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Tag: "labor"

AFL-CIO Coming Out for Keystone

[ 109 ] February 6, 2014 | Erik Loomis

For quite awhile, the AFL-CIO has tried to tread a middle ground on fossil fuel development. Understanding that its constituent unions had differing feelings on the issue and finding itself between the knowledge that it desperately needs alliances with other progressive organizations in order to remain a politically potent force on one hand with the demand for immediate jobs on the other, it tried to remain relatively neutral on the Keystone XL Pipeline and other issues.

That neutrality seems to be slipping as Richard Trumka has recently started supporting the pipeline and other fossil fuel projects.

The nation’s leading environmental groups are digging their heels in the sand by rejecting President Obama’s “all-of-the above” domestic energy strategy—which calls for pursuing renewable energy sources like wind and solar, but simultaneously expanding oil and gas production.

But it appears the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, won’t be taking environmentalists’ side in this fight, despite moves toward labor-environmentalist cooperation in recent years. On a recent conference call with reporters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed two initiatives reviled by green groups: the Keystone XL pipeline and new natural gas export terminals.

“There’s no environmental reason that [the pipeline] can’t be done safely while at the same time creating jobs,” said Trumka.

In response to a question from In These Times, Trumka also spoke in favor of boosting exports of natural gas.

“Increasing the energy supply in the country is an important thing for us to be looking at,” Trumka said. “All facets of it ought to be up on the table and ought to be talked about. If we have the ability to export natural gas without increasing the price or disadvantaging American industry in the process, then we should carefully consider that and adopt policies to allow it to happen and help, because God only knows we do need help with our trade balance.”

The call came amidst a series of three speeches by the AFL-CIO leader pushing for more investment in energy and transportation infrastructure. Trumka did not specifically praise Keystone and natural gas exports during the first speech, at the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk on January 15, and it is unclear whether he will in the remaining two. But the labor leader’s comments on the conference call were enough to peeve environmentalists.

I understand the need for jobs. But the AFL-CIO is just wrong here. Yes, members need jobs. And if the pipeline is going to be built anyway, then they should be union jobs. But there is also some moral component to the jobs that we create and actively supporting the jobs that are contributing to catastrophic climate change is not something the federation should be doing.

I’m sure that no small part of this is that unions like the Laborers who have most actively supported the pipeline are a lot more powerful than the opposing unions and they care more about it. So no doubt Trumka is feeling the pressure internally. But this just reinforces the belief that basically every other progressive organization in the country has toward American unionism–out of touch, inclined toward political reaction, clannish, and old-fashioned. Now, maybe unions shouldn’t care what anyone else thinks. Certainly that’s been the position of many of the building trades going back to their creation. But labor should also stop wondering why other progressive movements don’t take it seriously.

Good News from the NLRB

[ 15 ] February 5, 2014 | Erik Loomis

This is very positive news from the National Labor Relations Board:

A proposal to streamline union elections that was slammed by Mitt Romney and scrapped by a Woody Allen-quoting judge is being revived by the National Labor Relations Board, the agency announced Wednesday morning.

“Unnecessary delay and inefficiencies hurt both employees and employers,” NLRB chairman Mark Pearce said in an emailed statement. While emphasizing that “No final decisions have been made,” Pearce argued the proposed changes “would modernize the representation case process and fulfill the promise of the National Labor Relations Act.” The new move by the NLRB, the federal agency charged with interpreting and enforcing private sector labor law, was made by a 3-2, party-line vote. It sets in motion a multi-month process, including an April public hearing, leading up to a final vote.

By changing how challenges to voter eligibility are handled, the proposed rule change has the potential to shorten the period between when non-union workers petition for a government-supervised election to win union recognition, and the date when the election actually takes place. Then-presidential contender Mitt Romney slammed the proposed changes in 2011, charging that Obama’s “out-of-control labor board continues to trample on the rights of workers, the interests of job creators, and the rule of law” and would “force employees into ‘quickie’ union elections” and thus “benefit only union bosses, while preventing employees from making an informed decision about unionization and preventing employers from challenging illegal activity.”

