There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The loss in the perceived importance of unions was due in part to worker complacency made possible by a strong postwar economy. Technology had also played a role, diminishing the number of industrial jobs around which labor organizing was traditionally centered, and creating new white-collar occupations more associated with management than with labor. Taft-Hartley had excluded foremen and supervisors from labor-law coverage, which made workplace unity more difficult because fewer new jobs were blue-collar in character and more positions in the emerging service fields were designated as supervisory, meaning that a wide array of employees from bank tellers, insurance agents, and finance brokers to café managers and college professors were denied the right to unionize.3 Of the approximately 22 million white-collar workers in America in 1965, only 10 percent belonged to unions. The impact of automation on the blue-collar workplace was likewise significant: long-unionized industries, such as mining, railroads, steel, and the large automakers, had all managed to lay off workers in the generation since the war without sacrificing productivity, a trend that was expected to grow. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson predicted that by 1975 the nation would be capable of maintaining its present levels of production with 20 million fewer workers.4

  Despite its obvious benefits, technology had historically been the bane of the American worker. Industrialization made the craft tradition virtually obsolete; then came multiple-loom systems and factory speed-ups; the mid-nineteenth century introduced interchangeable parts, and the early twentieth the assembly line. No wonder the legend grew of the mythic black railroader John Henry, who, in a bid to save his and his coworkers’ jobs, challenged the boss’s new steam-powered drill to a race. Henry beat the drill, only to collapse and die “with his hammer in his hand.”5 Millions of “John Henrys” would fall as the pace of technological change accelerated, as the age of steam and the coming of electricity gave way to electronics and atomic energy. Large corporations such as General Motors, DuPont, and General Electric opened research divisions in the early twentieth century whose main purpose was to create new innovations that drove production and advanced corporate profitability, but inevitably wreaked havoc with employees’ lives and livelihoods.

  Like other Americans, workers welcomed progress, sharing in the considerable national pride attached to innovations such as communications satellites, improved devices for treating and detecting disease, nuclear power, computers, and the competition for supremacy in outer space. And many joined their fellow countrymen in looking forward to new, laborsaving methods, or anticipated the opportunity to learn new skills. But for older workers and the unskilled in a time of rapid technological change, the fear of being replaced by a machine was all too real; while in some communities, businesses prepared to abandon older-technology plants altogether, in order to reconfigure with new automation elsewhere. Such pressures were often hard to deflect with traditional union negotiating, for automation came with the imprimatur of Progress; it was difficult to make the argument that an employer should eschew efficiency and decreased production costs in the interest of sustaining jobs that had become obsolete.

  Not that people didn’t try. The job of locomotive fireman was a position once integral to the operation of steam locomotives, but it had been superseded with the introduction of diesel locomotives beginning in the 1930s. As diesel replaced steam over the next two decades, many firemen were lost to attrition, yet in 1958 there were still thirty-two thousand locomotive firemen working at an estimated annual cost to the railroads of $200 million. Employers moved to reclassify and/or phase out the fireman’s job, in some instances accusing those who held the position of featherbedding, the maintaining of a union-protected job that was unnecessary and required little or no effort. The firemen’s brotherhood countered that his role was still essential, as he served as a critical extra pair of eyes and ears for the engineer, helping to avert derailments and collisions. This was important, the brotherhood pointed out, because railroads now ran fewer but longer trains, adding to safety concerns.6 Management allowed that having a second pair of eyes and ears on passenger trains was valid as a safety measure, but that the advent of radio communication and innovations in locomotive design that allowed an engine to be controlled from either side meant two men were no longer required to drive a freight train or assemble trains in a yard. From the standpoint of publicity the union’s fight for the firemen came off poorly, as it appeared in asking for the job’s retention to be demanding special exemption from a modernizing, more efficient world.

  A panel created by Congress to resolve the issue proposed that 90 percent of firemen’s positions be phased out, but not without retaining longtime workers or offering comparable work and/or generous severance packages. When the rail unions balked, challenging the elimination of nineteen thousand jobs and the power of Congress to order compulsory resolution of the dispute, the case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the commission’s ruling. In reaction, a walkout was threatened by the nation’s five railway unions. Only the direct involvement of President Johnson broke the logjam, the rail unions accepting in principle the end of the fireman’s position in exchange for improved working conditions and the promise that the transition would be phased in gradually. A similar agreement took shape in the newspaper business, where linotype operators whose jobs were made obsolete by the introduction of computerized typesetting were guaranteed job and retirement security in exchange for unions agreeing to accept other changes in the workplace.7

  As these kinds of negotiations suggested, the era of the 1950s and early 1960s differed from earlier periods of rapid technological transition in that anxiety about technology as a job-killer was more widely shared. Strike activity in the early 1960s was as low as during the era of the no-strike pledge of the Second World War, but when strikes did occur, as they did in the printing trades, among butchers, in aviation and aerospace, and in marine-related work, they tended to involve issues of displacement due to automation, retraining programs, job security, severance packages, and bonuses for early retirement.

