Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Meanfor Working Americans By Stephen Franklin.
Guilford Press, 308 pages, $23.95
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit ofLabor's Last Century By Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D.G. Kelley.
Beacon Press, 174 pages, $23.00
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History ofLabor in the United States By Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty.
The New Press, 364 pages, $27.50
Someday, when our own time is a distant memory,scholars will blow the dustoff the 1935 Wagner Act, the enabling legislation for the American laborupheavals of the 1930s and 1940s, and stare blankly at some long-lost languagethat doesn't jibe with the pattern of history. The act promised to correct a hostof imbalances and injustices by "encouraging the practice and procedure ofcollective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedomof association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of theirown choosing." Encouraging? Here it was written into law that the state was not supposed to be hostile, not even neutral, but was supposed to assist workers' efforts to win collective representation. Ancient history indeed.
The last 60 years of labor history seem to have vanished into oblivion aslabor's single long-term success in organizing masses of unskilled workers, theformation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), has been undermined.The victor has written at least the popular version of history, and despite theprodigious outpouring of a generation of "new labor historians," organized laborand workers are nowhere to be found in that narrative. In the face of what UnitedAuto Workers' President Doug Fraser back in 1978 called a "one-sided class war,"not only did the energy and mission of the old CIO vanish but so did the members,their jobs, and the public memory of what happened. While the current sloganrepeated among labor folks is "Unions are back," a skeptic could be forgiven foranswering that yes, labor is back--to square one.
With the percentage of private-sector workers belonging to unions down to a60-year low in the United States, the world of American labor relations hasessentially returned to the pre-New Deal era. It's just like the bad old days.Unions would have to organize more than a million new workers a year to see aconsistent and measurable increase in the percentage of the labor force belongingto unions--an overwhelming proposition. If you advocate for a union where youwork, there's a good chance you'll be fired. Go out on strike and there's adecent chance that you'll be permanently replaced. Should you and your coworkersfeel the need to band together, you probably won't have to face down brassknuckles and goon squads, but you would, at minimum, have to take on a flyingsquadron of lawyers.
The story of this upended peace in industrial relations has received shortshrift in the popular press, but it approaches a veritable genre in thelabor-studies world. Books such as Jonathan Rosenblum's Copper Crucible, Julius Getman's Betrayal of Local 14, and a spate of others on the struggle of Hormel meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota (also covered in a controversial Barbara Kopple film, American Dream), tell remarkably similar tales. Workers were happy, if naive, in the era that followed World War II, working hard, enjoying the fruits of the postwar labor-relations system, saving to send their kids to college, and spending their modest paychecks in a virtuous circle of Keynesian logic. They also did not go to union meetings very often and did not seem to care much about the majority of their sisters and brothers, who toiled outside the narrow confines of the collective-bargaining system and were denied similar benefits and remuneration. When contract negotiations came up at some point in the 1980s or 1990s, management decided that it was time to shatter this blue-collar paradise. Labor, already weak from a series of compromises in the postwar period, went down to defeat. As Rosenblum argues (with only a bit of overstatement), these stories document both the end of the right to strike and the end of solidarity.
And the tales keep coming. In journalist Stephen Franklin'sThree Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for WorkingAmericans, we get a dramatic and detailed examination of events in Decatur, Illinois, an otherwise sleepy midwestern town that became known as "the War Zone." The three strikes--actually two strikes and a lockout--took place at Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone, and the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company, against miserable changes in work rules, the dissolution of industry-wide bargaining, and an assault on wage rates. The corporations "were not fighting to stay alive," explains Franklin, one of the few newspaper writers to take labor issues seriously in an era that seems to have erased working people from the reporter's beat. "They were not racing to keep ahead of ruthless competitors about to overtake them. They were monoliths, and they had prevailed because they had had the power to do so." In contrast to management's well-laid plans, Franklin reports, the workers were simply not prepared for the company attack. "The unions had pinned their futures on their blue-collar identities," he writes. "A big mistake. They had grown careless, lazy, blinded by onetime success, and too weak to bend back the forces pushing them aside. Blue-collar workers had grown too reliant on their time-clock-driven lives. They believed too much in tradition. They counted too much on good faith and loyalty." And they lost.