But hey, those Obama appointed NLRB members making it easier for workers to join unions show once again that there is no meaningful difference between the two parties and thus Rand Paul is the only progressive alternative in 2016.

Musing about the CIO’s Legacy

[ 28 ] January 30, 2014 | Erik Loomis

I’ve been reading and rereading some key books of American labor history of late and I have a few thoughts. First on the CIO, after reading Robert Zieger’s 1995′s book, The CIO, 1935-1955.

There’s a sort of popular history of the CIO in the progressive mind that might go like this: The AFL sucked and was racist and wouldn’t organize industrial workers and so John Lewis changed this by creating the CIO. Worker activism, especially with the sit-down strikes of the late 1930s in the auto industry combined with FDR’s labor law to open up mass organizing, which was largely achieved by World War II. After the war, the CIO really screwed up by jumping in bed with the companies, undermining rank and file action, and kicking out the communists. By the time of the merger with the AFL in 1955, there wasn’t much reason for the CIO to exist as a separate entity.

I wouldn’t quibble with too much of this popular history. But I think for progressives and leftists thinking about the CIO as an important point in American labor history–and more importantly thinking about the role of the labor movement, progressivism broadly conceived, radicalism, etc. in American life today–there are a few issues and facts that have to be reckoned with.

1. That the CIO worked at all is incredibly lucky. It was so contingent on a lot falling the right way and it’s amazing it more or less happened. John L. Lewis was willing to front all the new unions a ton of money that they really couldn’t pay back. Yet by the time that Lewis bailed on the CIO project in 1940, there was just enough money to keep it all going. Lewis was mostly willing to tolerate communists for just long enough to get these organizing campaigns going. The need for full mobilization during World War II was all that really stabilized the CIO financially. Without it, it’s hard to say what would have happened to most of the industrial unions.

2. For all the talk of union power, actual information about the CIO’s success in mobilizing workers outside of basic organization does not leave one optimistic. Basically, the CIO struggled motivating workers at the polls. It’s political program was largely a failure on the local level. Historians like Thomas Sugrue have shown how Detroit workers were willing to reject the UAW whenever it pushed for racial equality, voting for Republicans even in the late 30s. Its candidates often lost, even in pro-labor states like Michigan and Ohio. The CIO fought hard to support Helen Gagahan Douglas against Richard Nixon and she was crushed. There are many cases like this from the late 30s until the merger in 1955. While CIO workers tended to vote more liberally than non-CIO workers, the federation simply could not turn the tide of most elections, even in its areas of strength.

3. Even more important, the American people outside of the CIO basically hated the organization. It’s worth remembering that not only did Taft-Hartley pass and not only did Taft-Hartley pass over Truman’s veto, but that the CIO wasn’t able to do a single thing to punish the politicians involved. That’s because not only did Taft-Hartley have the overwhelming support of the American people, it had a lot of support from rank and file members of CIO unions who were never comfortable with the radicalism of some of their leaders.

4. While the CIO redbaiting the communists out of the federation certainly helped undermine the social ferment unionism that gave the federation a reason to exist outside the AFL, it’s also important to remember that the communists actually were taking their orders from Moscow. Their constant position switching to fit Stalin’s new line disgusted many, including rank and file workers. Most workers were avowed anti-communists. Because the communists had great discipline and understood the mechanism of how unions worked, they tended to have outsized influence in the unions, but when there was a non-communist alternative, most (though certainly not all) workers were happy to get rid of them. There are exceptions to this, but the larger point stands–if we think that the communists were good for the labor movement, we do have to understand that most actual workers hated them.

5a. One area where the communist unions were right on and the CIO leadership was dead wrong was on race and Operation Dixie. The CIO tried to appeal to white workers in the South, meaning it avoided any talk of integration. Some of the communist-led unions had southern locals based upon black workers. The white workers hated them precisely because of the communist line on race. But there was much white workers in the South did not like on unions. The communists strongly pushed for an integrationist line and that had a much better chance of succeeding, because southern black workers were ardently pro-union when southern white workers weren’t really pro-union anyway. Not only was this important from a moral standpoint, the failure of Operation Dixie gave northern companies even more incentive to begin a process of capital mobility to the nonunion south that continues today in the global south.