  Large firms such as General Electric and the Armour Meat Packing Company tried to preempt the difficulty with extensive worker retraining programs, and various states made similar efforts. The federal government had begun addressing the crisis in 1954 with the formation of the Office of Manpower Administration, an effort that carried over into the New Frontier era, culminating in the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, which assigned $35 million to assist technology-displaced workers. The attention to so sensitive a labor issue would bolster support from organized labor for both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations.

  While the labor movement may have lost a good deal of its fervency for reform, it identified with and embraced Johnson’s major domestic initiatives, particularly his plans for what he termed the Great Society, aimed at improving basic living conditions for all Americans—in health care, housing, civil rights, and employment. The Great Society program mirrored a growing liberal concern for the widening gulf between rich and poor that had informed one of the era’s most seminal books, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962. Harrington’s account of the extensive poverty and need in America that lay hidden from view aroused indignation, much as had Jacob Riis’s 1890 exposé of slum conditions, How the Other Half Lives. Readers closed Harrington’s book with the conviction that the most affluent nation on earth could not walk into the future while substantial numbers of its population remained uneducated, unemployed, hungry, and desperate for decent housing.

  The Voting Rights Act and Medicare, both enacted in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were aligned closely with labor’s own historic concern for the fundamental economic and social vitality of working people. Especially meaningful was the breakthrough Equal Employment Opportunity Act, part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which laid assault to discrimination in the workplace and made $1 billion available specifically to develop young people’s work skills for jobs created by new technology. A
distinguishing feature of Johnson’s social agenda was that, unlike the New Deal, which created large government programs to alleviate economic suffering, the Great Society aimed at empowering individuals through education, job training, and community programs and giving them options that they themselves would be required to act upon. Surely the most emotionally compelling part of Johnson’s program was his “War on Poverty,” which sought to address directly the crisis outlined by Harrington, that amid the tremendous affluence of American life at mid-century, pockets of extreme poverty still existed, a neglected subpopulation Harrington called “the invisible poor.”

  AS FAR AWAY FROM WASHINGTON as one could travel in the United States, in the fertile agricultural valleys of California, migrant Latino farmworkers were among those Americans struggling fiercely to become less “invisible.” Historically among the country’s most neglected laborers, the farmworkers sought to win the right to organize and bargain collectively from the state’s powerful growers, who had long ignored or easily rebuffed such demands. This time the workers expected things to go differently; in addition to the Great Society reforms emanating from Washington, they could look to the dramatic inspiration of the Southern civil rights movement, and to the quiet determination of their own charismatic spokesman, César Chávez.

  Seasonal fruit and vegetable picking—stoop labor, as it was known—had not been included in the collective bargaining regime of the New Deal because Southerners in Congress had influenced the legislation creating both the Wagner Act and Social Security to exclude agricultural and domestic labor, which at the time employed half of all African American workers. Three decades later pay and conditions for migrant workers remained abysmal; they had no guarantee of a job and benefited from no protective laws; even child labor was unregulated. The work itself—picking fruit or vegetables under a warm California sun—was backbreaking. “The workers hunch under the vines like ducks,” reported journalist John Gregory Dunne. “There is no air, making the intense heat all but unbearable. Gnats and bugs swarm out from under the leaves. Some workers wear face masks; others, handkerchiefs knotted around their heads to catch the sweat.”8 The workers’ camps adjacent to these “factories in the fields”—whether provided by the growers or improvised by the migrants themselves—had poor sanitation, inadequate toilets and showers, and often little provision for shelter or safe drinking water.9

  For the better part of a century, regional crop and vineyard growers had successfully repulsed attempts at worker organization. Part of their clout came from the sheer size of their estates, some as large as three hundred thousand acres. Unlike large agricultural property elsewhere in America that often consisted of many former small family farms sewn together, California’s extensive farm holdings were created by Mexican and Spanish land grants that predated the U.S. possession of California, as well as Gilded Age railroad landgrabs that carved parts of the state into vast estates. These large enterprises, which often remained intact over several generations, harvested tremendous annual tonnages of produce and required a steady supply of cheap labor—successive waves of Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Mexicans, and Filipinos who toiled in the fields. The results of this kind of agricultural organization were insular fiefdoms that controlled the lives of the people who lived and worked on them and dominated local politics as well as the courts, sheriffs’ offices, clergy, and the press—a civic culture with no parallel in the United States outside the plantation South or the Colorado coalfields of the early 1900s.

