Standing Up, Sitting Down
It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America’s battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss of over a hundred thousand members and the union’s relegation to the sidelines of the labor movement. The UE that survived those terrible fights of the 40’s and 50’s remained a leaner, meaner fighting machine; a union that prized democratic rank-and-file control, labor education, the long haul struggle and the value of a symbolic fight. The tactic of the sit-down strike was expelled from the labor movement long before the Communists who perfected it. The […]