Workers rallied around health and safety issues on an unprecedented scale. In the late 1960s, the United Mine Workers backed the Black Lung Association’s campaign for compensation for black lung disease, caused by breathing coal dust. UMW members in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia staged mass strikes for compensation in February 1969. Late that year Congress passed the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which set up a compensation program and set new mine safety standards—mining deaths from accidents and explosions dropped by half over the next decade. The black lung campaign inspired others: the Carolina Brown Lung Association worked to get compensation for byssinosis (from cotton dust);the White Lung Association for compensation for asbestosis (asbestos was widely used in insulation).
In 1970, Congress established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, authorized to set workplace safety and health standards and monitor compliance. OSHA was not up to the task—in its first sixteen years OSHA issued only eighteen health and safety regulations, and even at its most active could inspect less than 2 percent of U.S. workplaces in any given year. Unionists joined health professionals and scientists in a network of committees, councils, and coalitions on occupational safety and health. These “COSH” groups developed local and state standards on workplace safety and health and provided advice and training to shop stewards and other local union officers. Strikes over health and safety issues actually doubled in the first four years after OSHA’s authorization.
Some unions made other allies in the struggle against toxic workplaces. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers won a 1973 strike against Shell Oil after environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Defense Fund and community organizations like the National Tenants Association and NWRO boycotted Shell products. The next year OCAW local officer Karen Silkwood began documenting radiation hazards at the Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma City. After she was killed while driving to meet a union staffer and a New York Times reporter, OCAW organized a network of environmentalists and Native Americans into the Sunbelt Alliance, which targeted the nuclear industry in the late 1970s (and raised money for Silkwood’s three orphaned children).
Unionism expanded dramatically in the public sector. By 1972, more than half of public employees belonged to unions—up from about one in ten in the early 1960s. The American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) became some of the largest unions in the land. Professional organizations like the National Education Association and American Nurses Association added collective bargaining to their services, though they did not formally affiliate with the labor movement.
Though strikes by public employees were almost always against the law, they broke out repeatedly anyway—among hospital workers, teachers, office clerks, social workers, fire fighters, police, and others. Each victory encouraged other groups to take their grievances to the streets. Memphis sanitation workers won their 1968 strike when the city finally recognized their AFSCME local after King’s murder. Within months black garbage collectors in St. Petersburg and Atlanta launched AFSCME strikes and won with support from the SCLC and the strikers’ communities.
The first national walkout by federal employees began on March 18, 1970, when postal workers in New York City staged a wildcat strike for higher pay. It quickly spread to Boston, Pittsburgh, Akron, Houston, and other cities. Within days the strikers numbered 150,000, despite federal injunctions. On March 23, President Nixon sent troops and National Guardsmen to move the mails in New York, and union officers across the country were hauled into court. The strike ended two days later, when the government agreed to negotiate; postal workers got substantial raises, and strikers got amnesty.
The postal walkout came at the peak of a strike wave that extended from 1968 into 1977. Strikes numbered over 5,000 per year and involved an average of 2.5 million workers, with more than 3 million out in both 1970 and 1971. The trend penetrated places where walkouts had been rare or unknown, and not only in the public sector. In 1969, singers, musicians, and dancers struck New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company. Book publishers saw their first strike since the 1930s when Harper & Row office employees walked out in 1974. San Francisco Chinatown garment workers broke another long truce, striking the Jung Sai company in 1975. Higher pay was the most common strike demand, as military spending fueled inflation in living costs. But many strikes concerned issues of power, like union recognition and management prerogatives on the shop floor.
Women’s fights for recognition could be especially bitter. In Detroit, clerical workers struck Fruehauf Trailer for six months in 1969–70; operatives at the Oneita Knitting Mills in rural South Carolina stayed out for six months in 1973. Some 4,000 Chicana garment workers in El Paso, Texas, struck Farah Manufacturing from May 1972 into March 1974. They won with the help of a Farah boycott backed by the AFL-CIO, a national network of community and campus activists, and unions as far away as Sweden and Hong Kong.
The most famous battle over managerial prerogatives was the March 1972 strike by UAW Local 1112 at the General Motors complex in Lordstown, Ohio. Virtually all of the strikers were in their late teens or twenties, many had college experience, and a good portion had served in Vietnam. They targeted the latest trend in industrial management: paramilitary shop discipline to enforce unprecedented production quotas. Though the strike lasted just three weeks and ended in a draw, it made national headlines as a youth revolt against dehumanizing work and struck a deeply responsive chord among the mostly young workers on the front lines of automated speedup.
Local 1112 president Gary Bryner said of the strikers, “They just want to be treated with dignity. That’s not asking a hell of a lot.” To the extent that dignity meant simple justice as well as general respect, the same could be said of all working people involved in insurgencies on the job and elsewhere in the sixties. The demands for dignity from so many fronts added up to a veritable revolution.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
In October 1974, a special issue of Business Week lamented the sense of entitlement that drove social unrest. The editorial declared, “Some people will obviously have to do with less. . . . Yet it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.” To get its way, corporate America had launched a collective assault on what one task force called the “excess of democracy.”