5b. The CIO was to the right of the AFL on foreign policy issues between 1945 and 1955. The AFL retained an independence from the national security state (and the state more generally) than the CIO. The CIO relied upon federal legislation to push its agenda. Part of that deal was integrating itself into the state, which meant actively supporting Cold War foreign policy. The CIO basically said that Jacobo Arbenz had too many communists in his government, lending after the fact support to the coup in Guatemala.

6. On the other hand, it was precisely this working within the state and more specifically the Democratic Party that created the modern liberal state that did more for real workers than anything else in American history. Yet the growing consumer purchasing power of CIO workers actually did separate them from the rest of the American working class and there is a lot of evidence of CIO members in the 40s and 50s opposing federal programs that would have expanded the liberal state to a larger sector of the poor, precisely out of the same spirit of jealousy that today manifests itself in today’s poor complaining about public sector workers getting benefits when they don’t have any.

7. One thing the CIO and AFL had in common was no tolerance for rank and file activism. While rank and file activism did help build the CIO, its leaders were far more comfortable operating in Washington than the shop floor. It looked to crush wildcat strikes precisely because they made the internationals look bad to government and business leaders. On the other hand, there’s not all that much evidence that most workers wanted much in the way of rank and file activism and when they did express it, it was often protesting black people getting jobs or other socially reactionary issues.

Of course as so many people on the left have done, you can just look at this and say the CIO was a corrupted organization and that we need to promote solidarity, worker militancy, and direct action. Because the IWW did promote all of these things, they would say it is far more useful organization to see as a model than the CIO. The problem with that formulation is that the IWW has never accomplished anything. We might rightfully see the CIO as a deeply flawed organization. But what it did accomplish for American workers was enormous, even with all these problems.

And these discussions of worker solidarity, democratic unionism, and militancy are often just vague dreams without much meaningful connection to what the working class actually wants, which is to watch TV and go to their kids’ soccer games. Which ultimately is what most of us want because activism is hard and TV is fun.

In other words, history is complicated and any pat narrative that says this or that model is going to transform the conditions of the world’s workers is probably wrong. And if we are going to look at any past issues or models, we need to ground them in real historical fact and complexity. It’s one thing to remember Joe Hill and Frank Little and Emma Goldman with a quick raised fist or singing of Solidarity Forever. It’s another to be serious enough about our ideas to improve the lives of the world’s poor to investigate whether they actually had much useful to offer outside of image and figure. The CIO might have screwed up in some important ways. It’s still primarily responsible for actually winning the key issues that created the American middle class.

Unionize the NCAA

[ 62 ] January 28, 2014 | Erik Loomis

Wow.

For the first time in the history of college sports, athletes are asking to be represented by a labor union, taking formal steps on Tuesday to begin the process of being recognized as employees, ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” has learned.

Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, filed a petition in Chicago on behalf of football players at Northwestern University, submitting the form at the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board.

Backed by the United Steelworkers union, Huma also filed union cards signed by an undisclosed number of Northwestern players with the NLRB — the federal statutory body that recognizes groups that seek collective bargaining rights.

“This is about finally giving college athletes a seat at the table,” said Huma, a former UCLA linebacker, who created the NCPA as an advocacy group in 2001. “Athletes deserve an equal voice when it comes to their physical, academic and financial protections.”

Huma told “Outside The Lines” that the move to unionize players at Northwestern started with quarterback Kain Colter, who reached out to him last spring and asked for help in giving athletes representation in their effort to improve the conditions under which they play NCAA sports. Colter became a leading voice in regular NCPA-organized conference calls among players from around the country.

Now this is a story worth following. Given the difficulty graduate student unions have had in getting universities to admit they are employees, I think this is going to be an even harder struggle for athletes since they aren’t even paid, but I wish them the best of luck.

Hope from Scalia?

