Hunkered In A Bunker

From a few months back, but fitting for Labor Day: Sam Seder's interview with Rich Yeselson, about this article.

Yeselson highlights the historical memory being lost: of how strong organized labor once was—in numbers and in daring—and how hard labor's opponents needed to work to reverse things. The rise of labor came in the decade after the 1935 passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which itself was a response to increased worker militancy. By 1945

... union membership quadrupled from almost 3.6 million to more than 14.3 million workers. During this period, American labor dominated the daily life of much of the nation and drew the obsessive concern of politicians and the press. Even some Southern states had union membership percentages in the high teens—statewide numbers that would be among the highest in the nation today but were among the smallest then. In a six-month period in 1937 alone—the year of the great sit-down strike at General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan—the CIO signed up two million workers in a nation with a population of about 130 million.

Organized labor made a no-strike pledge during the war. As the fight ended, wartime production levels decreased, along with workers' hours. An anticipated end to wage and price controls prompted further worry about inflation. The whole situation made Americans, whether in unions or not, fearful of a return to the Depression's economic conditions.

The American labor movement responded to these uncertainties with the greatest strike wave in the history of the United States. It started almost immediately after the war and continued right through 1946. Clerical workers walked out at the citadel of capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange. About 68,000 textile workers struck in the East, while 35,000 oil-refinery workers struck across seven states. In the Northwest, 40,000 lumber workers struck. In the Midwest, it was 70,000 Teamsters. In Oakland, a strike that started at the loading docks of two downtown department stores spread quickly to include 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period. 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period.

At the end of 1945 and into the next year, was the UAW's 225,000 member strike against GM (which Walter Reuther "used as an effort to bring European style co-determination to American labor-management relations"); 350,000 mineworkers struck in spring 1946.

All in all, about 10 percent of the entire American workforce withheld their labor in 1946. There were about 5,000 separate work stoppages involving about 4.6 million workers. ... To imagine this kind of union militancy today is to imagine 14 million workers striking in a single year.

1946 also saw midterm elections: Republicans won, under the slogan "Had enough?" Big majorities in both houses opened the way for them to create new labor laws, with backing from corporations and smaller business, the Federal Reserve Board, and the publishers of most major newspapers. In Congress, Republicans also had perfect allies in Dixiecrats eager to rid the South of unions and to forestall all moves toward civil rights.

Thus the paradox that at the high-water mark of its power and size, the labor movement generated an even more powerful backlash from the nation's power elite, which was augmented by an obsessive determination from the white South to make its region as union-free as possible. Southern elites, led by their nearly unified bloc in both houses of Congress, feared an ongoing alliance between labor and the first signs of a sustained African-American civil-rights movement, fueled by the return from the war of African-American soldiers newly emboldened to seek justice. The CIO, observing the same phenomenon, hopefully launched "Operation Dixie" in 1946, a well-funded effort to organize throughout 12 Southern states. Southern elites ruthlessly race-baited, red-baited, and intimidated poor black and white workers. Operation Dixie failed dismally, only making the Southern bloc more determined to stop unions in the region. Ira Katznelson, the great historian and political scientist, has called this implacable opposition of the South to African-American rights and the labor movement "the Southern cage."

Passage of Taft-Hartley would shift the balance in numerous ways. The overall insidious effect, Yeselson finds, was that

... Taft-Hartley bureaucratized labor unions. Unions required more and more lawyers—and more and more union stewards adept at labor law—to untangle the welter of laws, board decisions, judicial decisions, and contractual obligations that now ensnared the modern labor organization. This pervasive legalistic framework made the labor titans increasingly cautious, and it drained the energy and creativity out of the members and their rank-and-file leadership—the idea was to wait for the lawyers to tell them what would fly before the NLRB or the courts.... Taft-Hartley unmistakably signaled that anti-union political, economic, and cultural elites could contain both the leaders and their ranks. The bill shaved a risk-taking edge off labor that, perhaps, it didn’t realize it needed until subsequent moments of institutional crisis, like Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.

By the 1960s, says Yeselson, Taft-Hartley had been so effective that "even with its deep penetration in the workforce at the time, even at the apex of LBJ’s enormous Democratic congressional majority, labor could not repeal a comma of it."

"Fortress unionism" is Yeselson's concept of where private sector unions need to focus their energies now: defending regions and industries that remain unionized; strengthening locals and enhancing member education and activism; building coalitions with progressive groups; investing in "alt-labor organizations."

In the end, it's up to workers.

...union growth occurs when working-class activism overwhelms the quotidian strictures of civil society, forcing political and economic elites to accept unionization as the price of civil peace. During episodes of massive union growth, the workers don’t confine themselves to the careful strategies of union staff—they disregard them, and force the union to play catch up....

Yeselson notes the successful tactics Justice for Janitors used in a number of cities: going over the heads of cleaning subcontractors by targeting the real employers, commercial real estate owners.

There's another good Majority Report segment: Sarah Jaffe at the end of last year, as New York fast food workers held their first walkouts. It's a valuable history, with Jaffe suggesting the issues of low-wage adult workers are similar to those of earlier assembly line workers, prior to being organized and forcing those jobs to pay living, ultimately middle-class, wages. In this instance, housing activists saw so many of the working poor trying to subsist on depressed wages paid by local franchisees of powerful national companies.

Robert Kuttner has a good summary of these issues and possible strategies, in his rundown of recent actions around the country.

Kuttner's aticle is among Digby's list for reading, and taking encouragement.