A chorus of business-friendly “experts” on public policy declared that the federal War on Poverty had at last been won. In fact, it had scarcely made a dent. The proportion of families living below the official poverty line dropped from about 11 percent in 1967 to 10 percent in 1973, but 23 million Americans still lived in poverty, including 10 percent of whites, 22 percent of Latinos, and 33 percent of blacks. President Nixon nevertheless decided in 1973 to shut down the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the many community projects it had supported lost their funding.
The federal cuts had especially harsh consequences in cities, where business leaders instigated reductions in public services. In New York City investment bankers staged a coup by refusing to underwrite municipal bonds unless they could dictate the city’s budget. A 1975 law drafted by businessmen transferred budgetary power from elected officials to an Emergency Financial Control Board authorized to remove officials who defied its policies. By the time the board disbanded in 1978, the City had laid off 25,000 public workers and gutted spending on schools, hospitals, sanitation, mass transit, libraries, parks, and recreation.
Reduced services followed tax cuts in cities and states around the country. The cuts were often engineered by business interests. In the late 1970s, businessmen from California to Massachusetts funded groups agitating for lower property taxes, directing their appeals at white homeowners who were all too ready to believe that black and Latino people got too much attention and too much money from the government. When tax cuts were voted in, big investors in busines
s real estate reaped the lion’s share of savings, and the poorest neighborhoods took the largest cuts in public services.
Sixties-style community organizing receded under the new regimes. Urban infrastructures crumbled first and worst in the predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods that had been on the front lines of protest. Keeping a family safe and healthy in these neighborhoods now required so much extra work and worry that most people, especially women, could do little more. The diminished cadre of activists scrambled to create substitutes for defunded programs and services. Old coalitions faded as neighborhoods vied for shrinking resources, and more and more white families fled to the suburbs. Community sympathy for public workers and their unions sharply declined, making it almost impossible for them to resist layoffs, speedups, and eroding wages and benefits.
Workers in the private sector also lost ground. President Nixon tried to control inflation with a wage and price freeze in 1971. The freeze—especially on prices—was widely ignored but corporate pressure on the federal government stepped up. The Business Roundtable, founded in 1972 by the heads of General Motors, U.S. Steel, and other giant corporations, coordinated a national drive to control the legislative process. Corporate political action committees multiplied from 89 in 1974 to nearly 800 by 1978 and poured massive sums into campaign financing as well as lobbying, investing in Republicans and Democrats alike. Such investments paid off: during the 1974–75 recession, the federal government abandoned its usual attempts to stimulate the economy and cut spending. Unemployment soared to levels unseen since the end of the Depression—8.5 percent nationally and more than five times higher among young black and Latino workers. Strike activity diminished until the economy recovered in 1976.
Business’s political offensive targeted a labor movement racked by internal divisions since the advent of the sixties. The AFL-CIO Executive Council refused to endorse the 1963 March on Washington. Support for integration cost the Mississippi AFL-CIO a third of its membership between 1960 and 1966. The United Farm Workers faced persistent attacks from the Teamsters, who continued their longtime practice of signing sweetheart contracts with growers trying to avoid more militant unions. Some 200 black and Puerto Rican labor leaders denounced New York City’s United Federation of Teachers for its fall 1968 strike against community control of public schools.
Many thousands of workers brought complaints against unions to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) established by the Civil Rights Act. The building trades repeatedly promised to desegregate but made negligible progress except when the government required integrated work crews on federally funded projects. Industrial unions drew almost as many EEOC complaints as the building trades. Feminists from Steelworkers NOW—a union caucus with loose ties to the National Organization for Women—joined black and Latino men in a lawsuit charging discrimination by the steel industry and the United Steel Workers. A 1974 settlement brokered by the EEOC set new rules for transfer, training, and promotion and obliged the union along with nine major companies to pay $30 million in back wages to groups disadvantaged under the old rules.
Divisions over Vietnam were especially acrimonious. Most AFL-CIO leaders supported the war. The AFL-CIO expanded international operations with the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI), founded in 1968 to aid the corrupt but anticommunist Vietnamese Confederation of Labor. Frustrated by George Meany’s intransigence on the war, Walter Reuther took the UAW out of the Federation in 1968, and joined with the Teamsters in an Alliance for Labor Action. (The Alliance disappeared after Reuther’s death in a 1970 airplane crash.)
The Nixon administration promoted labor attacks on the antiwar movement. The infamous “hardhat rampage” on Wall Street and other prowar union demonstrations in May 1970 were orchestrated by union leaders and White House operatives. (Peter Brennan, then president of the New York City Building Trades Council, later became Nixon’s Labor Secretary.) The AFL-CIO made no presidential endorsement in 1972. Building trades and maritime affiliates led a Labor for Nixon campaign;most industrial and public employee unions joined with the Farm Workers and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in supporting the liberal antiwar Democrat George McGovern.
AFL-CIO foreign policy stuck to its Cold War mission. In Chile, where the CIA helped General Augusto Pinochet overthrow popularly elected leftist Salvador Allende in 1973, the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development ran programs for the truckers whose 1972 strike began the CIA’s destabilization of the economy and for the maritime union leaders who supplied names of labor activists for Army death lists. Such operations remained cloaked in secrecy, more to shield AFL-CIO leaders from critics than to fool anyone in Chile. The AFL-CIO revived European operations by starting the Free Trade Union Institute in 1977 to oppose socialist and communist unions in post–fascist Spain and Portugal.
