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Labor Organizing in the COVID Depression

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I’ve been talking to quite a few reporters about organizing in the Depression, a story that has gotten a lot more interest as we enter into our own version of that very bad time. My answers are more ambivalent than the kind of rah-rah “the people united will never be defeated” sloganeering that some people want to hear. People are organizing and fighting for safe workplaces. But what it leads to is highly historically contingent.

At this point, it’s hard to predict whether workers like Woolwine and Smalls will be able to shift the balance of power on a federal level and shore up rights for low-wage workers in the long run. As America reaches unemployment levels last seen during the Great Depression, more people are facing economic hardship than they have in decades. That kind of struggle can turn apolitical people into voters and activists, said Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island. 

“Now all of a sudden people who never really considered themselves political can’t pay their rent,” he explained. “Probably a relatively significant percentage are going to say, ‘I’m not going to pay.’” He added that recent polls of people who say they’re going to vote in the fall elections “have skyrocketed.”

Rent strikes became widespread in many cities during the Depression, he noted, and a series of labor strikes in the 1910s and 1920s helped strengthen support for unions. Then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt laid the foundation for the modern labor movement when he signed the National Labor Recovery Act in 1933, which gave workers the right to unionize. The following year gave rise to four major strikes, including a 400,000-strong textile worker strike that became one of the country’s largest labor actions.

While it is tempting to assume that the U.S. could follow a similar path in the wake of the pandemic, Loomis pointed out that the country experienced a similar depression in 1893, which is widely considered the second-worst in American history. “The legal and social structure of the United States is so overwhelmingly opposed to worker rights at that time” that no clear worker reforms emerged from the panic of 1893, which coincided with the rise of populism, he explained.

Loomis predicted that coronavirus will lead to “a significant wave of workplace activism with new, more concrete demands. The ultimate result of that, I don’t know. It could be 1935 where you have a new wave of legislation, or 1894 where you don’t.”

It’s the National Industrial Recovery Act, but whatever.

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