A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants
On September 8, 1947, federal agents walked into the midtown Manhattan office of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6 and arrested its president for being an “undesirable alien.” Michael J. Obermeier had been organizing hotel workers into a succession of scrappy independent unions since he arrived in New York as a German immigrant around the time of the first World War. By the time of his arrest, he led 27,000 union members in a powerful affiliate of the American Federation of Labor.
That same day, attorneys for the CIO’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 were fighting an aggressive move to deport John Santo, the union’s Romanian-born organizing director. Local press asked the Deputy Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Thomas Shoemaker, if these actions were a part of a crackdown. Shoemaker’s mild response was that the legal actions were “in the normal order of business.”
The truth is that they were both. The federal government was cracking down on union leaders it believed to be Communists, and it was specifically targeting activists based upon their immigration status. Dozens of arrests, prosecutions and deportation procedures were initiated against alleged Communist activists in the weeks and months that followed. It’s a pattern that has marked American politics for over a century.
A new book by lawyer and historian Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, comprehensively lays out this long history of using the denial—and even the threatened removal—of citizenship in order to restrict some forms of political action.
A history of ideological exclusion
Restrictions on naturalization coincided with the advent of partisan politics, according to Kraut. Article I of the Constitution directs Congress to “establish an uniform rule of Nationalization,” and the first one that Congress set, in 1790, allowed white foreigners to become citizens after just two years of residency. This liberal policy made the United States a haven for political refugees throughout the 1790s, and they became active in American politics. The Irish fleeing British rule and French fleeing the twists and turns of their revolution tended to support Thomas Jefferson’s new Democratic-Republican clubs that were critical of the Federalists’ drive for a strong central government.
By the end of the decade, the Federalists were frustrated by the legislative intransigence of Jefferson’s party and with its many publications that were critical of them. President John Adams, a Federalist, was facing a tough re-election and itching for war with France. In 1798, he signed the notorious Sedition Act into law, which made it a crime to publish material critical of the government, or the president. Less well remembered is that the Federalists also updated the Naturalization Act to greatly increase the years of residency needed to become a citizen, and passed an Alien Friends Act, which gave the president the power to deport non-citizens that he deemed a threat to the nation’s security.
Most of us were taught in high school that the United States ultimately survived this early test of our democracy. After all, when Adams lost to Jefferson in 1800, he peacefully transferred power, establishing a norm. The Sedition Act expired and Adams never used his expulsion powers under the Alien Friends Act. Readers of this publication, on the other hand, are all too aware that a reliance on norms makes for a vulnerable democracy, and a hardening of the line between citizen and resident alien leaves the latter population vulnerable to persecution. (Indeed, the reason Adams never had to use his deportation powers, Kraut shows us, is that many of Adams’ targeted enemies self-deported before he had the chance to do it by force.)
In the century that followed, Congress continued to make it difficult for immigrants to naturalize, but primarily for reasons of regulating the workforce, coupled with racist exclusion (mostly directed at Asian workers). Kraut does not neglect this scorched underside of our national melting pot myth, but the subjects of “ideological exclusion and deportation” are perhaps less well understood—even by those on the Left—than the fact that our immigration laws are inherently racist.
The 20th century drive to deny and revoke citizenship of dissidents began with a bang. When President William McKinley was shot to death in 1901 his assassin, Leon Czolgosz, claimed to be an anarchist who drew his inspiration from a lecture he attended by Emma Goldman. Although Czogolz was a natural-born citizen, anarchism was still viewed as a foreign ideology and Congress responded by voting to ban anarchists or anyone who advocated the “overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States,” language that in one form or another remains in federal immigration code.
Goldman was made notorious by the assassination that she neither called for nor condoned. But she was a revolutionary, and her writings and public speeches on anarchism and workers’ rights, not to mention her advocacy of free love and contraception, made her the bête noire of the law and order types who wanted to stamp out “criminal anarchy.” The barrier to kicking Emma Goldman out of the country, aside from the yawning gulf between philosophical anarchism and advocating real acts of violence, was that she was a U.S. citizen by marriage.
Obsessed with so-called undesirable aliens, Congress in 1906 passed a law that for the first time allowed for the denaturalization of a person who obtained citizenship through fraud or misrepresentation. Immigration officials almost immediately began investigating Goldman’s estranged husband. Finding that he had misrepresented his age in his application for citizenship, he was denaturalized. Goldman lost her own citizenship as a result and spent 10 years restricting her travel, well-aware of how vulnerable she now was to deportation. She was eventually purged in 1919, along with 248 other foreign radicals, and deported to Russia during the first Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik revolution and (at the time) the largest strike wave in U.S. history.
Anti-communism would animate most changes to immigration law, and much of federal law enforcement, in the decades that followed. The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to today’s FBI) that was created to investigate potentially fraudulent immigration paperwork in 1908 transformed into a domestic spy agency focused on going after underground Communists in the 1920s. In 1940, Congress again revised immigration and naturalization code, and passed the Smith Act, making it a federal crime to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence,” or to belong to an organization that did. This included publishing, public speaking and organizing. The Smith Act further required foreign nationals to be fingerprinted and to sign an affidavit regarding the date and place of entry to the United States, the intended length of stay, the activities he or she expected to be engaged in, criminal record (if any) and other information that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) might request.
