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Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis

In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own.

An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life.

As such, it’s really more of a history of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the short-lived federation of independent labor unions sponsored by the Communist Party in the years before the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The TUUL has been maligned by many historians as a sectarian boondoggle that isolated the Communists from the early development of the CIO. Foner portrays the formation of the TUUL as a “necessary and unavoidable” response to the wholesale expulsion of Communist activists from the AFL’s mineworkers and garment workers unions as well as a sincere effort to organize new unions in industries that the AFL had no serious plans to take on.

Foner documents a revived Auto Workers Union, as well as a Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, that organized shop committees and published consciousness-raising shop papers during the long years that the AFL was still thinking of assembly line work as dozens of discrete crafts. Also chronicled are lesser-known unions like the Food Workers Industrial Union, which staged a strike in 1933 that successfully raised wages for 1,400 mostly black women who worked as nut pickers in St. Louis, and an Alabama Sharecroppers Union that defied violent racist repression.

Other heroic campaigns are highlighted, like the National Miners Union’s 1931 strike in “Bloody” Harlan County, Kentucky, which kicked off a decade-long struggle for union recognition, and Ben Gold and Fur Workers organizers facing down violent racketeers, gaining the loyalty of much of the rank and file, and leading eventually to collective bargaining and a CIO charter.

Foner was not particularly critical of the TUUL. He was a Communist, and in the last three volumes of his series, which coincide with the existence of the Communist Party, his analysis became much more partisan. That’s a shame, because it will cause some scholars and activists to continue to dismiss or ignore the lessons of this brief project of forming new, “pure,” left-wing unions outside the established labor movement. More recent scholarship has shown that the TUUL was more complicated, and more influential, than its critics have claimed.

Edward P. Johanningsmeier has shown that the shift from the 1920s strategy of “boring from within” the established unions (basically, the “rank-and-file strategy” of its day) to forming new unions was driven by organizers’ frustrations with the dirty tactics of trade union bureaucrats as much if not more than by “orders from Moscow.” Victor G. Devinatz has argued that the better measure of the TUUL’s legacy was not its membership numbers (which were pathetically low, perhaps never more than fifty thousand) but in the hundreds of thousands of workers who followed its leaders out on strike during these years, serving as a proving ground for organizers and giving workers some experience for the actual strike wave that would follow in 1934.

And Ahmed White has shown that former TUUL members, many of whom took jobs in the steel mills in order to organize a union, were the most dedicated activists during the long and sometimes violent SWOC organizing campaign at the “Little Steel” firms.

Foner’s is still, somehow, the first book-length treatment of the TUUL, and it’s well worth a read by activists who are currently, or thinking about, forming new independent unions. The surprise NLRB election victories of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island and the Trader Joe’s Union in Hadley, Massachusetts, have provoked serious debate over the efficacy of organizing without the resources and expertise (and baggage and bureaucracy) of traditional labor unions.

My takeaway: it’s hard to blame workers for organizing independently of unions that won’t seriously commit resources to unionizing the industries they claim jurisdiction over. But most independent unions (historically speaking) have not amounted to much on their own. Where the TUUL unions were able to inspire workers to protest their working conditions, though, they left a road map of workplaces for the CIO to concentrate on a few years later. And where TUUL leaders inspired rank-and-file confidence in their strategies, they were sometimes able to negotiate their way into AFL and CIO unions to score the resources necessary to win when collective bargaining became legally protected.

A History of the History

It’s a strange delight to hold a “new” volume of Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in one’s hands, its cover the same red and blue gear, with the same typeface and International Publishers logo on the spine, three decades since the series was presumed to have ended with Foner’s life. (Amalgamated Transit Union organizing director Chris Townsend learned of its existence and fought for its publication, and SUNY Empire State College professor emeritus Roger Keeran got the manuscript into publishable form.)

A massive work across over four thousand pages, Foner published the first volume in 1947. He conceived the series as a Marxist rebuttal to the then-dominant Wisconsin school of labor history, which treated the broad sweep of labor’s story as an evolutionary process that resulted in the ideal policies and practices for unions: those of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s (which, in retrospect, was a historical nadir of union membership, organizing activity, and political power for labor).

