there since six thousand BCE, and the first ruler of the region cropped up around thirty one hundred BCE, conquering the whole the Nile River, at least the parts you could take a boat up. Even ancient Egypt is a sort of meaninglessly broad phrase. It changed a lot over the millennium. You've got prehistoric Egypt, that is, you know, before we have history aka writing, we don't know as much about it.

5:03 You've got the three kingdom periods, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. You can probably figure out which ones came when those kingdoms were relatively stable, And in between those various kingdoms you have these unstable periods called the intermediate periods. The Old Kingdom starts about three hundred years or so after the founding of Egypt, and it runs from two six eight six BCE to twenty one eighty one BCE. And don't worry, there is not a test on these dates at the end. Personally, I only find actual dates interesting when you can use them to cross reference stuff and position things in relation to each other. It's part of why I actually didn't care much about the way I learned history in school.

5:46 It was taught in a way that just flowed right over me with names and dates. And names and dates are great, stories are better. They stick in my brain more. I only care about the names and dates once I have the story and realize why I should care. In the Old Kingdom, the pharaohs the king's slash queens the people who ruled right. They were the head priest, the commander in chief of the military, and the owner of all of the lands. They were the ruler of all the people, and according to some interpretations and not others, they were the only people who got an afterlife. They got big old tombs as a result of that, and most sources say only the Pharaohs got an afterlife, but I think that might be slightly outdated because in early

6:37 twenty ten new tombs of pyramid workers were uncovered and they had some grave goods. They had jars of beer and bread buried with them to serve them in the afterlife, so they probably had an afterlife. Now, Okay, I am doing an episode, like always, especially when you do the ancient world, I am doing an episode that is a thing that people have dedicated centuries to studying, and I'm like, I read a lot about this really quickly, so you know, I'm not the world's leading egyptologist, and I also sort of hate that word, so we'll talk about in the Orientalism section. Anyway, it was the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom who started the whole pyramid thing. Not a pyramid scheme, just a pyramid to be buried under, although

7:30 you could sort of argue that monarchy is a pyramid scheme. This particular pharaoh, his name was Joseph. He was the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, the second pharaoh of the Third dynasty, and he had a step pyramid built for himself. The smooth sided pyramids at Giza, like with the famous big Pyramids, are also from the Old Kingdom, as is the famous Sphinx. Then you've got the Middle Kingdom from twenty fifty five BCE to sixteen fifty BCE, and in that one the upper classes like nobles and priests and shit started having a lot more of a say and more independence. And this is really interesting to me because this is a pattern that we are going to see replicated later with monarchy in say Europe, you

8:17 know where you start off with these like while you start off with these very kind of low level kings who are almost coming out of a vaguely democratic thing, and then they start building up to more and more centralized power. And then underneath the centralized power you have like the rich and the rich who aren't necessarily nobility, start being like, but I want some power, And that's where all the anti monarchy stuff comes from. Quite unfortunately, it was a lateral move in which the bourgeoisie took power from the monarchs, and we're actually better able to not just centralized power, but exert power, like have power go further out from the core of their society. So they were actually better able to fuck up people's lives,

8:59 which is why I was a lot to remove. Even though it seems like it'd be better to have oligarchs than kings, it turns out it both kind of suck. Anyway. I just think it's interesting that we'll see patterns just repeat themselves over and over again throughout civilizations, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago. So in the Middle Kingdom, the upper classes, like the nobles and priests started having more of a say and more independence, and they started getting fancier burials, and it's this period. Then we started getting literature from like the Coffin texts, which we'll talk about later, but their architecture didn't hold up as well and wasn't as spectacular as the Old Kingdom. Then there's

9:35 the New Kingdom from fifteen fifty BCE to ten seventy BCE. By this point the pharaohs were like, you know what, we don't actually need whole pyramids. You can just put us in the valley of kings and big old rock tombs that are kind of underground. And I don't think they did this because they were less arrogant than the kings and queens of old, because plenty of the pharaohs were women, as we'll get to, not like fifty to fifty, but a fair number of them. But rather they did this because grave robbers were organized and persistent, so it was easier to have a more remote, hidden, underground place where you could centralize your security. And by the time we're in the New Kingdom, more and more people wanted

10:18 fancy funerals, and the workers who built all their tombs were in fact free people inasmuch as anyone was free. But before we talk about them. We should talk about people who aren't free, But do you know what, before we talk about even that, we should talk about the products and services that support the show. And we're back when I say that the people who built the pyramids and the tombs were free people, and as much as anyone was free, this is not to say that Egypt didn't have slavery. If you've been listening to the show for a lot, especially in the past years I've explored the ancient world, you're likely tired of hearing me say, well, they had slavery. But it's not like you think. You're likely tired of hearing me say the racialized chattel slavery

11:13 the American South was a unique evil that stands out in history. But I've got to say both those things again here. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, especially Rome, which honestly kind of matches America. It's not the same as the American South and how it did slavery. It's like a different way of doing it, but it was like fucking bad anyway. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies.

