Labor Day 2011

The Lessons of the Past

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers’ blood

The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for

From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud

War has always been the bosses way, sir

The Union forever, defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, all workers unite

With our brothers and our sisters from many far-off lands

There is power in a Union

–Billy Bragg, “There is Power in a Union”

Since it is known in the North Florida city in which I live that I am interested in labor history, the local Central Labor Council invited me to speak at its annual Labor Day breakfast (held actually on the Saturday before Labor Day). (Full disclosure: Until my retirement, I was a delegate for my union, the United Faculty of Florida, to the Council). The idea is for me in my Activist Bob (AB) persona to remind an audience of unionists, community, civil rights, environmental, and gender activists, and other progressive-minded people of what singer Billy Bragg calls “the lessons of the past.” Presumably, edifying stories of labor’s struggles would encourage men and women of good hope in the current fight for human rights, in the workplace and in the community.

The assignment turned out to be more complicated than I initially thought. No less a figure than AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently has warned that “nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future,”[1] but I did hope that lessons drawn from the experience of the CIO–whose history I had chronicled in a book published in 1995[2]–could be helpful for today’s activists. Since most in the audience would be occupied with their plates of sausage, eggs, biscuits, and redeye gravy, I’d have to be concise in the brief time allotted to my remarks. But brevity can be a challenge and so I set about distilling my 400 page book into brief, audience-friendly remarks.

Indeed, I soon discovered that I would need only four words with which to convey the lessons of the CIO experience to today’s beleaguered trade unionists and their allies. They are:

FIGHT

UNITE

CONNECT

VOTE

The CIO experience of the 1930s and 1940s provided ample evidence of the power of these four verbs. Thus, the CIO was a fighting organization: The Flint sit-downers, John L. Lewis’s coal miners, World War II wildcatters; the postwar auto and steel workers who struck to achieve pension and health care benefits; black and white workers combining to achieve racial equity in the packinghouses of Chicago, Omaha, and Fort Worth–all attested to centrality of struggle in labor’s story. The words of the Almanac Singers’ “Talking Union” came to mind:

If you wait for the boss to raise your pay

You’ll be awaitin’ till judgment day

The CIO also united workers across the lines of race, ethnicity, and job categories. It mobilized first-and-second generation immigrants; Appalachian whites and African Americans; assemblyline workers and skilled tradesmen; and, at least on occasion, men and women. It reached out to the unskilled and to the marginalized. The Packinghouse Workers’ slogan from the 1930s captured this theme: Negro and White/ Unite and Fight

But the CIO didn’t do it alone. It had to connect with allies in the community. Protestant social gospelers; Catholic worker advocates; African American storefront preachers; the NAACP and other civil rights organizations; liberal and radical academics, publicists, and agitators; Socialists; Communists; Wobblies.

Voting was also critical. The workers’ cause could not be confined to the picket line and the bargaining table. In 1936, the John L. Lewis mobilized the CIO’s human and financial resources in behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s re-election. And in 1943 the CIO created the first Political Action Committee. CIO leaders, notably Clothing Workers’ head Sidney Hillman, recognized that what you won on the picket line could be lost in the legislative chambers.

So, four verbs: Fight, Unite, Connect, Vote. Clearly, the CIO experience contained useful lessons for today’s activists. True, today’s workers face challenges very different from those confronting their grandfathers and grandmothers seventy years ago but the idea that there can be no progress without struggle remains. Like their earlier counterparts, today’s workers have to combat divisiveness. Problems involving immigration, outsourcing, and public-vs-private employment surely pose tests as serious as those involving race, ethnicity, and ideology did seventy-five years. Today, as perhaps even more than in the 1930s, labor needs allies–communities of faith, youthful activists, civic and gender rights advocates. And, while political action rarely achieved unambiguous victories, the ballot box remains critical to labor’s hopes. “Whether you’re a union protester . . . or Wisconsin’s union-busting Governor Scott Walker,” writer David Von Drehle reminds us, just as in the New Deal era, “your cause ultimately depends on your ability to win the next election.”[3] Thus, in my own mind at least, I had successfully descended from the academic ivory tower and, in my small way, enriched public discourse and drawn upon my historical knowledge to help my audience find the courage to continue the struggle.