Foner’s approach was institutionalist (making heavy use of minutes and official journals to document organizations), but his focus was more on strikes and organizing campaigns, making the theme of his series the conflicts that are the whole point of having a labor movement.

The books are arranged thematically (earlier volumes include The Industrial Workers of the World 1905–1917 and The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor 1900–1909) and chronologically, which I’ve found makes them a go-to reference when researching any particular event in order to get a sense of what else was going on in the labor movement at the time.

Foner’s choice to focus just on the first four years of the Great Depression is instructive. The historical memory of the New Deal tends to get smushed together, causing a lot of fuzzy thinking on the Left of the interplay between labor militancy and legal reform. In fact, radical changes were occurring on a year-to-year basis before Franklin D. Roosevelt even took office. (Rutgers labor studies professor Eric Blanc has been working through this in the series of working papers he put out this summer, “Labor Struggle from Below and Above: Lessons from the 1930s.”)

Aside from the TUUL, Foner highlights the unemployment demonstrations of the first years of the crisis and the AFL’s long, tortured internal disagreements about pushing for a system of unemployment insurance (which the federation had derided since the days of Samuel Gompers) as a “dole” that would make workers subservient to the government. As we have seen during our own COVID-19 crisis, workers are more likely to risk protesting on the job when they have some kind of safety net to fall back on.

The most important reform during these years was the anti-injunction Norris-LaGuardia Act, still the most important labor law in this country. Prior to the legislation, employers routinely made workers sign “yellow dog” contracts promising not to join a union. When unions went on strike, employers would go to federal court — yellow dog contracts in hand — and argue that the picket lines were interfering with their contract rights (as well as their property right to expect their employees to come to work every day). The courts would just as routinely issue injunctions, and the National Guard would violently shut the strikes down.

The Norris-LaGuardia Act made it the federal government’s stated policy to encourage the “full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives . . . free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers.” More practically, it outlawed yellow dog contracts and basically forbade federal courts from issuing injunctions that restrained workers’ strike and picket line activity.

That this great law was written by two Republicans (albeit liberal ones, when that was still a thing) and signed by a Republican president is illuminating. By the early 1930s, enough senators were so frustrated by the court’s pretzel logic on property rights, its conservative legislating from the bench, and its dithered views on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce that they actually voted down one of Herbert Hoover’s Supreme Court nominees and passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act by a veto-proof majority.

Would that we had enough senators of either party today who would vote to strengthen labor law as a “fuck you” to the Roberts Court.

Had Foner lived long enough to complete the History of the Labor Movement in the United States (a sisyphean task for any one scholar), the twelfth volume would probably have dealt with Roosevelt’s “first” New Deal, the industrial code-setting National Recovery Administration with its Section 7a “right” to organize — a gift lobbed toward a feeble labor movement to buy just a little opposition to a controversial bill — that, in turn, triggered the 1934 strike wave. And the thirteenth volume would likely have covered the advent of the National Labor Relations Board, the sit-down strikes, and the period that we tend to think of as “labor’s great upsurge” (and, again, tend to romantically misremember as occurring earlier in the New Deal timeline).

Perhaps now, a quarter of a century since Foner’s passing, the time is right for a new generation of scholars to pick up his mantle.

[This article originally appeared in Jacobin.]

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15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas

The prestige drama Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons, beginning fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it, which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from socialist thought. Series creator Matthew Weiner tipped his hand that Mad Men would at least play with Marxist critiques of capitalism in the very first episode with two simple words: “It’s toasted.”

That advertising slogan is prominently featured in a classic mid-century Marxist text, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. In an age when supermarket shelves were newly and fully stocked with competing technicolor boxes of breakfast cereal and the constant introduction of “new” and “improved” products, the two writers, associated with the Marxist magazine and book publisher Monthly Review, argued that “competition, which was the predominant form of market relations,” had been replaced by “large-scale enterprise producing a significant share of the output of an industry, or even several industries, and able to control its prices, the volume of production, and the types and amounts of its investments.”

Monopoly, in other words, wasn’t an occasional mistake of the capitalist system — now it was the system.

One of Baran and Sweezy’s central arguments is that the massive surplus value (or, more crudely, the profits) generated by monopoly capital could be democratically and equitably distributed to provide for the material needs of all members of society. Instead, it’s wasted.

