A new book of labor history is just published in July 2024.
The Fight Over Jobs, 1877-2024: An Accounting of Events Distorted, Suppressed or Ignored
Author Dr. Fred Siegmund
Americans work “at will” and can be fired or laid off at any
time. Work and the boss can be difficult; sometimes we strike, picket and
protest. Take the time back in July 1877
after the Pennsylvania Railroad cut wages 20 percent and the Pittsburgh
superintendent laid off half his conductors, flagmen and brakemen. Striking
crews blocked the tracks, except railroad officials declared to “clear the
tracks” and found a compliant governor ready to call out the National Guard.
His troops fired directly into the crowds at Pittsburgh’s 28th
Street grade crossing, leaving 16 dead and 27 wounded. Follow along with the
“angry surging tide of humanity” descending into the rail yards for three days
of arson, looting and rioting. Take a trip through the Sunday aftermath to
consider the burned-out ruins of 1,200 freight cars, 126 locomotives and two
miles of smoldering Pittsburgh. The Fight Over Jobs narrates these street
battles in one strike after another along with the confrontations on the picket
line, the shop floor, the bargaining table, in Congress and the courts over the
years 1877 to 2024.
Six parts divide the history, further sub divided into
twenty-one chapters, which should be treated as evidence for the discussion and
frank assertions made about America’s labor and labor relations in Part VII.
Part VII, Labor History’s Déjà vu, offers arguments, interpretations,
conclusions.
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Part I begins with the Pittsburgh strike, often known as the
Great Upheaval, that develops the early era between 1877 and 1913. Four
chapters develop the major organizing and strikes of the era that include the
1892 Homestead strike, the Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union and the 1894
Pullman strike that follows. The era includes organizing details of the
Industrial Workers of the World and their free speech fights and strikes. Readers
meet Mother Jones and the early United Mine Workers organizing and Clare
Lemlich leading the uprising and revolt in early textile industry strikes. Part
I includes narrative review of the Haymarket bombing and Triangle fire.
Part II covers the years from 1913 to 1921, the Presidential
years of Woodrow Wilson. His first two
years in office feature some of labor history’s renown labor battles at Paint
Creek and Cabin Creek, West Virginia, Akron, Ohio, Paterson, New Jersey,
Keweenaw, Michigan, Wheatlands, California, and Ludlow, Colorado and the legal
battle over Joe Hill. A chapter covers President Wilson’s preparedness campaign
and then his decisions over wartime labor relations that dominant the years of
his first term. In spite of labor’s no strike pledge there were wartime strikes
with the Bisbee, Arizona and Butte, Montana strikes providing two especially
grim examples. War time labor relations included race riots at East St. Louis
and then at Chicago as part of the great migration. Once the war ended in 1918,
1919 turned into another horror of strikes and violence in Seattle Washington,
and the fall strikes of the Boston police, steel workers and coal miners ending
with the shootings and lynching in Centralia, Washington.
Part
III develops labor relations through the three Republican party presidents of
1921 to 1933. These years feature the Republican Party’s determination to
neutralize unions in contrast with Lenin’s Russian revolution and the hope to
empower unions and the working class. Labor relations in the agriculture, mining
and textile industries declined even further in the 1920’s. This chapter
narrates the violent Matewan, West Virginia strike featured in the John Sayles
film. There were more strikes in the textile industry at Passaic, New Jersey,
New Bedford, Massachusetts as well as a celebrated railroad shopman’s strike.
In the last chapter of part III, the depression arrives and describes Herbert
Hoover’s failure to respond.
Part IV covers the depression era of Franklin Roosevelt and labor relations during WWII for the years of 1933 and 1945. The first Roosevelt plan for recovery brought corporate opposition and strikes and rioting from a desperate working class. Strikes in agriculture came in spite of the Agriculture Adjustment Act and strikes in manufacturing came in spite of the National Industrial Recovery Act. Strikes filled 1934 at Toledo, Ohio, at Minneapolis, Minnesota, at San Francisco, California, and up and down the east coast with more textile strikes. Senator Robert Wagner of New York responded to these failures by steering the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) through Congress in 1935.
Part IV continues with the drive to organize under the new NLRA and the internal, political and legal battles to enforce the law. Narrative includes the Roosevelt court packing plan, the Robert LaFollette Congressional hearings and negotiations and strikes in the rubber, steel and automobile industries. These sections narrate the celebrated Flint sit-down strikes. The success of the sit-down strikes proved to be the high point of the New Deal. The last chapter of part IV narrates the corporate resistance to union organizing and the changes to labor relations during and after World War II.
Part V covers 1945 to 1981 that begins when Harry Truman takes over and the great post war strike wave of 1945-46 begins. It was a tough time for labor with corporate America determined to undue the New Deal. Republicans take over the 80th Congress and pass the Taft-Hartley Act and then harass labor with Congressional hearings and charges of a communist take over of the labor movement that includes the Joe McCarthy outbreak and the legal assault on Hollywood actors and labor organizers.
Part V continues with Senator McClellan of Arkansas investigating labor racketeering in general and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters in particular. Narrative here follows Robert Kennedy’s legal pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa and the successful effort to amend labor law with the Landrum-Griffin Act. By the 1960’s the civil rights, women’s rights and Vietnam war protests joined forces with the labor movement organizing in California with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers, in Memphis, Tennessee with the sanitation workers, in the Detroit auto plants and especially in the 1968 elections.
