11
ORGANIZE
Disaster accelerates the speed of decision-making. Emergency collapses time—making the past irrelevant and the future uncertain. What remains is a politics of quick fixes. When this happens, it’s hard to fight against oppression. Hastily reacting to every crisis will never revolutionize society. At best, it will temporarily lessen society’s inequities. What you need instead is strategy. Thoughtful organization and concrete demands that anchor you, forcing leaders to respond to your desires. Not theirs. Beware: elites will divide you from those with whom you share interests. They will intimidate you or hold out lucrative incentives for you to cave. Hold firm. You have numbers, and without your participation they can’t win. Once you organize, success is within reach.
This is the great lesson of the US labor movement, even though the odds were stacked against it. At the end of the nineteenth century, rank-and-file union membership expanded from one hundred thousand to almost one million, and between 1880 and 1905, seven and a half million workers took part in over thirty-eight thousand strikes. Big business wasn’t pleased. So, from the early 1900s through the 1930s, in what became infamously known as the Lochner Era, it was enthralled to watch the US Supreme Court provide them relief. In a series of devastating decisions, the high court gutted popular legislation that secured workers’ rights. In Lochner v. New York (1905), for example, a 5–4 majority struck down a New York state law limiting bakers’ workday to ten hours. This was the precedent for judicial activist decisions like Adair v. United States (1908), which invalidated a congressional act that banned employers from firing railroad workers who joined unions, and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), which overturned federal minimum wage legislation for children and women. For decades, the court held that freedom of contract and individual liberty prevented any real constraint on big business.
True, capitalism had the courts on their side, but workers had the numbers. Not only did they organize among themselves; they did so even more vigorously than ever before. By 1920, union membership had risen to five million, and the labor movement moved beyond its centrist demands, which had dominated the previous decades. In the 1890s, the voice of labor was Samuel Gompers, whose American Federation of Labor (AFL) endorsed anti-Black racism and segregated shops, and lobbied Congress to restrict immigration from China and Mexico. Gompers colluded with power as much as he could. By 1912, though, the voice of labor was the fiery midwesterner from Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene V. Debs, who won an impressive nine hundred thousand votes for president when he ran as the Socialist Party candidate. A champion of women’s suffrage and an anti-racist in the Indiana state legislature, where he served for one term beginning in 1885, Debs evolved to socialism over time. This happened only after he read the writings of Karl Marx in prison, where he sat for six months. His crime: standing with over two hundred thousand Pullman railroad strikers in July 1894 who wouldn’t accept drastic wage cuts of 30 percent, without a similar reduction of rent costs for the company housing in which they lived. “The solidarity of the working class is the salient force in the social transformation of which we behold the signs upon every hand,” Debs said years later. “Nearer and nearer they are being drawn together in the bonds of unionism; clearer and clearer becomes their collective vision; greater and greater the power that throbs within them.”1
Abolishing inequality doesn’t happen spontaneously. For this to happen, you must organize. Labor has people power, but capitalism has repressive instruments. To crush the Pullman Strike, for instance, the sitting president, Grover Cleveland, equipped with an injunction from the federal courts, dispatched troops to Chicago. Twenty-six civilians died. This sort of violence was more common than you can imagine. When free-market evangelists tell you that capitalism has a great record, just remind them of the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which mercenary Pinkerton detectives, on behalf of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s steel company, assaulted strikers from the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA). Or tell them about the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when the private army of Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company opened fire upon striking mining families sleeping inside their tent colony. Thirteen women and children burned to death.
Debs understood that power doesn’t crumble without a fight. There are two fronts upon which the war for economic equality has to be waged. The first is institutional. You need a robust political party to groom candidates for local and state government, and to push an agenda that breaks the long-standing monopoly of the two-party system. The second is a broad multiracial coalition of people. This was why Debs and William “Big Bill” Haywood founded the IWW (International Workers of the World) in 1905 in Chicago. The IWW endorsed spontaneous “wildcat” strikes without approval from leadership. Unlike the AFL, it rallied over one million unskilled industrial workers, including people of color, migrants, and women. At its peak, the IWW had over one hundred thousand members.
