Thou Shall Not Scab

“Thou Shall Not Scab” is the first in a series of radical labor history zines produced by Natasha’s forthcoming imprint, Past Lives Press. The zine pulls excerpts from her essay, “What an epic women’s strike can teach us over 70 years later,” which was published in The Nation in March 2023. The zine opens with the first three paragraphs of the published article:

“The 53 women and children packed into Grant County Jail on June 16, 1951, were not normally ones for civil disobedience. But eight months into what would become New Mexico’s longest-lasting strike, they felt they had little choice but to put their bodies on the line to demand an end to racially discriminatory labor practices at the Empire Zinc Mine in the tiny town of Hanover.

When members of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Local 890 had gone on strike on October 17, 1950, they’d formed a picket line to keep strikebreakers at bay. But after a court injunction sidelined the miners, their wives, sisters, and mothers voted to take up the picket themselves. They were met with violence and arrested en masse, but they did not take their captivity quietly. In fact, they made such a ruckus that their jailers had little choice but to release them after just 12 hours. The next day, they were back on the picket line, where they continued to walk, sing, dance, and knit their resistance for another seven months.

More than 70 years later, the Empire Zinc strike still holds a totemic place in American labor history. And despite attempts to suppress the story, it was immortalized in Salt of the Earth (1954), a film that was blacklisted at the time of its release in the McCarthy era but that now streams freely online and has achieved a cult following among leftists.”

Their story represents a fact that is as threatening to the patriarchal, capitalistic status quo in 2023 as it was in 1951: that women have as much power as they’re willing to organize for, and that that power extends far beyond the workplace.

As we grapple with increasing threats to women’s bodily autonomy in this post-Roe era, let the Empire Zinc strike be a reminder that women and their needs cannot be ignored—and that no movement can be won if we don’t let the most marginalized among us lead.

Designed by Robert Baxter, riso printed and assembled at Common Area Maintenance. Copies for sale at Common Objects in Seattle, Washington. 

Read the article in full here, and see a few clips of the zine below.