There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Labor organizations accordingly have come to treat seriously the need for unionized workers to be aware of the larger political and economic forces affecting today’s global markets, and to know labor history itself. While the visionary labor ideologies of a century ago may appear quaint and even misguided today, there is no denying they were about connecting labor’s daily experience to larger themes and world-size challenges. That impulse was reinvigorated by Walter Reuther and the UAW during the 1960s, but it has been chiefly in the past two decades that unions have launched deliberate efforts to educate their members (and the public) about social and economic forces relevant to the workplace, such as the conditions in foreign sweatshops, free trade product alternatives, the rights of women workers, and concepts such as industrial retention and green technology. This isn’t to imply that people need indoctrination or to be taught new slogans, but rather that the use of unions’ programmatic dollars on member education regarding labor issues is essential.121

  Unions have also retooled structurally for global action. “Not so long ago, a major union’s international activity could be carried out by a single person who might even have had other organizational responsibilities,” explains Mazur. “This is no longer possible.” Because almost all labor-industrial conflicts have an international aspect, “the most advanced unions now involve many of their departments—organizing, research, political action, public relations, education, legal, health and safety, and corporate affairs—in diverse strategies. In turn, these strategies forge effective links with overseas partners, coordinate industrial actions, lobby governments, take legal action, and simultaneously publicize all this activity in more than one country.”122

  However, activists hoping to work cooperatively with their counterparts in developing nations will need to be mindful of the negative impression left by decades of American labor’s harmful meddling—the conspiring of Jay Lovestone and the CIA, ersatz U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) “training” programs, and the undermining of labor unions and whole governments. In some instances, foreign trade unions with which American organizations might now seek alliance are the very ones plotted against by the AFL-CIO during the cold war, or they exist in countries where our own actions enabled the government to create means of suppressing independent labor unions. “By working to make the world safe for U.S. business in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,” says labor scholar Gregory Mantsios, “the AFL-CIO laid the ground for labor’s current predicament: the world became all too safe for U.S. corporations interested in cheap labor and unregulated environments.”123

  What has differentiated America from other industrialized nations since the Second World War is not that some industries have become obsolete or that others have emerged—that was bound to occur—but that this process and the related need to confront globalization and the energy crisis have not been adequately met by coordinated economic or energy planning. The collective aspect of industrial self-control, as Geoghegan relates, such as a tax on oil consumption proposed by the Carter administration, failed to win broad support, even from organized labor, for all the old reasons of Americans’ “excess of individualism,” the nation’s “shortsighted brand of liberal capitalism,” and the lack of a “constituency with an interest in the long term, or in visionary economic planning.” Participation in such an undertaking would be, under ideal circumstances, a natural calling for a reinvigorated labor movement.124

  The question of how labor organizes has itself been the focus in recent years of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation which has languished in Congress. Labor wants a “card check” system that will allow workers to simply sign a card stating they want union representation, at which point an employer would have to recognize and bargain with the union that a majority of the workers have chosen. It would replace the existing arrangement, often abused by management, in which an NLRB election to certify a union is held once 30 percent of workers sign cards expressing a desire for a union’s representation. Such elections are scheduled at the employer’s discretion, allowing opportunity for management to propagandize against unionization and harass or even fire labor organizers. While such firings are illegal, employers know only too well that the process by which unfairly terminated workers must seek reinstatement under the National Labor Relations Act is nearly hopeless; indeed, firms have mastered a bag of tricks they can deploy to stall and hinder union representation elections, some of which become drawn out as long as ten or fifteen years. And as in the conservatives’ historic use of the argument for the greater “freedom” of the open shop, employers’ advocates take refuge behind the notion that employees’ rights will be voided by the card check process since it would deny them the opportunity to vote their conscience freely in a secret-ballot election.125

  Responding to an early 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics report that indicated union members tend to earn more than nonunionized workers, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that enacting EFCA would have the salutary effect of enabling “more American workers to access the benefits of union membership,” although—in comments suggestive of a deeply entrenched opposition—J. Justin Wilson, managing director of the business-supported Center for Union Facts, quickly dismissed the idea that unionized employees are better paid, terming membership in unions “an outdated concept for most working Americans” and “a relic of Depression-era labor-management relations.”126

  It is doubtful many people would describe themselves as optimistic about the present state of organized labor. The labor movement described in this book, a cause that “uniquely embodied a vision, a generosity of spirit, and the political courage to rescue society from selfishness, exploitation, and organized violence,”127 now belongs to history, and for every expression of faith in the universal and timeless nature of worker solidarity there stands an illustration of its opposite: the eternalness of labor exploitation and abuse. Hispanic women suffer conditions and indignities in textile sweatshops in Los Angeles today that would be entirely recognizable to the Yiddish-speaking garment workers of the Lower East Side in 1909, or even to the New England mill hands who entrusted their ardor and youth to the Lowell Miracle. Gone missing is the communal purpose that animated America in the mid-twentieth century, leading workers into unions and creating fundamental trust in government sufficient to bring about not only the benefits of the New Deal but the advances of the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other programs.128