One particularly egregious form of waste they target is the commercial advertising business, which was rapidly expanding in the 1960s. Instead of reinvesting surplus in innovation or using the lowered costs of production to make more products available to more people, advertising wastes vast fortunes on convincing consumers that one identical product is somehow superior to another.

In the process of advancing this argument, Baran and Sweezy cite a bit of Madison Avenue braggadocio from ad exec and author Rosser Reeves: the George Washington Hill tobacco company’s “It’s toasted” advertising campaign — “So, indeed, is every other cigarette, but no manufacturer has been shrewd enough to see the enormous possibility of such a simple story.”

The plot of Mad Men’s first episode centers on an impending Surgeon General report that will link smoking tobacco to lung cancer. This is a crisis for the series’ protagonist, Don Draper.

Not a health crisis, of course. In fact, Draper, the head of the creative department at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency, is first introduced smoking a cigarette and sketching out tobacco ad campaigns on the back of a cocktail napkin in preparation for a high-stakes meeting with his largest client, a tobacco company. Cigarette advertising had long emphasized the supposed therapeutic benefits of smoking, and the client wants a plan for how to continue selling a product when the public inevitably finds out it’s deadly.

“This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products,” Draper declares after some initial floundering.

To prove his point, Draper asks the men to describe how their cigarettes are made. His client, the patriarch of Lucky Strike, blathers on about insect-repellent seeds, the North Carolina sunshine, and the harvesting, curing, and toasting of the tobacco leaves.

“There you go!” Draper declares about the fact that tobacco leaves are toasted before they’re rolled into cancer sticks. When the owner’s son objects that all cigarette tobacco is toasted as part of the manufacturing process, the advertising agency’s head of creative counters, “No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s is toasted.”

This was not a famous advertising campaign. It’s hardly “Where’s the Beef?” and was for a completely different cigarette maker. It seems clear that Matthew Weiner read Monopoly Capital and drew some inspiration from it. But what, if anything, was he trying to say about the advanced stage of capitalism and artistic creativity in an industry built on lies and deception?

A Beautiful Sentiment

Early reviewers noticed that Mad Men was slyly feminist, with secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson’s slow climb toward professional respect and artistic ambition marking her as the show’s parallel (if not primary) protagonist. From early on, interviewers drew out Weiner on the influence that Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl had on his pilot script.

Those were bestselling books. But Cold War–era Marxist economic texts are deeper cuts, so Monthly Review’s contribution to Mad Men has gone unremarked upon.

Baran and Sweezy are not the last or even the most obvious example of Mad Men cribbing from leftist texts. A third-season episode has a pair of copywriters, recently hired to help court the emerging baby boomer market, making a “kids these days” presentation about developing a youth market for a client, a coffee brand, to Draper.

The smarmier of the two, Smitty, launches into an already passé staccato faux-beatnik rap about “this letter from a friend back in Michigan . . . he’s still in school, man, and it’s got this — I dunno — sixty-page rant in it.” He reads from it: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”

Though unnamed in the episode, that “rant” is the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society and a seminal text of the New Left.

“That’s a beautiful sentiment,” Draper replies sardonically. “Does your friend know what you do for a living?”

Smitty replies with a slightly deflated, “Yeah . . . there was a shitty note with it.”

How quickly and eagerly young men would seek to commodify youth rebellion to sell instant coffee is treated as a bitter joke. There is some creativity required to repackage anti-capitalist sentiment as a new and improved lifestyle that can be purchased at the supermarket. But that creative spark is wasted on cynical exploitation.

A major theme across Mad Men’s seven seasons is the tension between the creative talent at an advertising firm and the accounts executives who keep the corporate clients happy (and the revenue flowing). At one point in the series, Draper bellyaches that the creative department is the “most important, least important thing there is.” The most important element in advertising, of course, is actually the buying and selling of radio and television airtime and column inches in newspapers and magazines (in its 1960’s business model, at least). That’s where the money is made. But the creatives are essential for selling the lie that one cigarette is superior to another (and that they will all kill you should not be a primary concern).