Yes, a broad base of support is indispensable. But you’ll win concessions from management only if you keep up pressure that disrupts power’s seamless flow. What’s remarkable about the sixty-five thousand Seattle shipyard workers who participated in a work stoppage that ground the city to a halt in 1919 is that they organized a strike committee, which was responsible for deciding which services would be boycotted and which essential ones would continue. Sanitation workers collected wet trash, which was a grave public health risk. Firemen stayed on the job to prevent arson. Laundry workers remained open to keep people’s clothing clean. Twenty-one makeshift dining halls serving thirty thousand meals a day were set up. This experiment was short-lived, however. The Seattle mayor sent in 2,400 police to shut it down.
But their example lived on when four hundred thousand railroad workers across the country went on strike in 1922, and fifteen thousand New Jersey textile workers did the same in 1926. Colorado coal miners followed suit in 1927. In 1933, over one million workers were involved in some kind of direct labor action. Newly inaugurated president, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, had no choice but to cave and support labor demands. Consequently, he passed the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which established a federal minimum wage and made unionization a right.
But when you win, you can’t stop. You have to push harder. In May 1936, fourteen thousand San Francisco longshoremen defied their union leaders, who had colluded with management to weed out the younger, more militant and less-paid members among their ranks. The ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) negotiated a secret agreement that would have taken out the young workers, but, remembering Seattle in 1919, San Francisco longshoremen appealed to rank-and-file truck drivers and merchant marines to support their strike. The Teamsters Union agreed and stopped hauling cargo to and from the docks. The strike spread to 115 locals in San Francisco, and 130,000 people eventually joined. This was too radical a tactic for the AFL, which called the strikers communists. More than four thousand police and National Guard members were brought in to crush the strike, and vigilante groups followed suit with a concerted attack. But victory was close at hand. By 1935, Roosevelt had passed the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act. Soon, the Lochner Era came to a close, in 1937. That’s when the Supreme Court, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, overturned Adkins by upholding a state minimum wage law.
Nothing lasts forever. One step for labor precipitated a full-court assault from big business. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned spontaneous or wildcat strikes and mass protests from the grassroots without union leaders’ approval. That was just the beginning of a series of measures that eroded labor’s power. States soon began passing “right-to-work” legislation, which made unionization difficult. Years of chipping away culminated in the 2018 Supreme Court decision Janus v. AFSCME, in which a 5–4 conservative majority reversed long-standing precedent established in the Abood decision (1977). In Janus, the court argued that union dues violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment and made it constitutional for workers to opt out of paying union dues. This, even though the union would still represent them. Unions already stood little chance in terms of competing with corporations that had vast resources. Janus made it that much harder. The court used a similar principle in its Citizen United (2010) decision, which ruled that corporations had free speech rights and therefore could spend unlimited money on political campaigns.
Yes, pessimism makes sense. Look at our era of precarious flex work. Uber drivers are treated as private contractors, and retail employees at big-box stores are optimally scheduled for part-time hours to avoid paying full-time benefits. But be hopeful. Organizing is on the rise. Chicago teachers threatened to strike over being forced to resume in-person teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, due to inadequate personal protective equipment and poorly ventilated, overcrowded classrooms. One hundred Washington State healthcare workers walked off their jobs in November 2020 because hospital administrators wouldn’t reduce their twelve-hour shifts. Even Silicon Valley employees have gotten in on the action. Four hundred Google engineers, who met and held officer elections in secret, formed the Alphabet Workers Union in January 2021—an unprecedented achievement given the tech industry’s hostility toward organized labor and its philosophy of growth at all costs. Democratic socialism, popularized by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in 2016, is no longer the third rail of American politics. Join a union. Support labor rights. You have power in numbers. Remember that.