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Labor’s popularity offers opportunities for 2024
Tag Archives: Labor History
Labor Day 2021: Crossroads for Workers
Labor Day 2021 could mark a crossroads in the future fortunes of America’s working families. Will the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer” trend continue? Will working people continue to be at the mercy of long hours, manipulative managers and unsafe and unhealthy conditions continue?
Unless working people begin to understand we live in a society of classes, the corporate / managerial / financial class versus the working class, American workers are doomed to a future of second class status. Most tragically their children and grandchildren are similarly fated. The United States is no longer a society where a person through hard work and perseverance can expect to move into a high economic status. Horatio Alger is no more.
Only during the relatively brief three decades (1950 to 1980) have American workers achieved a degree of economic equality. The post-World War II era was a time of promise for working families, when the sons and daughters of industrial workers could go to college or when the family could own a ranch home in the suburbs or when they could buy a cottage “up north.” It was a time of progressive taxation when those at the top faced a 90% income tax rate.
How did that come about? Because workers in the 1930s realized that only through solidarity could they improve their status in life.
Whether it was due to the privations of the Great Depression or the realization that workers were being terribly exploited, workers understood that only by rising up and joining together to speak in one-voice could they bring about change. During the early 1930s, even when jobs were scarce, workers walked out on their jobs and struck industrial plant after industrial plant. There were numerous disruptions of all types: unemployed worker marches in Milwaukee in 1933, World War I veterans in the great “bonus marches” and plant walkouts.
The early 1930s were time of disruption and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a politician with a wealthy patrician upbringing and one who had no particular left-wing ideology) realized that to keep peace within the nation actions had to be taken to help America’s working families rise from the poverty in which they lived. In 1935 he signed into law two historic laws, the Social Security Act which not only provided assistance for the elderly but created a safety net for many of America’s poor and the National Labor Relations Act that established the right of collective bargaining for private sector workers.
The NLRA may have been the law that helped most directly to bring the nation out of the Depression since it established the right to form unions, and as workers joined unions and more and more went on strike, wage levels soon began to bring most prosperity to workers.
FDR and the Democrats in Congress in 1935 didn’t pass the NLRA (named the Wagner Act after its chief sponsor Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY)) out of any burning sympathy for the working class. Congress passed the law to bring an end to the disruptions (the strikes and demonstrations) that were occurring in the nation. In short, they passed these laws to end such mass actions and, some believe, to assure the survival of the capitalistic system. So massive were the strikes that many feared the nation may turn to accept communism.
Section 1 of the Wagner Act stated the purpose of the law was to remedy the situations that “lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest, which have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce.”
The Wagner Act would not have been passed without the selfless sacrifice of millions of American workers who banded together to demand equality.
By 1954, 34% of American workers were union members and the typical worker had gained a degree of equity. In the 1980s, when some 20% of workers were union, the typical CEO’s pay was only 42 times that of the production worker. Today, when less than 10% of American workers are in unions, the CEO is now earning 280 times more than the worker in his/her shops.
Now, on Labor Day 2021, the question is whether American workers can begin to understand that their best bet to earn family-supporting wages on jobs that are both safe and healthy is to realize their class status. Only then will workers mobilize and act in solidarity to take the mass actions that bring about change.
It won’t be easy: the worker protections built into the Wagner Act not only have been eroded by the Congress and the Courts through the years but the nature of the workplace has changed. The factory environment that nurtured the togetherness of the 1930s is largely gone; today’s workers often work remotely or are being sold on the idea of being “independent,” as Uber and Lyft seeks to do. This makes organizing difficult. In addition, since President Reagan’s firing of PATCO Strikers 40 years ago, managements have become more skilled in beating back organizing efforts.
There’s promise, however, in that unions are more popular with the public with a recent Gallup Poll showing that 64% of Americans view unions as a “positive.” Working people have their fate in their own hands. Only by working together in solidarity can equity occur. Ken Germanson, Sept. 6, 2021
Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall! Where was Flint?
Perhaps the most memorable phrase in President Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address was this:
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall . . . “
As eloquent as this was, another landmark event was sadly missing. How about Flint, Michigan, as a symbol of the great sitdown strikes in the cold winter of 1936-37 that became the rallying cry for workers to organize into unions?