Union democracy became an increasingly explosive issue during the long wave of strikes. Many strikes were wildcats, contesting the authority of employers and labor officials alike. In April 1970, Teamsters rejected a new contract signed by their president and shut down trucking from Los Angeles to New Hampshire. In May a thousand information operators demanding higher pay and more sick days left New York Telephone switchboards. In June UMW members in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia walked out over hospital and pension benefits and lax enforcement of the Mine Safety Act. In August 1973, UAW staffers with baseball bats escorted members to work during a wildcat strike over safety at Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant in Detroit. After the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, 2,000 members of an ad hoc Arab Workers Caucus in the Detroit UAW staged a one-day strike against union investments in Israeli bonds. In 1974, Mexican and Mexican American Steelworkers defied union leaders to strike for higher pay at Superior Fireplace in Fullerton, California, and against speedup at the Kennecott mines in Bayard, New Mexico. In July 1976, Chicana cannery workers in San Jose, California, struck against a contract negotiated by Teamsters Local 679.
Some wildcats were supported by dissident union groups. For more than six years before the San Jose strike, the Cannery Workers Committee had been pushing for rank-and-file participation and bilingual meetings in Local 679. The Superior Fireplace strike was supported by the Comité Obrero en Defensa de Indocumentados en Lucha and the Centro de Acción Autónomia—Hermandad General de Trabajadores, both Mexican workers’ rights organizations. In other cases, dissident groups grew out of strikes. After the 1970 wildcat strike in the Post Office, an “Outlaw” committee led by Vietnam veterans organized in bulk-mail facilities in and around New York City. While the Amalgamated Clothing Workers concentrated on the Farah boycott to support the El Paso strike, the strikers themselves formed Unidad Para Siempre to build a more militant and democratic local. Teamsters United Rank and File, started in Toledo, Ohio, after the 1970 wildcat strike, did not last, but Teamsters for a Decent Contract, started by long-haul drivers in 1975, became Teamsters for a Democratic Union the next year and began a long campaign to reform the union.
Like the Teamsters, Steelworkers organized against bad contracts. After Steelworker president I.W. Abel signed the no-strike Experimental Negotiations Agreement (ENA) with the major steel companies in 1973, District 31 President Ed Sadlowski and other union officers founded Steel Workers Fight Back to dump the ENA and gain union members the right to ratify contracts. Fight Back concentrated on electing Sadlowski USWA president, but failed to address the issue of affirmative action or reach out to locals outside basic steel (the majority of USWA members). In 1977, Sadlowski lost to Lloyd McBride, Abel’s choice for successor, by about nine percentage points.
One reform caucus took over a national union. Pennsylvania miner and black lung activist Jock Yablonski had challenged the notoriously corrupt Tony Boyle for UMW president. On Boyle’s orders gunmen murdered Yablonski and his wife and daughter on New Year’s Eve, 1969. At the funeral, mourners started Miners for Democracy, which won the 1973 election with a slate headed by retired miner (and Black Lung A
ssociation leader) Arnold Miller, and then disbanded. But the new leadership made little difference in the mines, and wildcats resumed; the biggest took place in the summer of 1976, when 150,000 miners—almost every UMW member east of the Mississippi—walked out to protest injunctions against West Virginia wildcat strikers.
Union rank-and-file movements aimed at more than ousting unsatisfactory leaders. Making unions more democratic would make them more responsive to the interests of the members and better able to defend those interests. As management assaults expanded, workers needed all their collective strength.
The strike wave receded in 1978, broken by continuing high unemployment—still around 6 percent more than three years after the end of the recession. Democrats had strengthened their control of Congress following Nixon’s disgrace and fall in the Watergate scandal in 1974, and Democrat Jimmy Carter had taken the White House from incumbent caretaker Gerald Ford in 1976, but the AFL-CIO’s political agenda ran into a business lobbying campaign that killed labor law reform and a minimum wage increase. Business lobbyists meanwhile won tax reform (rates on personal income reduced across the board, investment credits increased, capital gains rates lowered), cuts in federal grants-in-aid to cities, and airline and trucking deregulation.
UAW president Douglas Fraser charged that business leaders were waging “a one-sided class war” on “working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle-class.” In October 1978, he hosted a conference attended by thirty affiliated and independent unions and seventy-one organizations from the NAACP, the National Farmers Union, and the Women’s Political Caucus, to environmental, tax reform, and consumer protection groups. The following January, this “coalition of coalitions” founded the Progressive Alliance.
The Alliance fizzled; its leaders never agreed on a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, bad investments and worse marketing strategies had nearly ruined Chrysler Corporation by 1979. As the price of a rescue, banks demanded union concessions—mainly a two-year wage freeze. Fraser lobbied for the package and joined Chrysler’s board to help restructure the company. The union workforce fell by nearly half to 57,000, and plants like Dodge Main closed.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 35