11:35 Their economies were built on slavery. Rome, in particular, required a state of constant war to continue to enslave more and more people to work the fields and the mines and the houses of the wealthy. Slavery has been found all over the world across millennia, though was also far from universally practiced. Anyone who tries to sell you on a simple idea of what non civilized people did versus what civilized people did is trying to sell you on this or that ideology built an outdated anthropology. See the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow the Davids, as we like to call them in this household for more about that. But basically, some groups of people did slavery and some groups didn't, and even

12:21 those societies that practiced slavery did so wildly different from one another. The slavery of the Ottoman Empire, where civil servants and bureaucrats were owned by the empire itself, was entirely different from the American South with its famous racialized chattel slavery, which was entirely different from the serfdom common across medieval Europe and Renaissance Russia, where peasants were considered part of the property of the land and lived comparatively free lives, but were not free to travel or kind of self determine their lives. And even those descriptions are over simplifications of complex situations that changed decade to decade region to region. Ancient Egypt, slavery was I can't even

13:02 really say relatively benign because it's slavery, so it wasn't. But in the scale of unfathomable evil, which gets infinitely deep, this was still unfathomably evil, just way less unfathomably so almost fathomably fathomable. Fath of enslave people in Egypt were like the rest of the ancient world, mostly people who were captured in warfare, caught doing some crime, or were debtors.

13:29 Debtors would choose and I think they get scare quotes to sell themselves off to cover their debts, which didn't work out great, I think because at that point your family and kids are now enslaved too, because it was a hereditary condition. If your mother was enslaved when you gave birth to you, you were born in slave too.

13:47 But also we see this elsewhere too, But in Egypt, poor people sometimes sold themselves and therefore their families into slavery, because being free and broke often starving to death, while if you were owned, there was someone who was responsible for you. This doesn't make it good, but in a world in which everyone is some degree of unfree, many people chose to enter involuntary servitude rather than starve. It was for some a method of social mobility. Temples in particular often owned the people who worked there, and in fact, sometimes for like a brief period kind of later in the late BCE, like the Near Ce part of BCE, a lot of people didn't just sell themselves into slavery.

14:35 They paid a monthly fee for the privilege of being enslaved. Because in ancient Egypt and up until the nineteenth century, I think I don't know as much about like medieval Egypt, and it relates to this, it relied heavily on CorV labor, which is basically labor as tax. You can think of it as like, ah, I owe the king three sheep and to two months. I'm making those numbers up. They have no really to reality. Or you can think of it like the mandatory military service, only it's for public works.

15:07 It's been a while since i've been there, But I remember in Finland being told, like, you know, when you turn eighteen you can either do one year in the military or two years in public service. So but think of that, only it's not just like once when you turn eighteen and so kind of recently there's there's still new things people are learning, finding old papyrieye papyri I don't know, and translating them. A recent papyrus translation is a contract that reads quote, I am your servant from this day onwards, and I shall pay two and a half copper pieces every month as my slave fee before sokenebtunis the great God. So that was like the contract of someone who sold themselves into slavery or paid to

15:47 opposite of sold whatever I already covered it. They probably paid that fee by doing wage labor elsewhere, like a second gig after their primary job. And they probably did this to avoid the core vla that was just way way rougher of a life than being owned by a temple. This probably wasn't a long standing practice. We only have evidence of it happening from one ninety BCE to one thirty BCE, and that's well after the rest of this week's story. Takes place. I still found it interesting, and I've been thinking a lot because I've been doing all of these ancient episodes, I've been thinking a lot about freedom and how all throughout history up to including the present day, we're all in some sort of sliding scale