[ 31 ] January 22, 2014 | Erik Loomis

I was feeling pretty hopeless about the forthcoming Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn, which challenges the constitutionality of states signing closed shop contracts with public sector unions. If the right-wingers have their way, states would not be allowed to do this, effectively making the various levels of the federal government operate by right to work laws and kneecapping SEIU and AFSCME, two of the last major successful unions in this country. But as Moshe Marvit reports, Antonin Scalia in oral arguments was quite hostile to the right to work argument:

Scalia turned the NRTW argument on its head by raising the hypothetical of a policeman who, after asking a dozen times for a raise, was denied access to the police commissioner. Did he have his First Amendment rights violated? The answer was no. With this device, Justice Scalia highlighted how the Supreme Court has recognized that the government has wider latitude in dealing with its employees than in dealing with its citizenry. The police commissioner telling his secretary that he didn’t want to speak with his subordinate no more violated the policeman’s First Amendment rights than charging healthcare workers a fair share fee for union representation does theirs.

At one point in the arguments, when Justice Kagan suggested that Scalia believed that the NRTW position was valid, Scalia interrupted to clarify, stating, “I want to hear the answer, too, because, contrary to what Justice Kagan suggests, I didn’t say your First Amendment argument was valid … I said at least it was a comprehensible argument.”

When the NRTW attorney suggested that the way homecare workers negotiate for higher wages was not internal workplace speech, but rather more highly protected political speech, Scalia objected, saying, “Why isn’t it? I mean, it is for private employers.” Scalia went on to suggest that employers may stand to gain by having their workforce represented by a single union. “There are some private employers who think they’re better off with a closed shop and they just want to deal with one union. … They do this as private employers because they think it is in their interest as an employer. Why can’t the government have the same interest?” Coming from Scalia, these arguments have far more force than they would from one of the more liberal justices.

Seattle University Law Professor Charlotte Garden, the author of an amicus brief by labor law professors supporting the union in Harris, tells Working In These Times that Scalia’s position in this case was in line with his partial concurrent opinion in a 1991 case, Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association. “Scalia also accepted in Lehnert—and seemed to accept in the argument [on Tuesday]—that requiring the union to fairly represent all members of the bargaining unit, but not requiring the agency fee (which is a model that states are free to adopt) puts pressure on the bargaining relationship by allowing represented workers to free ride,” she says.

Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. And Scalia’s federalism arguments are usually rank hypocrisy that apply only when they favor his personal policy positions. But maybe he cares enough to let states make their own choices here.

At least there’s reason to hope for the future of public sector unionism. For today at least.

The Cost of Free Trade Agreements

[ 287 ] January 22, 2014 | Erik Loomis

Free trade agreements are so bipartisan now that even a large number of liberals support them. But free trade agreements and the resultant fully mobile capital unhinged to states has done more than any other thing to destroy the union movement, kneecap the popular environmentalism of 1970s, and undermine the middle class than anything else. It’s cost to everyday people in the United States has been profound. Harold Meyerson on the potential of the Trans-Pacific Partnership for making this even worse.

By now, even the most ossified right-wing economists concede that globalization has played a major role in the loss of American manufacturing jobs and, more broadly, the stagnation of U.S. wages and incomes. Former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder has calculated that 22 percent to 29 percent of all U.S. jobs could potentially be offshored. That’s a lot of jobs: 25 percent would translate to 36 million workers whose wages are in competition with those in largely lower-income nations. Of the 11 nations with which the United States is negotiating the TPP, nine have wage levels significantly lower than ours.

Trade agreements that promote the relocation of U.S. corporations’ factories to nations like China and Mexico have played a central role in the evisceration of American manufacturing and the decline in U.S. workers’ incomes. Two out of three displaced manufacturing workers who got new jobs between 2009 and 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, experienced wage reductions — most of them greater than 20 percent.