Despite its countless examples of rank-and-file solidarity, inventiveness,and renewed militancy, the emotional impact of Franklin's story is akin tohearing a Bruce Springsteen song played on slow speed after the better part of acheap six-pack. The workers came home from Vietnam, got kicked around by thecompany, stood up for themselves when the company tried to dismantle theirmiddle-class existence, and, at least in the case of many of the stalwarts whorefused to cross the picket line, ended up eventually looking for work elsewhere.In between, there were torrid debates over strategy and the shredding of thecommunity fabric--punctuated by priceless moments of fellowship. The book ispositively riveting in capturing some of these moments, such as when the women'ssupport group for the Staley workers found some candy bars buried in a shipmentof donated food and clothing and, like little kids, reveled in the niceties oflife too long denied. Or when the cross-pressures of the strike delivered alonely man to a gray, frozen field, confessing his thoughts of suicide to theauthor but not wanting his wife to know how depressed he had become. "Betrayedand abandoned," Franklin laments. "Does anybody care about this?" And that seemsto be the rub of American working-class history: Is anybody paying attention?
Such plaintive cries are suggestive of the loneliness Franklin portrays. Theseworkers, whose local forms of solidarity allowed them to survive these disputes,seem to inhabit some distant outpost on the map of labor history, like maroonedJapanese soldiers who don't know that the atom bomb of neoliberalism has beendropped on the heartland and that the rest of the working class has surrenderedto the free-market shock troops. Even when a group of Decatur workers known asthe "road warriors" took their struggle out of the heartland and tried to crashthe 1995 AFL-CIO retreat in Bal Harbour, Florida, their message of hope andsolidarity found the national leadership in a state of soporific isolation. "Theywere out of touch. They were mostly old. They were mostly men. They were mostlywhite," explains Franklin of labor's old guard. "A few of them would doze on thedais as their long public meetings droned on." Although John Sweeney and the "NewVoice" candidates were about to take over the AFL-CIO when the workers made theirvisit, the national labor leaders, argues Franklin, were asleep at the helm oflabor history when it mattered most to the rank and file.
Some of the workers in the War Zone went in search of a more profound sense ofhistory than those dozing at Bal Harbour seemed to offer. Once a week, Decaturworkers motored over to the local community college for a labor-history class totry to figure out what dark secrets in the American past had allowed all of thisto happen to them. What they found was an odd comfort and a personal relationshipwith an oppressive past--and here Franklin waxes lyrical: "The terrible defeatslabor had suffered on the railroads and in the steel mills and coal mines, thesaga of the Homestead workers' defeat and labor's crushing setbacks at the turnof the century seemed too familiar, too painful, too immediate," he writes. "Theyidentified with the defeats as if they were their very own and they were relivingthem." What some community-college instructor might have told them is that thepostwar-era system of collective bargaining that they were struggling to protectwas the exceptional period in labor history: It was a brief respite in a200-year-old tale of blatant, often violent, hostility to the cause ofunionization. We've come full circle, they might have learned, and arguably arenow closer to the New Gilded Age than to the New Deal.
Despite the many merits of Franklin's book, it is not going to help generatethat much-needed sense of the past. The history here is episodic and ultimately unsatisfactory; the story remains well grounded in anecdote but lacking in scope.While the trajectory of the postwar era that delivered these workers to theirfate is not covered, even the analysis of the 1990s lacks argumentative arch. Thestory is so broken up--into journalistic chunks, one could say--that it ends upbeing a series of tragic laments rather than a sustained explanation of what wentwrong. None of the great issues in working-class history are approached: AreAmerican workers particularly weak in the solidarity department? Do historicalcircumstances explain why capital's interests control the state? Is this simplypart of a global pattern? Why did capital ever bother to respect labor's rightsin the postwar era in the first place? Readers deserve to hang their hats onsomething after reading this book, but little remains except solidarity trumpedby a profound sense of melancholy and victimization.