16:31 of unfreedom. There's people who've like done a bunch of time in prison who will talk about the outside world as minimum security prison because like, you're still being surveilled and policed, and at any point they can take you away to the higher security prison. And you know, there's the whole like, none of us are free until everyone is free. The fact that our quote unquote freedom is a thing that could be taken away from us so easily really indicates that we're not free. Early anti capitalists, including the formerly enslaved woman Lucy Parsons, refer to wage labor as wage slavery because your choice was work and build the wealth of your boss or starve. It always struck me as an insensitive phrasing, so I tend not

17:18 to use wage slavery as a phrasing. But honestly, once I understood a more expansive look at freedom and unfreedom, I kind of get it, Like Theoretically, in an idealized understanding of the world, your boss should never be able to just talk down to you or treat you as a lesser because you've made an arrangement with them and which you freely agree to trade labor for a wage, you're still peers. Yet in practice, so many bosses treat their workers like shit. Yell at them, get mad at them, be like you're don't do the thing right. That's not how you talk to your peer. Most bosses will treat subordinates just subordinates in terms of a work structure, but socially because workers are fundamentally less free than employers in

18:06 our society, which believes in the central myth of capitalism of free associations and contracts between people. Yet that's not what's happening. There's never been a binary between free and unfree, and I think it's important to understand that in order to understand someone who decides to sell themselves and therefore they're family into the permanent service of someone wealthy in order to be taken care of. It's like joining the army or a nunnery, basically saying like, all right, I'm going to be part of this larger unit that will take care of me. But I'm going to do it in a subordinate way because that's my option. I am not saying that this is a good way to structure society.

18:46 I'm saying that this is a way that society has been into some degree is structured still. People in ancient Egypt, before they really kind of start hanging out with the Greeks, who are way into worse slavery, people enslaved in ancient Egypt could still own property and get married. I read one source that claims that people could buy their own freedom, but another sources there's simply no record of that ever happening.

19:08 But it was possible for them to kind of advance up the social ladder without being freed, and many were freed by their owners. People still escaped, and as we talked about in episodes about ancient Greece, basically some of the first international treaties were you have to give your runaway slaves back. In particular, the first known peace treaty in history, from the twelfth century BCE, was between Ramses the Second from Egypt and the Hittites from the Assyrian Peninsula aka modern Turkey. That treaty included this quote. If a man or two men who are unknown flee, and if they escape from the country of Egypt, and if they don't want to serve him, then Hatusili the great King, the king of the country of Hati, has to deliver

19:54 them into his brother's hands, and he shall not allow them to inhabit the country of Hati. You got to give the runaway and slave people back. We talk sometimes about how the concept of the police force in the modern sense was largely developed out of slave catcher societies in the United States, but it's worth understanding that the development of law, of borders and of international treaties also develop out of the same urge to hold on to private property, which for most of the history of civilization hinged around the ownership of people. Because people create all value, so owning people is the best way to generate value without, you know, working. Now we've discovered wage labor, which is another good way to do it, although they also would

20:41 wage labor back then. Whatever, Okay. Maybe the most important difference though, was that compared to Greece or especially to Rome, both of which came way later, Egypt's economy didn't run on slave labor. It was a really complex web of people who are in some ways free and in other ways not. Much like I am both free and unfree when it comes to my job obligations like pivoting to ads and we're back. Essentially, everyone underneath the pharaoh was in some condition of being unfree. In ancient Egypt, most of the peasants were tied to the land they lived on, much like later serfdom, but this was less of a legal rule and more of a social rule. People were born into their jobs. Your dad does a thing, you're

21:34 gonna do the thing. And as for those big, massive infrastructure projects, the one that still stand today, the ones that people from all over the world are fascinated by, they weren't built by enslaved people. They are built by cor v labor and wage labor. The myth of them being created by slave labor, though, is ancient. We're not like uniquely foolish. Usually you can blame every misunderstanding of the past on the Victorians, but sometimes you can blame it on the Greeks, because it goes back to Herodotus, a Greek who lived in much more of a slave society.

22:05 I think he just made an assumption based on his own culture. The myth continued to pick up steam in nineteen seventy seven when former Israeli Prime Minister Menichem Begen claimed that it was Jews who built the Pyramids, that they were built by enslaved Israelites, but this was debunked by another Israelian Israeli archaeologist, Amahai Mazar, who put it bluntly, quote no Jews built the Pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built. A German egyptologist, Dietzer Wildung said about the slave myth to the Guardian, quote, the world simply could not believe the pyramids were built without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs. The pyramids were massive undertakings. Ten thousand workers

22:51 worked for more than thirty years on a single one. They were recruited from poor areas. They worked in three month shifts. They were well fed and got to eat meat eat regularly. Most people didn't get to eat meat regularly. They mostly grain and vegetables, with some fish and rarely some meat. Best as I can put together, and the workers who died on site doing this work, they were buried on site as a sign of respect. Their heads were pointed west, their feet were pointed east in religious custom, and they, you know, were buried with bread and with beer.