And here’s the thing–for workers in Mexico, Central America, and southeast Asia, the overall effects of free trade has not been particularly beneficial either. American food policy and food companies have forced Mexican farmers off their land, creating a new mobile labor force for the maquiladoras and undocumented workers in the U.S. For both of these groups of workers, they have effectively no rights at the workplace; in the U.S., companies have frequently turned themselves into immigration officials when their undocumented workers have organized. Today in Mexico, movements are rising around the “right to stay at home,” as workers do not want to leave for the border or for the U.S. The situation in Central America is similar and has spurred a lot of migration to the U.S. as well for the same reasons. As for Bangladesh and Cambodia and other southeast Asian nations, free trade has had an impact for the elites quite similar to the U.S.–a lot of wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. For the poor, the apparel-elite state is more than happy to send the police after you for organizing. And if that doesn’t happen, your factory may collapse and leave you dead.

And while of course on the ground there is a great deal of complexity as to the overall impact of these agreements on poor nations (obviously there are some it has helped in some ways, etc), there is a glib and largely unexamined response from those who support free trade agreements saying that they have helped these workers, they have jobs, they are moving out of poverty, etc. But not only is the last part of that largely not true, but it ignores the preconditions as to why these workers needed jobs–often being forced off their land by the same policies and corporate-political elite that have them working 14-hour days in a Honduran sweatshop today. We need to take that into account before saying these things are universally good for poor nations.

Not to mention the impact of free trade on your own pocketbook, your own future stability, your own ability to send your kids to college, or to retire by choice rather than by long-term unemployment.

….The thing about Meyerson is that he’s a big enough deal writing in one of the nation’s 2 papers of record that he can force the Obama Administration to respond. Which they did through Penny Pritzker in a letter that can basically summed up as “free trade is good for you now shut up and let’s get back to this bipartisan project with no evidence it benefits the majority of Americans. But trust us, we are thinking of you.”

Scab Cereal

[ 82 ] January 21, 2014 | Erik Loomis

Time to avoid Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops, since Kellogg’s has locked out the workers making the cereal at its Memphis factory and instead bused in scabs through an Ohio unionbusting company.

Bradshaw says the lockout is part of a plan to make Kellogg union-free. “If we win in Memphis, they have to wait until the master contract expires to make these changes,” he said. “If we lose in Memphis, it’s going everywhere.

“Other companies are going to see it. General Mills has already called our international president and said, ‘What are you doing about Kellogg?’ He’s thinking if Kellogg can do it, they can, too.”

The Memphis lockout is only the latest step in a series of increasingly hostile anti-union moves by Kellogg globally. Management recently announced that two union plants in Australia and Canada will close this year, and production will move to non-union facilities.

Kellogg also recently shifted 58 million pounds per year of cereal production from Memphis to Mexico. Bradshaw said workers in Mexico are required to live in a housing compound near the factory and are bused to work. Some have been kidnapped by drug cartels.

In 1996, more than 800 people worked at the Memphis facility. Now it stands just above 200. Much of the work is automated.

Hardly surprising that a giant corporation like Kellogg’s is using capital mobility as a union-busting strategy. Capital mobility and the outsourcing of American jobs has done more than anything to undermine the middle class, making the working class ever more poor, and generate the enormous income inequality of the New Gilded Age.

Capital Mobility and Transnational Exploitation

[ 60 ] January 18, 2014 | Erik Loomis

David Bacon’s The Right to Stay Home is high on my reading list. Demonstrating the profound impact of NAFTA on both the United States and Mexico, it shows how NAFTA allowed American corporations to go into Mexico, buy up land and evict farmers, create a new pool of cheap labor for American companies in both the US and Mexico that forced Mexican farmers to migrate against their wills, and use immigration authorities as its own union-busting force when that labor begins to unionize.

To illustrate how NAFTA worked in practice, Bacon explains how a Smithfield Foods subsidiary used NAFTA’s land reform laws. The company scooped up land in Veracruz to open a massive mechanized hog-raising facility, driving small local pork producers out of business. Those displaced small farmers then filled the recruiting buses to go work at Smithfield’s packinghouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

Undocumented immigrants were shipped in partly to break a union campaign. When they said “enough is enough” and joined the union drive, Smithfield colluded with ICE to terrorize the workforce. Ultimately, the union drive won, but at tremendous cost: firings, fear, deportations, resentment among the different communities.

