Grassroots Action Built Labor Movement

Following is an interview with James Green, a labor historian and professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Green's latest book is Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. To read an excerpt and for more information, go to www.jamesgreenworks.com.

CWA News: Do you see parallels between the state of labor today and the late 1800's, when workers were fighting for the eight-hour day?

Jim: One of the main reasons I wrote Death in the Haymarket was to recreate the scene when our first national labor movement took shape and when the first massive struggle for the eight-hour day took place — a cause that has long been forgotten.

Union workers had tried to win shorter hours with legislation, but the employers defied the laws and the courts struck them down, so immigrant working people took to the streets, militantly and peacefully on that first May Day in 1886, just as they did this past May Day in 2006.

These workers created a variety of vehicles to advance their cause: trade or craft based unions, community based organizations of immigrants, city wide labor councils, socialist clubs and newspapers, and the "mixed assemblies" of the Knights of Labor. The Knights was the big tent organization of the time and welcomed everyone who worked for a living.

The struggles of 1886 that began so hopefully in March ended in tragedy at the Haymarket in Chicago where a bomb exploded and ten people died at a rally, but they resumed in the early 1900s when unions of the AFL achieved the shorter work day for thousands, and then again in the 1930s when Congress finally mandated the 40 hour work week in 1938.

CWA News: Who were these immigrants in these early worker struggles?

Jim: In the 1880's the largest groups of immigrants in Chicago were in this order: Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Canadians, Czechs, Poles and Scots. The mix would have been a bit different in the East where the Irish dominated, and in the West where Scandinavians were greater in number.

CWA News: Are there lessons for us today from the mass unionization of industries by workers in the early 1930's?

Jim: The lessons of these struggles in all three periods of union growth are several:

1. Unions had to reach out to women and immigrant communities;
2. Unions had to take on employers aggressively in the streets with strikes and boycotts and find ways of winning public opinion and preventing the use of strikebreakers;
3. Workers had to find allies and supporters in government who believed that what was good for workers was good for the country;
4. In order to do this the union movement had to make a moral appeal to the citizenry at large, and show that many employers were behaving immorally and illegally; and
5. To protect their gains and protect vulnerable workers, unions had to persuade elective officials to pass laws protecting their rights.

CWA News: The current rate of unionization in the private sector is 8 percent. Has it been lower?

Jim: The rate of unionization was probably about the same as this in the period from 1895 to 1915 (it soared during World War I because the government protected unions) and from 1925-35, when the period of huge growth began. It peaked in around 1955 when the AFL and the CIO merged.

CWA News: What percentage of workers was unionized in this country during the peak years?

Jim: Union membership reached its peak in 1953 at 32 percent — mostly private sector workers. It dropped to 26 percent overall in 1965, and you know the numbers now.

CWA News: How important has political action been historically in the United State to gaining real workers' rights?

Jim: Unions were never strong enough to influence national elections and congressional policy until 1936, when a 30-year period began in which organized labor's political muscle mattered a great deal, in many states and in Washington.

The AFL-CIO was the major influence on federal public policy from 1964-1968. It was also a time when Dr. Martin Luther King saw hope for what he called "A Negro-Labor Alliance." Without such an alliance, he thought there was little chance of escaping the poverty that gripped so many African Americans.

CWA News: In many industries in the early 1930's, workers and activists initiated new tactics and strategies to gain union representation. How did this get started?

Jim: The sit down strikes of 1935-37 were a major tactical breakthrough for labor in basic industry — it was the first time that unions devised a way of keeping strikebreakers out of their workplaces. Using this form of civil disobedience allowed rank and file workers (who initiated these strikes) to take employers by surprise. Many unions are now back to using creative tactics like the ones unions used before we had federally supervised NLRB elections.

CWA News: What role do unions play in a democratic society? Can a country have a strong democracy and not have free and strong unions?

Jim: Unions are not perfect institutions. Some have not been consistently democratic; some have been corrupt; some have not been accountable to the workers they represent. But these faults (which labor's enemies falsely apply to all unions) have not prevented the labor movement from being the most important force for popular empowerment and democratic engagement that existed until the civil rights movement took hold in 1961. It's not an accident that the decline of private sector unions since 1972 has occurred exactly when the country has had Republican presidents for all but twelve years and why we now have a government for the rich in Washington. Without a new strong labor movement, it's hard to imagine the American people taking back their government and restoring the democracy.