T HERE IS one organized force that, with all its flaws, has traditionally been in the forefront of efforts to improve the lives of the general population. That’s organized labor. It’s the one barrier to this vicious cycle going on, which leads to corporate tyranny.
A major reason for the concentrated, almost fanatic attack on unions and organized labor is they are a democratizing force. They provide a barrier that defends workers’ rights, but also popular rights generally. That interferes with the prerogatives and power of those who own and manage the society.
I should say that antiunion sentiment in the United States among elites is so strong that the fundamental core of labor rights—the basic principle in the International Labor Organization, which is the right of free association, hence the right to form unions—has never been ratified by the US. I think the US may be alone among major societies in that respect. It’s considered so far out of the spectrum of American politics that it literally has never been considered.
The business class is highly class-conscious, and rising popular power has always called forth real, deep concerns on the part of the business classes and the educated sectors, which are usually in line with the thesis that “too much democracy” is a real problem. Remember, the US has a long and very violent labor history as compared with similar societies. The labor movement had been very strong, but by the 1920s, in a period not unlike today, it was virtually crushed—in part by Woodrow Wilson’s red scare, in part by other means. (One of the great labor historians, David Montgomery, describes this in one of his main books, The Fall of the House of Labor).
So, the labor movement was really pretty dormant right through the early ’30s, but by the mid-’30s, it began to reconstruct. The organization of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) was the most significant part, and it drew in lots of people. It had a galvanizing effect on other kinds of activism, along with, we’re not supposed to say it today, but along with the Communist Party, which was the spearhead of all kinds of activism—civil rights, labor organizing, social and political movements, and so on.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was rather sympathetic to progressive legislation that would benefit the general population, but he had to somehow get it passed. He informed labor leaders and others, “Force me to do it. If you can force me to do it, I’ll be glad to do it.” What he meant is, go out and demonstrate, organize, protest, develop the labor movement, strike, and so on. When the popular pressure is sufficient, I’ll be able to put through the legislation you want. So there was kind of a combination of a sympathetic government that was interested in overcoming the tremendous shock and disaster of the Depression—again, caused by a financial crisis that they were interested in overcoming—and developing legislation that would benefit the general public.
The business world was actually split during the New Deal years, the 1930s. High-tech internationally oriented business was supportive of the New Deal. They didn’t object to having labor rights, decent wages, and so on. They liked the international orientation of the New Deal government. The National Association of Manufacturers, which is a much more labor-intensive industry, much more domestically oriented, they were passionately opposed to the New Deal. So there was a split among the masters. For example, the head of General Electric was one of the major supporters of Roosevelt. And that helped, along with the massive popular uprising, to enable Roosevelt to carry through the highly successful New Deal legislations. This laid the basis for postwar economic growth, as well as overcoming some of the worst effects of the Depression. Not joblessness, however—that remained until the Second World War.
So there was kind of a combination of sympathetic government and, by the mid-’30s, very substantial popular activism. There were industrial actions. There were sit-down strikes, which were very frightening to ownership. You have to recognize the sit-down strike is just one step before saying, “We don’t need bosses. We can run this by ourselves.” And business was appalled. You read the business press in the late ’30s, and they were talking about “the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses,” which has to be repressed. We must fight the “everlasting battle for the minds of men to indoctrinate people with the capitalist story,” and on and on. It sounds kind of vulgar Marxist, but the business classes tend to be vulgar Marxist, fighting the class war. The business literature in the 1930s, actually, kind of reads like the Powell Memorandum: “we’re lost, everything’s being destroyed.” In fact, the business world began to develop what were called at that time scientific methods of strike breaking. Violence isn’t working anymore, we can’t do it, so let’s look at more sophisticated ways to undermine the labor movement.
The Depression itself wasn’t really ended until the Second World War, when there was a huge government stimulus that led to a vast increase in industrial production—it practically quadrupled—and sent people back to work. It set the stage for the unprecedented postwar growth and development, with quite substantial government inputs. (Computers, the Internet, things that a lot of people take for granted now—you look back and they developed substantially through what amounts to the state sector of the economy. Most of the high-tech economy developed that way.)
So, things were on hold during the Second World War, but immediately afterward, the business offensive began in force. The Taft-Hartley Act and McCarthyism, for instance, were followed by massive corporate propaganda offensives—offensives to attack unions, to take over and control the educational system, sports leagues, infiltrate churches, everything—it was just massive. There’s a lot of good scholarship on this.