It was hard not to be thrilled by the imagery expressed by references to Seneca Falls, where the women’s suffrage movement started, to Selma, where the civil rights movement began to take hold and to Stonewall, long a symbol of the battle for gay rights. Each one of these symbolized how ordinary people were able to mobilize and move the nation’s reluctant leaders to embrace the right of women to vote, the lifting of many of the burdens that were carried by minorities and finally recognizing that our gay brothers and sisters have rights, too.
The worker movement of the period definitely belongs in this list as one of the four great mass movements of ordinary people that created change in U.S history. It took thousands of demonstrations, rallies, speeches, essays and letters to the editor to bring about women’s suffrage and 72 years from the time of the Seneca Falls, NY, meeting in 1848 to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It took nearly 45 years from the “Bloody Sunday” march over the bridge at Selma in 1965 to the election of the first African-American President; and it took more than 40 years from the police bashing of gays in 1969 at the Stonewall Tavern in New York City for the Armed Services to recognize gay rights.
The fight for workers to win the right to join unions took about 70 years from the great railroad strikes of the 1870s followed by other tragic events like the Homestead Strike, the Pullman Strike and the Bay View Massacre. The rights came with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 that finally conferred the right to collective bargaining upon working people. The law was fought bitterly by corporate America and it was only when workers began taking control of their own destiny in the sitdown at the General Motors plant in Flint that real change for working people occurred. The workers were vilified by most in the nation’s press, but their courage to stand up became a rallying cry for workers everywhere; sitdowns sprang up throughout 1937, adding starch to working people, and eventually unions grew and thrived.
Many economists believe that the power of the labor unions during that period helped more than any other single factor to create the middle-class.
How could President Obama have not included a reference to workers and to labor unions? There was nothing in the speech to indicate any awareness of the important of labor to creating the a decent standard of living for ordinary Americans.
Was it an oversight or a desire to avoid the topic that caused to President to fail to include the great unionizing efforts of the 1930s, 40s and 50s or to mention the role of labor in the 21st Century? Either way, it was a critical omission, and one that signifies that he may have deserted the labor movement, even though the nation’s unions never deserted him during the last four years. — Ken Germanson, Jan. 22, 2013.
A Liberal’s Lament: Preaching to the Choir!
Why is it that I have the impression that liberals are losing the battles? Yet, I wonder: How can that be when you analyze the polls about various issues and find the public as a rule favoring individually virtually every major progressive piece of legislation?
Take the idea of taxing the wealthy and the corporations. It’s no contest: the public – even a plurality of Republicans – loves the idea. And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: the majority says get us out of there. Global warming: it’s not only 95% of scientists who see it as a real human problem, but so does a majority of ordinary citizens.
Yet, the politicians who favor these ideas are scared stiff of pushing them through to law, afraid they’ll alienate some hidden power (read Tea Party and similar nuts) out there that will short circuit their careers.
A carload of us drove out to spend seven hours Saturday, Sept. 17, at Madison’s Fighting BobFest 10th Anniversary program, hearing from a host of progressive (or is it liberal?) speakers wax eloquent on issues close to all of our “bleeding heart” sentiments. To a person we wondered if – as exhilarating as the day was – whether we wasted a day that was only more preaching to the choir.
Some of the finest speakers of the liberal community brought down the house with successive applause, standing ovations and cheers and whistles. The crowd – which filled at least two-thirds of the house (seating capacity is 10,231) – seemed to erupt in applause almost constantly.
After introduction by Ed Garvey, the Madison attorney and two-time statewide candidate, the program began immediately with Mike McCabe, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, who called the growing amounts of money going into political campaigns “a crime,” and noting that the historic development of Wisconsin’s progressive legislation of 1911 (workers compensation, the vocational school system and much more) grew out of earlier legislation that banned corporate money in political campaigns. Now, with recent Supreme Court rulings that have brought corporate money into campaigns, he said the “first problem facing the nation is money in politics.”
Tony Schultz, a Farmer’s Union member from Athens,Wisconsin, showed that farmers can be eloquent progressives, as well. Retired Congressman Dave Obey offered an eloquent and philosophical commentary on the social contract that Americans of all political persuasions had accepted as standard American behavior until the growth of the uncaring reactionary right after the Reagan years.