23:23 They also worked really fucking hard and died young. I personally find that they did it because they loved the Pharaoh. Thing a little bit hard to swallow. But I might be wrong, because that's what multiple experts have written and they know more than me. I'm probably just not thinking of it in terms of the Egyptian theology properly. But I've read other things that suggested the Pyramids were built by core v labor, which again is basically labor as tax, and even if it were regular wage labor, and someone knows the answer to this, and I just read multiple things that contradicted each other. When poor people take back breaking, seasonal jobs that pay way better than anything else, that's a tale as old as time, and it's free within

24:05 a certain understanding of free. The people who work in those pop up fracking towns aren't doing it because they love America, but because it's tremendously difficult, dangerous labor that pays so much better than other blue collar work. So that's like where I think about it, but again I'm probably wrong. However they were built, it wasn't by enslaved people.

24:29 The pyramids got built. But that's the Old Kingdom, and we're going to be talking about the New Kingdom this week. We're going to be talking about a worker's town near the Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. We are going to be talking about Deir el Medina. Dierra el Medina was a whole town built up around workers who built and filled the tombs of royalty in the Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. The city's name, the current name that we use for it, is Arabic.

24:59 It means the monastery of the city, but it was known at the time as Podemi the Town, or Setma the place of Truth. Podemi was probably its informal name, in Setma was its formal name. I love that it's the place of truth. That's fucking metal. The famous king tut Pharaoh tut uncommon was buried there. His tomb is kind of small as far as pharaoh tombs go. It's mostly just famous because it was opened by British grave robbers, the kind of fancy degrees who don't call themselves grave robbers.

25:30 In nineteen twenty two, here's what the famous British grave robber Howard Carter wrote about finding the place quote. At first I could see nothing. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the candle flames to flicker. But presently, as my eyes grow accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues in gold. Everywhere was the glint of gold for a moment, an eternity, it must have seemed to the other standing by. I was dumb with amazement. And when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, can you see anything? It was all I could do to get out the words, yes, wonderful things. The royal seal on the door was found intact. The first three

26:20 chambers were unadorned, with evidence of early entrance through one of the outside walls. The next chamber contained most of the funery objects. The sarcophagus was four gilded wooden shrines, one inside the other, within which lay the stone sarcophagus, three mummiform coffins, the inner one being solid gold, and then the mummy haste can be seen in the reliefs and the sarcophagus due to the fact that Tutukanhaman died at only nineteen years of age, following a brief reign.

26:53 Though extremely impressive to the modern world, the treasurers of Tutucahaman must have paled when compared to the great pharaohs that ruled for many years during Egypt's Golden Age. And that's what a grave robber had to say about finding this place in the Valley of Kings, which only got unearthed around that time, the whole Valley of Kings, And we know more about the city that built this than kind of any other town like it in the ancient world.

27:21 I like the way that a write up from Murray Parsons and toryegypt dot Net put it, and toriegypt Net is a shockingly up to date and thorough source, although you know it's also trying to sell you tours. So the image of hundreds, perhaps thousands of toiling slaves whipped by overseers seems seared into the modern consciousness, and everyone is convinced that the despots who ruled Egypt with iron, greedy fists must have built their wealth and glory on the bleeding backs of this tortured labor. Nothing can be farther from the truth, except perhaps that aliens and spaceships pressed a button and built the Giza Complex and the other great monuments. The more work being done on these villages sounds a clear message that while they worked hard,

28:03 these villages were made up of mostly free and willing citizens doing their part to ensure the afterlife of their king. But here I'm no longer quoting here. I want to go on a side, me in a side. This is shocking. You see, whenever I see something called the Valley of Kings and another thing called the Valley of Queens, I want to know more. I'm interested in gender. Best as I can tell, the Valley of Kings was for the pharaohs, the actual rulers. Most of them were men, but not nearly as many as you'd assume, and so there's women buried in the Valley of Kings. The Valley of Queens was for the non ruling queens, and for the princes, and for the high ranking people of whatever gender who just happened not to be the ruler. I spent a