The union organizing in Tar Heel mirrored a community effort in Veracruz to limit the growth of the Smithfield subsidiary—in particular because of its toxic waste that destroyed the water table, causing kidney infections and forcing communities to depend on bottled water. The community won an agreement that the company would not expand further.

In another example, further south in Oaxaca, mining corporations gobbled up farmers’ land—also using NAFTA provisions—and poisoned the environment with toxic wastes. They provided a few jobs at above-average wages, but dried up many more.

These are the processes I am talking about in my own forthcoming book on the effects of capital mobility. Capitalism unbound by national borders and with the support of corrupt elite classes around the world undermines both labor and environmental rights and regulations everywhere with no consequences for their actions. These are the complex forces we have to fight against. Even when you have meaningful and difficult to achieve transnational progressive alliances, the forces of capital combined with the forces of capitalists’ client states make real wins few and far between. Probably nothing suggests the power of capital mobility than food and food policy, where free trade agreements create not only new markets for rich world corporations but by forcing people off the land through either direct eviction or more commonly undermining their economic stability, they then create a labor force for their own operations around the world. It’s win-win for corporations and lose-lose for most of the world’s workers.

Wisconsin Taking Another Step to the New Gilded Age

[ 66 ] January 16, 2014 | Erik Loomis

Conservatives’ vision of the future of American work

Scott Walker’s Wisconsin really is vanguard of the New Gilded Age. Republicans have introduced a new bill, almost certain to become law, that will get rid of a state law requiring employers to give workers 24 hours in a row off at least once every 7 days. I know, quite the imposition upon the freedom of workers to work whenever they are compelled upon risk of termination want! But hey, workers have the option to opt out, by which conservatives mean the same as Gilded Age conservatives did in 1895 that workers had real options–do what we say or find another job. But no one is compelling them!

Conservatives say that workers will only have to forego their rest days if they volunteer, but the law’s opponents argue that businesses could create environments that are hostile to workers who insist on their rights. Workers who take their mandated rest days could be skipped over for promotion, denied privileges allowed to workers who work a 7-day week or could see sharp reductions in their schedules until they no longer have enough hours to make ends meet, financially.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce said that it conceived of the law when it noted that the federal government does not have a rule mandating that workers receive a certain number of hours off per work cycle.

Lawmakers Grothman and Born told reporters from the Journal that they had heard from a diverse array of businesses that support the 7-day work week, but when asked to provide examples, they were only able to provide the names of groups belonging to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce network.

“Here’s an opportunity for folks to work together to get things done in a positive way for the employer and the employee,” Born said. “It just seems like a win all the way around.”

All the way around. Indeed. All the way around to the conditions of 1895.

Wal-Mart Doesn’t Have Much Respect for the Intelligence of Its Employees

[ 16 ] January 16, 2014 | Erik Loomis

This purloined presentation of Wal-Mart anti-union propaganda is pretty unprofessional. You’d at least think the world’s largest retailer would argue something a bit more complicated than a labor organization would cost employees a whole $5 a month. The second presentation, for managers, is more standard anti-union hack work. But at least it looks like they spent more than 5 minutes putting it together.

Meanwhile, the NLRB is filing a complaint against Wal-Mart for violation labor law in 14 states while cracking down on striking workers.

This Day in Labor History: January 15, 1915

[ 26 ] January 15, 2014 | Erik Loomis

On the night of January 15, 1915, the IWW writer and propagandist Ralph Chaplin wrote the song “Solidarity Forever.” The song is emblematic of Wobbly culture. If there’s one thing the IWW did well, it was culture creation. This culture creation has done a great deal to give them outsized influence compared to their real accomplishments in American labor and radical history, continuing to make the union and its ideas relevant to activists today.

The IWW valued culture as politics very early. The early twentieth century was a period of working-class poetry and song. The timber union journals I look at are full of this sort of thing, whether radical or not. Given the popularity of syndicalism among the Wobblies’ European immigrant base, this was enhanced by these same immigrants also bringing traditions of radicalism through culture with them to the United States.