Once Richard Nixon took over as president, he attempted to court labor in a concerted effort to have the working class vote Republican. The 1970’s labor movement was dominated by law and politics although there were also celebrated strikes like the one at J.P. Stevens. Labor and the working class divided over the McGovern election and the federal courts consistently ruled against labor unions. President Carter only added to their troubles by failing to support labor legislation.
Part VI opens when Ronald Reagan takes office in 1981 and establishes a new era in labor relations that runs to the present. The PATCO strike begins the Reagan era, but narrative turns to the aggressive union busting efforts in the copper industry, the paper industry and the meat parking industry. The 1980’s featured the rise of the service industry unions like Service Employees International Union, the Justice for Janitors campaign and the organizing of support workers at Yale University.
Part VI continues into the 1990’s with the George H.W. Bush era strikes at Eastern Airlines, at Las Vegas in the hospitality industry, at the Pittston Coal company in Virginia and in Decatur, Illinois at Caterpillar Tractor, Bridgestone Tire and Staley Food Products. Strikes continued during the Clinton years, featuring the politics of health care, NAFTA, and labor law legislation along with a couple of celebrated strikes at UPS and the Detroit Newspaper Strike. The second George Bush, a.k.a. W, allowed the anti-union parts of his administration to be active opponents of labor unions and labor organizing. The Bush era also featured internal disputes within the labor movement as Lane Kirkland, Andrew Stern, John Sweeney, John Wilhelm and a few more fought with each other to bring change to a calcified labor movement. The Bush administration gave way to the Obama and Trump administrations, but the focus of politics and labor were the same as they had been since the 1980’s: health care, NAFTA and immigration issues
The book develops labor legislation and labor law in separate sections of Parts I to VI as the law progresses from the 19th century to the present. The legal narrative explains the principal labor legislation – the Railway Labor Act, National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), Taft-Hartley Act, and Landrum-Griffin Act – and provides a chapter appendix with a readers guide giving condensed versions of the important sections of the laws.
Before Congress passed labor legislation the courts resolved labor disputes with the common law of conspiracy and the 1890 Anti-trust laws to curtail union strikes and organizing. After Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act both labor unions and corporate management attempted to enforce their view of the law by filing unfair labor practice complaints with the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). NLRB enforcement allows review in the federal courts and further appeal to the Supreme Court. The book reviews these cases by providing details of the disputes and analyzing the court decisions. The book follows the law cases covering the legal right to strike, the right to work, the right of free speech in labor relations and the duty to bargain as required by labor statute.
Part VII, entitled Labor History’s Déjà vu, pressures readers to consider common themes among the social, economic and political events of labor history narrated through the book. Part VII confronts readers with America’s class divisions, the narrow minds of economists, the short comings of capitalism and our obsolete Constitution. Part VII confronts inequality of income and civil rights, corporate America’s never-ending quest for cheap labor, and refusal by corporate officials to be leaders in a society they demand to control. It analyzes, defends and supports a living wage.
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This is a long book of 868 pages, with endnotes and index added to that, but a necessary length to bring out the central themes for a long period like 1877 to 2024. It intends to be self-contained and assumes only basic familiarity with U.S. history and political science, but it is not elementary and requires attention to detail. The central themes repeat in the same or similar ways over the many years. To help connect these themes from one era to another, readers are occasionally asked to “Recall” similar events already passed and informed of similar events to come in the future with “as we shall see.” Part and chapters begin with an epigraph specific to events of labor history. They are intended to reinforce these central themes. A few examples should help.
#1 - Joseph A. Dacus, editor, St. Louis Republican, 1878
It is cheap labor, more than any other fact, that most endangers our institutions, cheap labor serving corporate wealth, intent upon nothing but more wealth. Here is where capitalists make the gravest mistake, and the great strikes of the present year should be taken as a wholesome warning. Capitalists consider their direct interest in the cheap labor they hire, and not their indirect interest in the dearer labor that buys what wealth wishes to sell.
#2 - Lyman Trumbull, writing in Public Opinion, October 18,
1894
If the accumulation of fortunes goes on for another
generation with the same accelerated rapidity as during the present, the wealth
of this country will soon be consolidated in the hands of a few corporations
and individuals to as great an extent as the landed interests of Great Britain
now are. Neither strikes of the laboring classes, which it controls, nor the
governmental control of the great railroad and other corporations, will remove
the existing conflict between labor and capital, which has its foundations in
unjust laws, enabling the few to accumulate vast estates and live in luxurious
ease, while the great masses are doomed to incessant tool, penury, and want.
#3 - Memorandum from
Louis Brandeis to President Woodrow Wilson, June 14, 1913
The conflict between the policies of the Administration and the desires of the financiers and of big business, is an irreconcilable one. Concessions to the big business interests must in the end prove futile. The administration can at best have only their seeming or temporary cooperation. In essentials they must be hostile. While we must give the most careful consideration to their recommendations and avail ourselves of their expert knowledge, it is extremely dangerous to follow their advice even in a field technically their own.
#4 - Bayard Rustin,
quoted from Commentary, February 1965
“No social movement has ever been successful in this
country which did not involve as an ally the hard-core white middle class.”
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