  PADLOCKED FACTORY GATES have become a familiar image in news or magazine stories about the decline of industrial America. Equally poignant is a spectacle less often glimpsed by the public—the physical dismantling of the machinery that once powered U.S. industry—as giant metal stamp presses, pieces of assembly lines, and other equipment are sold to manufacturers in Mexico, India, Brazil, the hardware of America’s great industrial age following where America’s jobs already have gone. Writer Paul Clemens, who witnessed the disassembling of two-story-tall stamping presses at the venerable ThyssenKrupp Budd auto parts factory in Detroit in 2007, described the knot of attending Mexican and German engineers watching closely as the presses were prepared for removal to Mexico, where a Spanish auto supplier would install the machines. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” Clemens quoted an American electrician involved in the handoff.129

  Not every machine or every factory gets a second life. Many once-valued pieces of industrial machinery are sold for scrap or lie abandoned, orange with rust, in the weeds behind long-shuttered factories; some old nineteenth-century buildings, however, especially the sturdy redbrick textile mills of New England, have been renovated for use as outlet stores or condominiums. To walk today among these structures in Lawrence, Lowell, and Fall River is to imagine how imposing they must have seemed in their heyday, tens of thousands of workers entering their portals each dawn, work bells summ
oning an entire town to labor. That ordinary workingmen and -women ever organized to defy these behemoths and the captains of fortune who ran them seems remarkable, yet we know that they did.

  We know also that they went on to affirm a civil war for emancipation and free labor, formed national unions and federations, stayed corporate supremacy and abuse, and helped order the modern workplace. It was they who gave workers a voice on issues of war and economic justice, resisted the internal suppression of political freedom and free speech, inspired crusades for suffrage, equal rights, and education, and demanded the exercise of good government. Their words—rung in public squares, conventions, and union halls—spread from New England and New York to Appalachia, Detroit, to the timber stands of the Pacific Northwest and into the barrios of the Imperial Valley.

  Of that bygone era’s leading protagonists many left their life’s battle unfinished. Eugene Debs expired in 1926, his body frail and worn down by years of incarceration; Mother Jones lived a full century before finding her rest in a miners’ cemetery in rural Illinois; Joseph Ettor came into a small inheritance and moved to California to operate a wine business. John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn died in Russia; Flynn’s great love, Carlo Tresca, was assassinated on a New York street corner in 1943, his enemies so numerous even the hundred police detectives assigned to the case failed to find anyone to indict. John L. Lewis lived until 1969, long enough to see the UMW he’d nurtured for four decades slip into a bitter power struggle between two of his own former lieutenants, one of whom would soon order the murder of the other; Jimmy Hoffa vanished in 1975, the suspected victim of a Mafia hit. Visitors still come to Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery to honor the Haymarket martyrs; the immortal Joe Hill lives on in song; while the names Robert F. Wagner, George Meany, and Walter Reuther adorn major national labor archives.

  Of course the real monument to what these individuals and millions of others achieved is not stored in a library or carved on a plaque. It’s the freedoms and protections we take for granted—reasonable hours, on-the-job safety, benefits, and the bedrock notion that employees have the right to bargain for the value of their labor; it’s also the knowledge that such rights were not handed down by anyone or distributed ready-made, but were organized around, demanded, and won by workers themselves. UNION FOR POWER—POWER TO BLESS HUMANITY read the banner that mill worker Sarah Bagley presented to the workingmen of New England nearly two centuries ago. That fabled relic, one hopes, was never discarded but is still with us somewhere in America; surely its author would be curious to know if its message had endured, and if the words she so carefully chose remain immutable.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the guidance of my friend and literary agent Scott Moyers of the Wylie Agency, who helped shape the book’s premise and introduced me to Gerry Howard, an executive editor at Doubleday. Gerry has a deserved reputation as one of the top publishers in the business and I was pleased when he acquired the project. He has been a superb muse and collaborator.

  Labor scholars Les Leopold, Seth Rockman, and especially Laura Wolf-Powers have been generous with their time. I am grateful to a number of historians whose work informs these pages, including Melvyn Dubofsky, Foster Rhea Dulles, Eric Foner, Philip S. Foner, Steven Fraser, Thomas Geoghegan, Elliott J. Gorn, Richard A. Greenwald, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Christine Stansell. The Tamiment Labor Archives at New York University were invaluable. Brian Berger, historian of all things Brooklyn, shared research ideas. In Providence, friends Angel Dean and Jonathan Thomas kindly provided a place to stay during my New England research (thank you for waiting until morning to mention the guest room is haunted).