Ralph Chaplin was a central figure in the IWW. He was born to radicalism, having witnessed a worker shot to death during the Pullman Strike at the age of 7. He later traveled to Mexico in the early days of the Mexican Revolution, becoming an admirer of Emiliano Zapata. Upon his return from Mexico, Chaplin became involved with the growing IWW, which had by the early 1910s become the most important union alternative to the American Federation of Labor. Chaplin began writing “Solidarity Forever” while working on a coal strike in West Virginia in 1914. It took him a few months to finish. After watching a demonstration of the hungry in Chicago in 1915, he went back to his hotel room and finished the song. It soon became the most important song of the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.

Ralph Chaplin

The song’s lyrics:

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

Chorus

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

Chorus

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

Chorus

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Carried from place to place by the unionists, the songbook gave workers songs over which they could build solidarity. In our present of demographically divided cultural creation, it’s almost impossible to imagine a single song or style having the ability to unite people in struggle. That might well make for better music, but it’s politically a problem. The ability to sing together, although not cool in our oh so ironic and detached age, helped workers riding trains between timber camps, in the fields, and in the mines of the American West get through their daily lives of toil and great struggle. These songs and images created a revolutionary counterculture to the dominant culture of the day that contributed to working-class oppression. Songs and posters were central to building a workers’ revolution. They also served to push a revolutionary message to a polyglot and often illiterate (especially in English) working-class. Not everyone could read a tract. But they might learn the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever.” And it didn’t take a working knowledge of the language to see the meaning of a class war prisoner reaching through prison bars or a muscular man standing proud.

The Little Red Songbook

Through their songbooks, their newspapers, and their flyers, the IWW created really great culture. The black cat. Mr. Block. “Solidarity Forever.” These are images and songs that stick with us. As a labor organization, the IWW was often pretty ineffective. Some of that had to do with the conditions of organizing in the early 20th century. But as much had to do with weaknesses within the IWW. It was not infrequent that the IWW’s commitment to culture actually hindered organizing. The disastrous Paterson Strike Pageant was a prime example, dividing the workers (those not selected to participate were jealous and the resentments split the strikers) and taking them away from picketing, thus allowing scabs into the factories.

A classic piece of Wobbly culture creation

Compared to either the AFL or CIO, the IWW accomplished almost nothing. At best, the union’s campaigns caused so many problems in a given industry that it helped force the government to improve the conditions of workers to undermine it, such as with the Pacific Northwest timber workers I study. But both the AFL and CIO were terrible at culture creation. And as bureaucratic organizations, they had little room the kind of individualistic, showy activity that embedded the IWW in public memory. In fact, they explicitly eschewed this kind of thing as unproductive. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. But the IWW remains in the memory of American radicals today as an alternative to an AFL-CIO seen as unresponsive, boring, and bureaucratic. It’s had that power since the late 1960s. And the reason for it is largely the powerful cultural creations like “Solidarity Forever.”

Like many Wobbly intellectuals, Chaplin initially expressed hope that the Soviet Union was the beginning a true workers’ revolution but also like many of them, became quickly disillusioned. Chaplin remained committed to anti-communist leftist thought in the United States until World War II. In 1949, Chaplin became curator for manuscripts at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma, a position he retained until his death in 1961. I figure this makes him the most famous archivist in American history.

For a good book on the creation of IWW culture, see Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World.

This is the 91st post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: January 14, 1888

[ 25 ] January 14, 2014 | Erik Loomis

On January 14, 1888, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was published. One of the two most influential books in American labor history (with The Jungle as the other), Bellamy’s treatise tapped into the dreams of thousands of Americans who found the promises of the post-Civil War economy a lie and were desperate for alternatives to the reality of Gilded Age capitalism.

By the 1880s, the promise of post-Civil War capitalism had failed the American working class. Most working Americans believed, and this was fundamental to the founding ideology of the Republican Party, in free labor. In short that meant the ability of individuals to control their own economic destiny, either as an independent operator or as an employee in a small shop that would often lead to later independence. But the Civil War had transformed the American economy and while Gilded Age Republicans at first spoke the words of free labor, they consistently supported policies that concentrated capital at the top. Men like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie became unbelievably wealthy while the majority of workers fell into poverty. The search for wealth led to wide-scale corruption that both caused economic collapses and bought off politicians all the way up to Grant’s vice-president.