Going along with this was getting people to have a more ambivalent attitude toward government. On the one hand, people must be induced to hate and fear government, the potential instrument of popular will, while private corporations are left unaccountable, yielding a form of tyranny—the more they have power and the less government has power, the better from the viewpoint of the rich and powerful. So on the one hand, people have to be induced to hate government, while on the other hand, they have to support government because private business relies extensively on state support—all the way from high-technology economy to bailouts, to international force, and so on—a vast spectrum.
The offensive increased sharply during the Reagan years. Reagan pretty much told the business world, “If you want to illegally break organizing efforts and strikes, go ahead”—and, in fact, illegal strike breaking shot way up, and illegal firing tripled. Even before, in 1978, the head of the United Auto Workers, Doug Fraser, lamented the fact that, as he put it, “business is waging a one-sided class war against the working class.” It continued in the ’90s, and of course with George W. Bush it went through the roof. By now, less than 7 percent of private sector workers have unions, and it’s not because workers don’t want unions—polls show that, overwhelmingly, they want to unionize—but they can’t.
A few years ago we saw a dramatic illustration of public support for unions—in Madison, Wisconsin, and several other states in 2011—where efforts to really kill off the last remnants of the labor movement by Governor Walker, his super-rich backers, the Koch brothers, and the Republican legislature led to massive public protests. In Madison there were tens of thousands of people on the streets every day, “occupying” the State Capitol. They had enormous popular support. Polls showed a considerable majority of the population supported them. It wasn’t enough to beat back the legislative efforts, but if that continues it could very well lead to the kind of situation in which a sympathetic government could respond by implementing policies that would deal with the real problems of the country (and not the ones that are of concern to the financial institutions). The effect of the business postwar offensive is that the usual counterforce to an assault by our highly class-conscious business class has dissolved.
If you’re in a position of power, you want to maintain class consciousness for yourself, but eliminate it everywhere else. You go back to the nineteenth century, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, working people were very conscious of this. They overwhelmingly regarded wage labor as not very different from slavery, different only in that it was temporary. In fact, it was such a popular idea that it was a slogan of the Republican Party. That’s the idea under which Northern workers went to war in the Civil War—they wanted to eliminate all kinds of chattel slavery in the South, wage slavery in the North. “Working people ought to take over the factories” was the slogan of the big mass labor organizations that were developing.
This goes way back in American history, and the sources are interesting. One hundred and fifty years ago, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, there was a very free press. For example, working people ran their own newspapers, in factories and elsewhere, mainly around eastern New England. Now there are some constant themes that ran through that press. There was a bitter attack on the industrial system, which they said was turning free Americans into basically slaves. Wage labor was regarded as not very different from slavery, but the striking theme was anger at what some called, and I’m quoting now, “the New Spirit of the Age, gain wealth forgetting all but self.” And this is the mid-nineteenth century. That’s the “New Spirit” 150 years ago—you get wealthy, forget about everyone else. That was a very sharp class consciousness. In the interest of power and privilege, it’s good to drive those ideas out of people’s heads. You don’t want them to know that they’re an oppressed class. You get the situation we are in now where “class” has become a dirty word—you can’t say it.
You’ve all studied the first paragraph of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, about the butcher, the baker, everybody works together and division of labor is wonderful. But not many people have gotten to, say, page 450 where he sharply condemns division of labor, because he says it turns people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as can be, because they’re gonna be driven to performing routine, simple tasks, and not developing and exercising their intelligence and creative capacity. So, therefore, he urges that in every civilized society the government intervene to prevent this from happening.
We’re human beings, we’re not automatons. You work at your job but you don’t stop being a human being. Being a human being means benefiting from rich cultural traditions—not just our own traditions, but many others—and becoming not just skilled, but also wise. Somebody who can think—think creatively, think independently, explore, inquire—and contribute to society. If you don’t have that, you might as well be replaced by a robot. I think that simply can’t be ignored if we want to have a society that’s worth living in.
Another unpronounceable word incidentally is “profits,” so when you hear a politician say, “we’ve got to have jobs,” think about it for a minute. It almost always translates into “we have to have profits.” They don’t care about jobs—the same people who are saying “we have to have jobs” are happily exporting them to Mexico and China, because that increases profits—what they’re really after. The whole rhetorical system has shifted around to try to prevent people from seeing what’s happening—that’s understandable, and exactly what you’d expect people with power to do, but we should recognize it.