  The repression the workers suffered was licensed in part by a useful caricature of them as carefree nomads who required such an authoritarian structure. “There was nothing you could do about these insouciant and lighthearted boys,” wrote one historian of the early days in the fields. “You couldn’t pay them a decent wage for they would drink it up right away. As for providing them with shelter or a bed—why, they loved the open air and would rather die than take a bath.”10 When the workers dared defy this stereotype, growers never hesitated to use the law and the threat of official or vigilante violence to maintain control. There was an intense local dislike of unionism, rooted in Southern California’s history of being overrun by immigrant and transient job-seekers; while the Wobbly free speech battles, the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, the assault on a 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, and the 1934 longshoremen’s strike had conditioned public anxiety toward “radical” labor. In the case of the farmworkers there were also economic reasons to denigrate unionization, for although the work they performed was menial, its seasonal nature and the importance of bringing in each harvest in a timely manner made any disruption potentially ruinous; stoop labor was best kept “cheap and unorganized” in the Golden State.

  An often-cited cause for vigilance was the state’s experience with the IWW, which more than any other labor organization had succeeded at adapting to the migrants’ own lifestyle. The Wobblies were held responsible for one of the deadliest outbreaks of farm labor violence in the state’s history, a riot in the town of Wheatland in August 1913. The owner of the Durst Ranch, seeking to drive down wages, had intentionally advertised for far more pickers than he actually needed. Three thousand men, women, and children descended on the site, eager for work. Finding they’d been lied to, but believing some work might actually materialize, many remained—camping without adequate food, water, or sanitary facilities. Whole families were left to sleep on the open ground.

  When Wobbly “agitators” organized a rally to protest the situation, the sheriff, his deputies, and the local district attorney arrived by car, accompanied by a legion of armed enforcers hired by the growers. Someone—it was never established who—fired a shot into the air, triggering a massive brawl as the workers, furious at their mistreatment, lashed out against the officials and vigilantes with knives, sticks, and fists. The “Wheatland Riot” ended with the district attorney, a deputy, and two workers killed, and dozens wounded on both sides. Hundreds of migrants were rounded up by police, and two men deemed to have been the insurrection’s leaders and alleged to be IWW, Blackie Ford and Herman Suhr, were convicted of murder and sent to prison for life.11 As a California newspaper had opined of the IWW, “Hanging is much too good for them. They are the waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion, there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.”12

  The fact that the newly settled Roosevelt administration in Washington was moving toward labor reforms in the early 1930s offered a glimmer of hope for the farmworkers. One small victory came in 1933 when Labor Secretary Frances Perkins dispatched her own representative, retired army general Pelham Glassford, to California. Glassford visited the small towns and fields, met with both growers and workers, and concluded that the underlying problem was that wages were too low. Acting on his own and with questionable legal authority, he presented to the growers what “the U.S. government” believed fair wages for farmworkers should be, and posted the information on broadsides pinned to walls and trees throughout the region. The “Glassford Wage,” as it became known, was denounced by California conservatives including the reactionary governor James Rolph and largely ignored, but it did offer one of the first objective conclusions that workers were underpaid and put the growers on notice that the federal government was paying at least a modicum of attention to what went on in their hidden kingdom.13

  A Communist-affiliated union allied with the CIO, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, arrived in the harvest fields in the late 1930s to find the growers willing to use every weapon in their arsenal to stymie the union’s progress, from scabs to court injunctions. A series of strikes brought vicious reprisals from a vigilante group calling itself the Associated Farmers of California who, concealing their identities behind masks, kidnapped strike leaders, subjected some to torture, and drove others out of the area at threat of death. Despite the use of such Ku Klux Klan–like tactics, investigating state authorities blamed the violence on Un
ited Cannery and arrested several of its leaders, squelching any further efforts at unionization. In 1940 the Associated Farmers would be heard from again, condemning the publication of John Steinbeck’s revealing account of life in the harvest fields, The Grapes of Wrath.

  During the Second World War, growers found themselves desperately short of labor as manpower was drawn out of the picking fields to defense work or the military, and thousands of Japanese harvesters were sent to internment camps. This led in 1942 to an informal pact between the United States and Mexico to allow seasonal non-American guest workers, known as braceros, to be recruited and transported across the border to assist with the harvest. The agreement stressed that braceros were to work at an arranged location and not remain in the United States in the off-season, restrictions often ignored by the growers, as was the pay scale assigned by the pact. Amid complaints from braceros of unpaid wages and inhuman treatment, growers began importing illegal laborers who were far less likely to complain and who, unlike the braceros, could be shifted from one picking assignment to another.