But all the while I was mentally standing at the podium, delivering these edifying observations, I kept sensing that someone–we’ll call him Historian Bob (HB)–was looking over my shoulder, frowning and demurring. A sort of mental colloquy began to emerge between Activist Bob and Historian Bob, between AB and HB, with HB having all the good lines.

****

HB (mincing no words): Your talk is simplistic and evasive.

AB: Well, I am addressing a general audience, folks little interested in the finer points of labor historiography.

HB: Even so, what you have here is a cartoon version of CIO history, a kind of feel-good myth. For example, you celebrate the fighting militancy of the CIO. In fact, worker support for assertive industrial unionism was inconsistent, sporadic, and often simply non-existent. The Flint sit-downers, whom you celebrate, constituted a small proportion of the 40,000 or so auto workers employed in that Michigan auto center. You point to World War II wildcat strikers but ignore the fact that some of the largest job actions during the war were directed against the employment or upgrading of African American workers. Besides, isn’t it a fact that even those wartime strikes involving working conditions were conducted as much against union leaders, who had made a pledge to forgo the strike weapon for the duration of the war, as against employers?

AB: I admit that there were ambiguities in the CIO experience but you can’t deny that industrial unionism fostered common purpose and challenged the ethnic and racial divisions that had afflicted the old American Federation of Labor (AFL) from which it rebelled.

HB: Well, yes and no. CIO contracts often froze blacks (and women) into dead-end jobs, providing de facto union sanction to discriminatory hiring and compensation practices. Moreover, if it’s unity that’s so important, what about the CIO’s break away from the AFL and its fostering of conflict, often of a violent and acrimonious kind, within the labor movement? You speak glibly of the positive role that “Socialists; Communists; Wobblies” played in building the CIO but isn’t it a fact that these anti-capitalist radicals disagreed sharply among themselves and that the purge of Communists in 1949-50,engineered by liberals and social democrats, was one of the critical episodes in the organization’s history and remains a source of disputation?

AB: Granted, I skipped over some of the nuances. But how about the CIO’s political contributions? Surely the creation of CIO-PAC and its work in behalf of liberal candidates and a de facto social democratic vision of the American political economy must impress even an annoying skeptic such as you.

HB: I’m glad you mentioned politics. As you know (but neglected to tell your audience), not long after Lewis’s massive support for Roosevelt in 1936 he broke with FDR and struck out on an independent political course, warning that enmeshment in a bureaucratic warfare state would fatally compromise the labor movement. Yes, CIO-PAC was an innovation but it was part of a process by which CIO leaders spurned efforts to create a genuine labor party and entered into what Mike Davis has called “the barren marriage” of organized labor and the Democratic party.[4] The line from the creation of CIO-PAC to the failure to pass single-payer health care legislation and abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act by a Democratic Congress seems pretty clear.

AB: So what are you saying? There are no useful “lessons of the past,” linking labor’s struggles with contemporary concerns?

HB: Actually, my critique of your jejune outline is even more basic. In effect, you give aid and comfort to the enemy. Think of it: Is there anything in your four-verb formulation–Fight; Unite; Connect; Vote–that the Right would not embrace? Tea Party activists are spoiling for a fight. It is the Right that has reached out successfully, uniting evangelicals, corporate elites, dissatisfied blue collar whites, and libertarians. As for voting, just look at the results of the 2010 elections.

AB: (chagrined, but defiant): Okay, HB, you have made some perversely provocative debater’s points. But in fact you’re a hypocrite. Despite your put-down of CIO-PAC and its progeny, I know for a fact that you, HB, voted for Obama (and surely will do so again in 2012); that you have been an active member of your union; that you have worked with the men and women of the North Central Florida Central Labor Council to forge alliances with progressive allies in the community. In the real world, you don’t let esoteric points of historical disputation impede your willingness to work in and with the labor movement in behalf of progressive social change. Yet you would deny to these same activists and labor folks access to the inspiration that knowledge of past achievements might provide.

HB: I have to go now. I have a labor history class to teach. (He fades off).

AB (now at the podium at the Carpenters’ Hall, addressing a hundred-and-fifty Gainesville-area unionists and other activists): Four words encapsulate the lessons of labor’s past for today’s progressives. They are. . . .

Robert H. (Bob) Zieger

University of Florida Emeritus

Notes