  I am indebted to Ted Widmer of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, who welcomed me to the center’s resident fellowship program, where I spent a productive and enjoyable month writing labor history. Thanks also to Stephanie Steiker, Marisa Bowe, and my wife Lianne Smith for their concern and support, and to the highly professional staff at Doubleday, including editorial assistant Hannah Wood, production editor Nora Reichard, book designer Pei Loi Koay, and cover designer Emily Mahon.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 New York Times, Jan. 6–7, 1874.

  2 David T. Burbank, Reign of Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), p. 6.

  3 Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808–1942 (Niwat: University of Colorado Press, 1991), p. 117.

  4 New York Times, Jan. 14, 1874.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 New York Tribune, Jan. 31, 1874, and New York Times, Jan. 31, 1874.

  8 New York Times, Jan. 31, 1874.

  9 Ibid.

  10 The phrase “an irrepressible conflict” as an allusion to the coming civil war originated with Senator William Seward (later Lincoln’s secretary of state), and has often been invoked to describe the struggle between capital and organized labor. For one example see Literary Digest, Nov. 8, 1919.

  11 New York Tribune, Jan. 14, 1874.

  12 Gompers called Schwab’s establishment “the post office and information center for the underground of revolution.” See Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor, p. 121.

  13 A similar point is made in Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 18.

  14 Lichtenstein, State of the Union, pp. 106–7.

  15 Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (New York: New Press, 2004; originally published 1991), p. 6.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE OPPRESSING HAND OF AVARICE

  1 Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women, 1840–1845 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998; originally published 1977), pp. 66–73; Sarah Bagley, “Tales of Factory Life, No 1, and No 2,” in The Lowell Offering, ed. Benita Eisler, vol. 1, 1841.

  2 Lucy Larcom, “Among Lowell Mill Girls: A Reminiscence,” Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1881.

  3 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (Kailua, Hawaii: Press Pacifica, 1976; originally published 1898), p. 59.

  4 Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1949), p. 190.

  5 Eisler, Lowell Offering, pp. 63–65; Sarah Bagley, “Pleasures of Factory Life,” in The Lowell Offering, vol. 1, 1840.

  6 Jefferson as quoted in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 124–25.

  7 Doron S. Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 120.

  8 Stephen Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 73.

  9 Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 133; Jefferson to William Bingham, Sept. 25, 1789, quoted in Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets, p. 124.

  10 Although such restrictions were often ignored (by 1774 there were forty-three hat makers in Philadelphia alone).

  11 Jefferson letter to Benjamin Austin, Jan. 19, 1816, quoted in Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 139.

  12 Tench Coxe, An Address to an Assembly of the Friends of American Manufactures (Philadelphia: R. Aitkin & Son, 1787), p. 4.

  13 Tench Coxe, A View of the United States of America (Philadelphia: William Hall, 1794), p. 42.

  14 Ibid., p. 53.

  15 Ibid., p. 42; see also Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets, p. 158.

  16 A speech Coxe gave in June 1787 at the home of Benjamin Franklin, titled “An Enquiry into the Principle on Which a Commercial System for the United States of America Shall Be Founded,” was published and dedicated to members of the Constitutional Convention. See Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 152.

  17 Michael Folsom and Steven Lubar, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Deb
ates over Industrialization in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 90.

  18 British authorities were also cautious about allowing those who had worked in England’s cotton mills to immigrate to America. Samuel Slater, who opened one of America’s first mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1789, had dressed as a farmer in order to avoid suspicion when departing his native land. See Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber, p. 77.

  19 Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 29–30.

  20 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, pp. 5–6.

  21 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 208–9.

  22 On April 11, 1837, Boott tumbled from his carriage, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage at age forty-six.

  23 Lowell Courier, Jan. 27, 1842.

  24 Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and the Family: Female Operatives in the Lowell Mills, 1830–1860,” Feminist Studies, vol. 3, nos. 1–2 (Autumn 1975).

  25 Nancy Zaroulis, “Daughters of Freemen: The Female Operatives and the Beginning of the Labor Movement,” in Cotton Was King: History of Lowell, Massachusetts, ed. Arthur L. Eno Jr. (Lowell, Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 1976), p. 111.

  26 Factory owner Zachary Allen quoted in Michael Folsom and Steven Lubar, Philosophy of Manufactures, p. xxii.

  27 Alexander Hamilton, Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Philadelphia: William Brown, Printer, 1827; originally published 1797), p. 21.