Actually, the US has less social mobility than comparable industrial countries, but if you start talking about class, people begin to think about that. In fact, I have a friend who teaches introductory history courses in a state college, and she asks her students when they come in to identify their class background, and gets two standard answers: if your father is in jail you’re underclass, if your father is a janitor you’re middle class. Now those are the only categories, either you’re underclass or middle class. When we’re talking about working people, we mostly refer to them as middle class. And as I have said before, the middle class, in that sense—that unique American sense—is under severe attack.
So this is one of the few societies in which you just don’t talk about class. Last time I looked, the census did not even rank people by class. In fact, the notion of class is pretty simple: Who gives the orders? Who follows them? That basically defines class. It’s more nuanced and complex, but that’s basically it.
We’re not genetically different from the people in the 1930s. What was done then can be done again. And remember that, at that time, it was done after a period not unlike today—a period of very high inequality, harsh repression, destruction of the labor movement, a much poorer society than today with fewer opportunities. We can pick up the same thing, and turn the current developments in that direction. But it’s gotta be done. It’s not gonna happen by itself.
An outburst of violence, in which union representatives were beaten, kicked and driven away, marked today the first attempt of the United Automobile Workers of America to organize the employees of the Ford Motor Company.
Richard T. Frankensteen, directing the membership drive on behalf of the auto affiliate of the Committee for Industrial Organization, and Walter Reuther, president of the West Side local of the automobile workers’ union, were set upon by a group of employees at No.4 gate of the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn. With two other men who had accompanied them to oversee the distribution of union handbills, they were knocked down repeatedly, kicked, and finally forced away from the gate, despite efforts of Frankensteen to fight off his assailants.
Subsequent fighting, in which employees routed union representatives who had come to distribute leaflets, resulted in the injury of twelve more persons, seven of them women, the union stated.
“It was the worst licking I’ve ever taken,” Frankensteen declared. “They bounced us down the concrete steps of an overpass we had climbed. Then they would knock us down, stand us up, and knock us down again.”
Both Frankensteen and Reuther, together with several of the other victims, were treated by physicians.
We know how the NAM [National Association of Manufacturers] organized this conspiracy against the American consumer. One of its own officers was so proud of the work they did that he spilled the story in an interview, which was published after price control was killed. Now listen to this very carefully.
In this interview, the Director of Public Relations of the NAM told how his organization spent $3,000,000 in 1946 to destroy OPA [Office of Price Administration]. The NAM spent a million and a half on newspaper advertising. They sent their own speakers to make a thousand talks before women’s clubs, civic organizations, teachers, another one to 15,000 clergymen, another one to 35,000 farm leaders, and still another to 40,000 leaders of women’s clubs. A special clip sheet with NAM propaganda went to 7,500 weekly newspapers and to 2,500 columnists and editorial writers.
There never was a more vicious or a better organized campaign to mislead and deceive the American people.
Dear Labor-Management Group Member:
. . . I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my participation in the Labor-Management Group cannot continue. I am therefore resigning from the Group as of July 19 . . .
I have concluded that participation in these meetings is no longer useful to me or to the 1.5 million workers I represent as president of the UAW. I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress.
For a considerable time, the leaders of business and labor have sat at the Labor-Management Group’s table—recognizing differences, but seeking consensus where it existed. That worked because the business community in the U.S. succeeded in advocating a general loyalty to an allegedly benign capitalism that emphasized private property, independence and self-regulation along with an allegiance to free, democratic politics.
That system has worked best, of course, for the “haves” in our society rather than the “have-nots.” Yet it survived in part because of an unspoken foundation: that when things got bad enough for a segment of society, the business elite “gave” a little bit—enabling government or interest groups to better conditions somewhat for that segment. That give usually came only after sustained struggle, such as that waged by the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s . . .
The latest breakdown in our relationship is also perhaps the most serious. The fight waged by the business community against that Labor Law Reform bill stands as the most vicious, unfair attack upon the labor movement in more than 30 years . . . Labor law reform itself would not have organized a single worker. Rather, it would have begun to limit the ability of certain rogue employers to keep workers from choosing democratically to be represented by unions through employer delay and outright violation of existing labor law . . .
The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality but only self-interest, has made accountability almost non-existent. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all.
When you sell your product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.