Another new study, also called Three Strikes--this time, actually two strikes and a boycott--is designed to fulfill the craving for a usable past expressed by the Decatur history students. The book brings together three well-known progressive scholars to address three historic labor battles, with the intention, as they state in their joint introduction, of capturing the "fighting spirit of labor's last century to see if there are any lessons for the struggles yet to come." It may be indicative of the state of labor history and its relationship with present-day issues that all three of these disputes, each presented as an occasion for insight into future success, are stunning defeats. Are we to conclude from this that defeat is the most important lesson for the future of organized labor?
Howard Zinn, author of the ever popular People's History of the UnitedStates, opens the trilogy by returning us to the famed Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914 that ended in the horror of the Ludlow Massacre. One wonders if events in Decatur might have been like Ludlow if the bosses still used machine guns and armed troops to squelch strikes instead of legalistic options for crushing resistance. (Although Decatur workers did not face Gatling guns or Pinkertons, they did have to contend with a private security army in blue jumpsuits that specialized in strikebreaking--including videotaping conflicts for later use in court.) Sixteen persons, including 11 children, were slaughtered by Colorado National Guard troops at John D. Rockefeller's mines in the episode; and it is so dramatic a story that, unlike most events in labor's past, it made a mark in the basic textbook narrative of U.S. history. Zinn reminds us how power relationships have been constructed in the United States as well as how a critical view of the past must also include the wreckages of alternative futures and directions not taken. But it is unclear whether this will have the educational and inspirational impact that he desires. As Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones famously explained after the defeat, the union "had only the Constitution. The other side had the bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win."
Another lost future is reclaimed in Dana Frank's examination of the largelyunknown "girl" strikers who fought for union recognition in 1937 at aDetroit-area Woolworth's, just after the more widely known Michigan auto-planttakeovers in Flint. Frank's previous work has explored the crossroads ofproduction, gender, consumption, and national identity, and her skills in theseareas shine. While the mid-1930s period is typically thought of as the era oforganizing basic (male) industry--auto, rubber, electrical, and steel--Frank'sexploration of one episode in a broader miniwave of service-sector organizing hasobvious resonance with contemporary struggles. Woolworth's, an earlier versionof the de-skilled, chain-operated megastores of today, was--just in case youdon't get the postindustrial tie-in--"like striking Wal-Mart, the Gap, andMcDonald's all at the same time," according to Frank. It is a story, sheexplains, of young women using the sit-down strike to occupy a store for a weekand actually winning. As the author puts it: "What's the lesson? With enoughallies, with enough inspiration, and with enough daring, anything can happen."
Well, that's sort of the lesson. Frank's narrative ends abruptly after theworkers win union recognition--but we learn in a couple of throwaway lines in theepilogue that the employees lost the union just six months later. In essence, theunion won a skirmish while management won everything else. "As individual womenleft the store," Frank admits, "management deliberately replaced them withanti-union workers, who didn't then fight to keep the union." What else would wehave expected them to do? If this is really meant to become useful history, thecentral question needs to be: How did management gain the upper hand in such ashort time? Were the sit-downs merely a fad sweeping the nation in 1937 thatmanagement conceded to, knowing the company would be able to outmaneuver theunion in short order? While jubilant young women dancing in the aisles of aliberated department store makes for a good read, the story that needs to be toldis how the union quickly found itself outfoxed.
Of the three essays, Robin D.G. Kelley's rises to the top because it embracesambivalence and complexity, perhaps the most important tools for understandingthe American working classes. Kelley, who has made his reputation exploring race,labor, and popular culture, focuses his contribution on a failed attempt to"bring back flesh" to the theater in the 1930s--that is, to return live musiciansto a venue taken over by mechanically reproduced music. Thankfully, his analyticvision takes him beyond the usual litany of oppression and the tiredsolidarity-in-the-face-of-adversity narrative. "What happens," he asks, "whenworking-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concernsof popular culture workers?" Similarly, he requires us to confront "the limits ofsolidarity" between traditional blue-collar union members and those who producepopular culture. We also have to consider musicians, who are not typical workersbut people who "straddle class lines and historically possess a kind of culturalauthority that may belie their material class position." Finally, we have tocontend with a union that was unprepared to deal with the vexing problem of liveperformers trying to make both money and art in the "age of mechanicalreproduction." All of this adds up to an ambitious undertaking; and if Kelleydoes not entirely succeed in answering all his questions in this offbeatexamination of labor's past, hats off to him for asking them.