In its first three seasons, the idea of advertising as “selling out” creative ambition is most fully represented in the character Paul Kinsey, a senior copywriter who fashions himself as a bohemian and wears his admiration for Rod Serling and Orson Welles on his sleeve (and his bearded face). He lets anyone who will listen know that he’s always writing something that could turn into the Great American Novel, or at least an episode of The Twilight Zone. We also see him try to blow up a pitch meeting with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to protest the demolition of its classic train station in 1963, as well as participate in — and chicken out during — the Mississippi Freedom Rides that summer.

We’re also given the clear impression that he’s not all that creative of a writer. He’s hilariously left behind when Draper and his partners start a new firm after ransacking their old office in the middle of the night. The audience sees Kinsey one more time, years later, when the character is in a Krishna cult and shopping around a Star Trek spec script.

Advertising as Art

Draper, in the early seasons, is similarly drawn toward the bohemian Greenwich Village, and stays on top of the latest novels and movies. One imagines he could create greater art than hokey tag lines for Life cereal. Peggy similarly winds up in the orbit of artists who can at least score an invite to Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Even the accounts men have a creative drive. Senior partner Roger Sterling spends the fourth-season year of 1965 writing his (poorly received) memoir, Sterling’s Gold, and an early episode in season one has the announcement that junior accounts executive Ken Cosgrove published a short story in the Atlantic, stirring jealousy among the other young men in the office.

With Cosgrove out of earshot, Kinsey and Peter Campbell and Harry Crane confess their artistic pretensions and cook up plans to get their own abandoned (and seemingly sophomoric) stories published; Campbell going so far as pressuring his wife, Trudy, to reconnect with an ex-boyfriend in the publishing business. Cosgrove, we find out, continues to pseudonymously publish genre short stories even as his accounts responsibilities increase — causing “fellow frustrated writer” Sterling (perhaps in a fit of jealousy) to forbid him from continuing to do so as a senior executive.

Whatever Matthew Weiner had to say about the employment of creative talent in a wasteful and unnecessary industry, it seems he intended to give the audience two potential interpretations in the series’ ambiguous final scene. Having walked out of the stultifying environment of the enormous McCann Erickson advertising agency after it absorbed and dissolved the small firm that Draper dedicated years of his life to building up, Draper dries out and meditates at a California hilltop yoga camp with an ambiguous smile on his face. Before the scene cuts to black, it fades in a soundtrack and visuals from a vastly more famous advertisement than “It’s toasted.”

The real-world McCann Erickson managed to turn a jingle for Coca-Cola, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” into a chart-topping single in 1971 on the strength of a stunningly cynical ad that featured vaguely multicultural hippies embracing on a hilltop. Sure, the ad sought to reassure its audience, you just saw cops beat the shit out of those idealistic Students for a Democratic Society kids in Chicago and now a bunch of them are blowing up federal buildings to protest the whole system, and your new president was elected through a strategy of racist “law and order” dog-whistling. But at least Coke brings us all together.

If you rewind and slow-mo the moments before Draper’s Mona Lisa smile, you’ll notice hairstyles and outfits from the Coke ad surround him as workers and guests at his newfound hilltop hippie camp. Is he smiling because this scene that he’s stumbled upon has inspired him to innovate a new decade of exploiting baby boomer culture to sell a national culture back to them in the form of diabetes in a bottle? Or is the dark joke of Mad Men that, even when an advertising creative walks away from a lucrative career of emotional manipulation and lies, the machine keeps on humming without him?

The problem is that as much as Matthew Weiner leaned on the famous cut-to-black ending of The Sopranos (his artistic home when he was writing Mad Men’s pilot) as a sort of “choose your own mythology,” his recent interviews have placed a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of the interpretation where Draper returns to New York to pitch the hippie Coke ad. Why does the internet tempt creators to ruin their endings by commenting on them? Weiner had ample opportunity to put a more definitive version on the screen and didn’t. What now privileges his head canon over my own, where Draper remains retired and returns to New York to be a present father for his kids and a reliable friend to the handful of female colleagues he managed to avoid sleeping with?

The ending in Weiner’s head is one of the most disappointingly cynical statements that a TV show that began with a nod to how advertising contributes nothing of productive value to society could have landed upon. It suggests a triumph of capitalism so complete that not only is making emotionally manipulative advertising an art that artists should settle for because the system makes room for it, but that it is the kind of creatively fulfilling work that an artist should aspire to. I’d rather stay at yoga camp.

[This article originally appeared in Jacobin.]