Senator Bernie Sanders, the only Independent in the Senate (and a socialist), offered a full menu of reforms which – as they were citied – drew raucous applause and often standing ovations. Along with former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, Sen. Sanders stressed the need for strong unions. “Without collective bargaining, you’re reduced to collective begging,” Sanders said, while Hightower called the dramatic landing on the Hudson River in 2010 a “union-made miracle on the Hudson,” since all of the actors in that heroic rescue were union members from Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger himself and the flight attendants to the rescuing firefighters and EMTs.
What Sanders also said made the most impression on me as we pondered about the futility of “speaking to the choir” only. After running down the progressive agenda, which included single-payer health insurance, stronger labor unions, taxing of the wealthy, fairer foreign trade policies, and removing our troops from current wars, he said pointedly, “Not one point that I mentioned is not what the overwhelming majority of Americans want.”
And he was right, if you are to believe many recent polls. Now more than 80% of Americans agree that spending to build bridges, roads and schools is important; 71% said that any budget deficit plan should include both spending cuts and more taxes, particularly on the rich.
So how do we begin to get this message out to the entire congregation of American voters – and not merely keep the secret within the choir loft. For one thing, we need to figure out a way to speak out over the constant falsehoods spouted by Fox News and talk radio; we need to get the local media more aware of these issues, a difficult task since the news hole is tightening up.
Somehow, we have to make an issue of the fact that this gathering in Madison of perhaps 7,000 persons listening to top national speakers was worth covering. (To my knowledge there was not a word about Fighting BobFest in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel nor on the local television stations.) It’s a fact that our message is getting lost in the din of a mainstream media that seems to find plenty of space for Tea Party meetings that attract even one-tenth or one-hundred as many participants.
Yet, my friends, there is the social media; witness the April Spring in the Mideast where Twitter and Facebook and such helped spur those citizen uprisings; there are the traditional door-to-door, citizen grassroots efforts as well.
Whatever we do, we must recognize that while such feel-good gatherings as Fighting BobFest may be exhilarating they are indeed nothing but choir practice; we need to sing out across the rooftops to the entire congregation.
Ken Germanson, Sept. 19, 2011
‘Fair and Balanced’ My Eye!
Praise must go to Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President David Newby for braving the “Fair and Balanced” segment of Fox News on Thursday, Dec. 17.
Governor Jim Doyle’s signing of the bill to call for the state’s education standards to include labor history and collective bargaining has gathered some national attention; it may indeed be the first law of its type in any state.
Thus, it has become national news and Newby accepted an invitation to appear on the “Fox and Friends” morning show for a brief 4-minute session along with a misinformed opponent of the law, Michael Dean, of a rightwing group called First Freedoms. Newby knew it would be a gamble.
Needless to say, even the promo to the session framed the issue in a one-sided way. It asked, in effect: Do you want your tax dollars going to build propaganda on behalf of labor unions? Hardly an honest question.
The interviewer asked two questions, giving Dean the opportunity to answer first in each one, and in each case he permitted Dean to prattle on with his propaganda line using up minutes far beyond any “fair and balanced” measure would support. Each question misstated the facts, calling the law “a mandate” on schools (which it is not, since it calls for the state standards to included labor history but does not dictate how to teach it). Dean repeatedly called it a mandate, too.
After Dean’s one-sided, and totally fact-challenged tirade ended, Newby was given only 15 seconds to answer. All totalled, Dean had 127 seconds of time, more than twice as much as Newby had with 53 seconds. Such is “Fair and Balanced” as Fox sees it!
Given his limited time, Newby did an excellent job in summarizing the need to provide “balance” (real balance, that is, not the Fox kind) in the teaching about workers and their unions in the schools.
Great job, David! Perhaps there may be some “fair and balanced” listeners who will take time to learn about the issue more completely.
*****
My only personal regret: in awaiting David’s appearance, I had to listen to about 10 minutes of Fox News. Even that was too much torture to bear.
I like to think I look at issues fairly (and truly do want to hear both sides), but Fox is so over the top in misstatements and lies and obvious bias, it’s just too much to handle before breakfast.
Judge for yourself if this interview was “Fair and Balanced,” by clicking here
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