28:54 little while trying to figure out if the Valley of the Kings and Queens were named by the people who built them, or if that's a modern appellation. But I didn't find an answer. We straight up don't know how many pharaohs were women, but we know it's way more than most people would guess. Sometimes the pharaohs, in order to be taken seriously, just call themselves men. Other times history remembers women as queens instead of pharaohs, leaving historians unsure if they ruled by themselves or if they had a guy with them. We know that succession could go to a woman, but it generally preferred men. So like if you're you know, got two kids, your son gets it if they're both genders, but if you got two daughters,

29:33 gets to a daughter. You know, women were, like a lot of later monarchies, kind of the last choice to keep a dynasty going, or a lot of queens would rule after their husbands died. We know about hot Shepsut, who has the word she right there in her name. Well you can't hear it, but it's in the spelling.

29:51 She was in charge for fifteen years fourteen seventy three BCE to fourteen fifty eight BCE. Again, there's no quiz on these states. She was married to her half brother Futmost the second, so her infant son inherited the throne, but she ruled first as the regent, but eventually she was like, not fuck that kid, I'm in charge. And she was a war leader and did a bunch of stuff.

30:14 And in early depictions of her, she's presented as a woman, but slowly the art about her starts changing, and in the sculptures and the engravings, she's wearing men's clothing, and then eventually she has the beard that pharaohs symbolically wear, and she starts even going by the masculine version of her name, Hotshepsu. As soon as she died, her step son, Thutmouse the third or is I'll call him thot Mouse, the ungrateful patriarchal asshole, just like erased her name from everything. Okay, not just as soon as she died, but later in his reign he starts erasing her name from everything he can.

30:47 He tries to erase her from history because he wanted to legitimize his own son as heir. It probably actually had nothing to do with gender, or did it. Then there's Nefertiti, who's famous because the grave robber Ludor Chart found a bust of her that I'm sure you've seen, even if you don't realize it. Never Tidy was queen, not pharaoh, during maybe the most prosperous period of Egypt's history, and historians like to argue about whether or not she ruled for a while after her husband died, so she was like the pharaoh who might have been a pharaoh, but people argue about whether or not she got to.

31:21 Then there's Tawerzette, who was buried in the Valley of Kings after ruling for a few years after her husband, the pharaoh died. And then there's Netherkret, who might have been the first woman to be a pharaoh, though I read really contradictory sources about her. Some say that all the records called her a man, Some say that she probably never existed. Others says she definitely existed and might not have ruled whatever. But I really like the story about her. The famously often incorrect ancient Greek Herodotus, the one who was wrong about a thing in the past.

31:51 Earlier in this story, he has a wild story about netherket In that tale, she came to the throne after an angry mob killed her brother and her on the throne instead. But she wasn't happy, She wasn't grateful, She wasn't happy that people killed her brother. So, to quote Herodotus, determined to avenge his death, she devised a cunning scheme by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She constructed a spacious underground chamber, and on the pretense of inaugurating it through a banquet, inviting all those whom she knew to have been responsible for the murder of her brother, suddenly, as they were feasting, she let the river in upon them by means of a large secret duct. And then later in that story, she kills herself by running into

32:36 a burning room. The past is so metal. Then, of course there's the most famous woman Pharaoh, Cleopatra. She's famous mostly because she came really late on the scene when the Romans were doing their thing, and actually, you know, eventually the Romans take over whatever. Okay, But she was Cleopatra the seventh, which means that there were six ruling women named Cleopatra, some of whom ruled out rites, some alongside their husbands who came before her. So yeah, pharaoh's of any gender during some chunk of the new kingdom went into the valley of kings. Queens who didn't rule went to the valley of queens, these temples and tombs, which were sort of public works projects in their way, because as best as I can tell, in these old kingdoms,

33:20 the ruler is the state. They were built by skilled workers, and those skilled workers, like I told you, ended up going on strike and ended up blockading roads and doing sit ins and threatening sabotage and just doing all the stuff that modern workers do. And those workers and their strength I'm going to tell you about in part two on Wednesday. Yep, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I have a newsletter. I write a bunch of stuff on it about preparedness, about history, about being queer, whatever, bullshit. I don't know. It's good. Almost all this is free. You should check it out buy home. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Goolzonemedia

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