Strikes tend to bring to the surface what were once called"contradictions in the system," but widening the historical lens to the grandmarch of U.S. labor history is a more formidable and complex project. PriscillaMurolo and A.B. Chitty take up the challenge in From the Folks Who Brought Youthe Weekend by synthesizing much of the "new labor history" into a democratic narrative of the American working class. The dream of somehow pulling together the countless community studies and social histories written by the last generation of scholars into a sweeping history is a long-standing one (and one that many have long given up on), but these authors accomplish the task with verve and style.
From the Folks has several things going for it over previous efforts to create a full narrative of labor and working-class history. It is broadly inclusive in its view of who is a "worker" and it is attentive to the gender and racial dimensions of working-class history. It is also good at placing U.S. labor history in a global context--from the conquest of the continent through the Spanish-American War and up to the World Trade Organization--an extraordinarily important and useful framework. Finally, it is an enjoyable introduction to American working-class history, a national story full of the richness of local history. In addition, a series of illustrations by comic artist Joe Sacco enhances the readability by providing humorous, if biting, relief from the packed text.
While Murolo and Chitty offer up a well-crafted and potentially popularintroductory survey, they have not opened up new understandings of vexingproblems. There is simply not enough that is new or engaging here--or evenrevealing in a synthetic way--to provoke much intellectual or politicalexcitement. The reader pines for a fresh, more complex read on the subject. Thesynthesis of the last generation of scholarship seems suddenly dated. While theauthors' emphasis is clearly on resistance, more needs to be done with theequally important, seldom understood opposite side of the coin--accommodation.Without even an introduction to frame their argument, the authors have succumbedto the major problem of the survey genre: acknowledging everything but not quitegetting at the core of anything. It may be a problem with the subjectitself--plenty of labor conflict scattered along the historical time line butrarely anything that adds up to a national story of struggle upon which a bighistory can be based. In the end, hundreds of years of social and labor historymay simply be too large and too diverse a subject to allow any summary that wouldnot be simplistic and argument driven; but it somehow still seems that historyhas to be more than just one damn thing after another.
The litmus test of any good labor history may be found in a question raised inthe Colorado coal strike. "We ask, sir, your solemn consideration of thisquestion," the state Federation of Labor demanded of the governor. "How muchlonger will workingmen continue to follow the Stars and Stripes when theyrepeatedly see the principle for which the Stars and Stripes have stoodcontemptuously disregarded by those in whose hands, for a time, lies mightwithout right?" Despite the rhetorical intention of the question, the answer is:a surprisingly long time.
Why that is so will require that a new "working-class realism" take root inthe field and transcend the "oppression-resistance" community-based modelunearthed and enshrined by social historians. It will have to encompass the fullcomplexity of working-class history: understanding state power, mass media,business, consumption, gender, nationalism, law, religion, mobility, education,race, geography, and community, to name only a few variables. It will have tobreak out of isolation and find ways of entering into a direct dialogue with corenarratives of American history. It will have to recognize that workers' mostpowerful expressions have fallen less under class consciousness than under morenebulous rubrics of "civic nationalism," as Gary Gerstle formulated it recentlyin American Crucible, or within a collection of malleable anti-elitist sentiments that Michael Kazin has labeled the "Populist Persuasion."
Such a working-class realism would be capable of explaining how workers cansimultaneously defend and attack much of the free-market system and ideology. Itwould understand why class conflict is frequent in American history and, at thesame time, why the class struggle has been coordinated and waged not in thestreets but in the corporate boardrooms. Such a history would be capable ofexplaining to those in Decatur exactly what went wrong--why substantial unionpower in the United States lasted a mere generation and a half. It could alsotell us why, despite all of the changes in labor's fate, rescue workers andbuilding-trades people caught up in the aftermath of September 11 at ground zerostill spoke with passion and reverence not about their "co-workers" but abouttheir "union brothers and sisters."
Such an analytical project will be complicated, it will be messy, and it willbe a lot of work. It would have to shelve contemporary political concerns inorder to tell it like it was, because good history makes for good strategy--andwhat labor needs now more than anything is good strategy.