By the 1880s, a lot of working-class Americans were searching for a solution. Most still fundamentally believed in the system of free labor market capitalism. They generally felt that if they could just tweak the system in one big way, everything would align. So they searched for any number of ways to do that. Some wanted to restrict immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first legislative success for labor unions in American history. Others grasped onto the 8-hour day. The Farmers Alliance sought railroad regulations. Other workers thought Henry George’s Single Tax on land would create conditions of equality.

Of all these one-off solutions, none had more power or appeal than Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward. Bellamy, a previously unknown reporter for the Springfield (MA) Daily Union, wrote a book telling the tale of Julian West, who is placed in a hypnotic trance in 1887 and because of a disaster is forgotten about until he is uncovered in 2000. Waking up, West is confused. His strife-riven, class-divided Boston of the Gilded Age has become a peaceful sort of paradise. Competitive capitalism had disappeared with all its terrible byproducts–inequality, strikes, poverty, taxes, money, wealth, and domestic labor. There were no more political parties, garbage, advertisements, state governments, or corruption. People retired at the age of 45 and lived long lives of comfort. There is harmony between the sexes, although based around a paternalistic view of women.

Most importantly for Gilded Age readers who ultimately still believed in the system’s fundamentals, this revolution was not Haymarket and it was not the Paris Commune. This was a peaceful revolution. Americans saw their society in crisis and voted in the necessary changes.

Bellamy was an evolutionary socialist and his ideas were appealing to those who realized that Gilded Age society was in a state of crisis and needed changes. Looking Backward became a best seller, moving over 1000 copies per day at its peak. By 1891, the book had sold nearly 500,000 copies, making it the biggest best seller of its era. Workers and middle class reformers around the country started Bellamy Clubs to press for his ideas. For the growing middle class, just entering the first stages of what would later be known as Progressivism, Bellamyism had possibly even more appeal than to workers. The first Bellamy Club was set up in Boston in 1889 and they soon spread around the country. A California Bellamyite wrote to him that “When the Golden Century arrives, your name will receive the homage of the human race of that period as the only writer of the 19th century capable of seeing, feeling and portraying the ‘better way.’”

Within the labor movement, Looking Backward was widely hailed. Both the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor embraced his ideas. For the Knights’ leadership, Bellamyism was far more appealing than the anarchism that had led to the Haymarket bombing and helped destroy the 8-hour day movement that had led to its growth up to 1886. The book became central to Knights locals and in fact many Bellamy Clubs became labor unions. The book attracted followers such as Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Upton Sinclair, and Daniel DeLeon. In later years, Franklin Roosevelt and Norman Thomas talked of its influence upon them. The Progressives held the book close as well. Effectively, in a world where people were desperately searching for a vision of a future that included both equality and peace, Bellamy’s dream world was an ideal.

Although one can say this of many futuristic novels, if we squint enough, we can see Bellamy predicting some of the 20th century, including credit cards, shopping malls and radios. As literature, it’s pretty tough sledding. It’s mostly a long conversation between West and his mentor in the new world. It’s stilted and much of it is boring; I used it once to introduce a course on the Gilded Age and it was a complete disaster.

Ultimately, these relatively simplistic solutions to the perils of American capitalism began to fade in favor of far more complex and necessary understandings of the system. Whether through the pure and simple unionism of the American Federation of Labor or the ideologically complex systems of anarchism, socialism, and communism, by the late 19th century, workers increasingly understood that the system they lived in was not an anomaly but rather the intentional creation of the plutocrats. Free labor ideology faded, replaced by class consciousness. Bellamyism had long legs as a utopian ideal, but as a direct goal to attain, more realistic and complex ways of understanding the world came to the forefront.

Edward Bellamy was uncomfortable with the ardor his book evinced and resisted publishing a follow-up. He eventually did in 1897, but it did not sell well. He died in 1898.

This is the 90th post in this series. Earlier posts are archived here.

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