Living on in the Archives
History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.”
The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American sabotage and denounced all the strikers, who went back to the shops under unsatisfactory conditions.
The Wobblies brought controversy, but no organization to speak of, so the workers who remained reorganized themselves into an independent union that lasted for 17 years, organizing the kitchens and dining rooms of Manhattan’s fanciest hotels. The “Free Voice” is a fascinating document of the times, as radicalism remained even as the union took on bread and butter issues like hours and wages. Evident in those pages was a wide variety of Wobbly, Socialist and Communist sympathies with fraternal greetings from Soviet Russia, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood and William Z. Foster. This was a trade union that organized along amalgamated industrial lines, and strove to expand its ranks to include all the workers in their industry, regardless of race, sex or language (Each edition included German and Italian translations; Yiddish, Lithuanian and other languages were apparently available).
Eventually, the union was supplanted by a Communist-led, T.U.U.L. affiliated union, the Food Workers Industrial Union, which was led by men like Jay Rubin and Michael J. Obermeier who has previously been leaders of the Amalgamated. In 1935, the unions merged and Rubin and Obermeier pressed further to merge with the AFL-affiliated Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union. They wound up as leaders of the newly chartered Local 6, as well as the amalgamated New York Hotel Trades Council.
In its last issue, the “Free Voice” took stock of its legacy:
The organ of the Amalgamated Food Workers, the “Free Voice,” can now be incorporated into history as a vital organ of the Labor Movement and will live in its archives as a reminder of the fearless weapon that it was in furthering the struggle of the working class against the obstacles that beset it.
What’s sad is that this archive had been stored in a warehouse until specially requested, and the paper was so fragile and bitter that it crumbled to be touched. The New York Public Library is one of perhaps three archives left of the “Free Voice,” perhaps the last archive that is not microfiche, and is incomplete, missing many volumes and issues.
Although the union that they helped organize lives on as a powerful advocate of workers in the hotel industry, the names, thoughts and deeds of those radical pioneers is all but lost. I hope, in some small way, to correct that.
WFP: Now Send a Message to the Senate
From the Working Families Party:
No employee of a multi-billion dollar company like Wal-Mart should be forced to go without medical care or forced to resort to Medicaid. The Fair Share for Health Care Act will ensure that large employers provide decent health benefits and level the playing field for responsible local businesses.
We’ve got over 50 Assembly cosponsors – now it’s time for you to ask your Senator to cosponsor the bill.
Ask your state Senator to sign on to the Fair Share for Health Care Act.
Bill O’Reilly’s Flying Circus
Four years ago, I was a guest on the “O’Reilly Factor,” part of a panel discussion on the income gap. It was a wonderfully surreal moment that, alas, I have yet to repeat. I just stumbled upon a transcript of the show. Below is a pretty funny bit that I believe is short enough that I can legally quote it.
Missing here is O’Reilly’s assertion that Cornell University is a socialist plot, “Parade” editor and DNC Treasurer Andrew Tobias inviting me to join the Democratic party, and, finally, Mr. O’Reilly brusquely ending the segment and announcing that Mel Gibson would be next after the commercials.
O’REILLY: OK, but here’s the deal. And you ought to know this, too, Shaun, is that for many years, I didn’t make any money. OK? And I lived in my younger time in a very frugal environment. OK? So I don’t believe that the government has the right, now that I’m successful, due to hard work and some luck, to come into my house and take my money and give it to other people, and they don’t even know what these people are going to do with it. That’s wrong, morally wrong.
…
RICHMAN: Are you living in poverty as a result of this 50 percent [tax rate]?
O’REILLY: Am I living in poverty? No, but what right do you or anybody else have, even in France, to take other peoples’ money and give it to somebody you don’t know? What right do you have, morally?
RICHMAN: It’s a basic system of fairness. Now when you weren’t making that money…
O’REILLY: Yes.
RICHMAN: When you were living in dire straits, wouldn’t it have been nicer to have a system where…
O’REILLY: No, I wouldn’t have taken a dime.
RICHMAN: You wouldn’t have taken a dime?
O’REILLY: No. Absolutely not.
RICHMAN: You would have died of tuberculosis?
O’REILLY: That’s right. And I wouldn’t have kids unless I could support them. That’s right, because I don’t believe in taking other peoples’ stuff and giving it to me. I won’t even take Social Security when I’m older. I’ll give it back or I’ll give it to charity. You see? That’s where you guys are wrong. You’re taking stuff, you’re making value judgments. You’re giving it to other people and you don’t know what those other people are going to do. That’s wrong. Am I wrong?
Why did they never invite me back?
Newsflash
This just in. After analyzing subpoenaed Google search records, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced that they foiled a new 9/11 Al Quaeda plot involving “blonde hair big tits.”
I hope that all you refuseniks and ACLU’ers out there stop and think about what kind of busty, peroxide doomsday your interference might have caused. Have more faith in your government. You’re not even using those civil liberties, anyway.