This 20th century sedition law was drafted in response to the INS’s inability to deport Harry Bridges, the longshore workers leader who led the 1934 strike that snarled shipping up and down the West Coast and led to a general strike in San Francisco. Although Bridges’ denied belonging to the Communist Party (CP), he was seen as a threat to commerce and national security. Bridges, who emigrated from Australia in 1920, was vulnerable to deportation and the House Un-American Activities Committee pressed the INS to begin deportation proceedings—under the older Anarchist Exclusion language—in 1938. A June 1939 Supreme Court decision, Strecker vs. Kessler, narrowly ruled that the exclusion language could only be applied to someone who was an active member of an organization that fit its definition of one that advocated the violent or forceful overthrow of the government. Bridges was definitely not an active member of the CP at the time, denied ever having been a member, and the prosecution could never prove otherwise. He walked out a free man.
The new law added 10 years of retroactivity to the affidavit required in a naturalization application, regarding membership in a revolutionary anti-government organization. This is why the infamous question in congressional hearings and other investigations was, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” It was a trap. Answer honestly, and you could go to jail under the Smith Act. Lie, and you could be denaturalized and deported under the Nationality Act. Michael J. Obermeier, the New York hotel workers leader, was one of 41 Communist labor organizers arrested in the initial crackdown of 1947. By 1949, Kraut writes, “the number had swelled to 135” and the Attorney General, Tom C. Clark, maintained a list of 2,100 foreign Communists who he wanted to deport.
“Are you now or have you ever been…”
Michael J. Obermeier is not one of the stories that Kraut tells in Threat of Dissent. He’s my research subject. Over a decade since filing my first Freedom of Information Act requests, I’ve been studying his FBI file and those of his comrades. Without knowing the complete dark history that Kraut’s book compellingly brings into the light, it was clear to me that the FBI was prioritizing investigatory resources based upon the immigration status of its targets. Obermeier was fingered in 1942 for work he was doing among German-Americans in support of the Allied war effort. Within two years, FBI agents had interviewed a dozen ex-comrades and had dug up details on numerous trips in and out of the country in the years between his first arrival in the country and his (unsuccessful) 1939 naturalization application, and were building the case to deport him.
By contrast, the FBI began investigating Obermeier’s long-time organizing partner, Jay Rubin, in late 1943. President of the NY Hotel Trades Council, Rubin was allied with a number of conservative AFL craft unions and maintained stable bargaining relationships within the hospitality industry. More importantly, from the FBI’s perspective, he became a naturalized citizen in 1929. He was added to the Security Index, a list of key individuals to be arrested if the government ever decided to completely suppress the Communist Party. But the FBI mostly kept tabs on him, and only briefly considered denaturalizing him in the late 1950s when a couple of agents convinced themselves that Rubin had only pretended to quit the CP in 1950.
Gertrude Lane, the General Organizer (and, later, Secretary-Treasurer) of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6, was a natural born citizen and graduate of Hunter College. Despite evidence that she served on the CP’s National Committee, she was dismissed as “not currently of sufficient interest” to add to the Bureau’s Security Index. Instead, the New York office mildly collected her birth, education and voter records, known aliases and whereabouts—and passively accepted tips from snitches.
As with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, we’re taught in school that the postwar Red Scare was a test of our democracy that we ultimately passed. After all, the overreach of the Smith Act was eventually blunted by the Supreme Court, and today, the Communist Party can operate in the open as a legal organization once again. But people’s lives were destroyed in the process, and immigrants were singled out for targeted harassment. More importantly, the principles of ideological exclusion and denaturalization are still enshrined in the law under the exclusive purview of the executive branch.
A good chunk of the latter half of Threat of Dissent is focused on the Nixon and Reagan administrations’ efforts to deny entry visas to scientists and public intellectuals who belonged to socialist or antifascist organizations, or who supported Palestinian statehood or opposed South African apartheid. This includes the ridiculously petty efforts to deny the ex-Beatles member John Lennon a visa renewal because of his public opposition to the war against Vietnam, and to kick the famed actor Charlie Chaplin out of the country for thumbing his nose at the House Un-American Activities Committee. “These cases,” writes Kraut, “served as a reminder of the importance of discretion and of who holds that discretion to determine the fate of foreigners seeking to enter the United States, as well as the potential for abuse of discretion under the law.”
Indeed, that executive discretion is at the heart of President Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban.” While obviously racist in his intentions, his executive order drew its authority from Red Scare-era ideological exclusion laws and the flimsy argument that visitors from majority-Muslim nations are predisposed towards terrorism. Now consider Trump’s recent efforts to declare the loose network of antifascist organizers a “domestic terrorist organization.” He wants to tap into the surveillance and civil forfeiture powers afforded him under the PATRIOT Act (which Democrats voted to renew during Trump’s term). Just wait until Stephen Miller tells him he can also deport antifascists who aren’t natural-born citizens!
If Joe Biden is able to defeat Trump in November, progressives should treat his presidency with the same level of fear and loathing as we did the Trump and Bush administrations. The basic democratic rights of citizenship should not be the playthings of presidents. When we are finally able to turn our attention towards shutting down Stephen Miller’s toddler concentration camps and establishing a “pathway to legal citizenship,” we also have to insist upon irrevocable citizenship as a right.
[This article was originally published at In These Times.]
Fighting Against Racism—And For a Better Paycheck—On the Docks
“Dockworkers have power.” With that simple statement, Western Illinois University professor and In These Times contributor Peter Cole kicks off his compelling new history, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press).
The story of the west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), its legendary founder Harry Bridges, and the 1934 San Francisco general strike he led is broadly familiar to Americans who enjoy romantic stories of derring do from the labor movement’s past. Less familiar may be the union’s struggle for anti-racist hiring and layoff policies on the docks, and its crucial allyship in various civil rights struggles.
Cole pairs their history with that of black South African docker organizing that presaged the struggle against apartheid by decades, and created an early and durable institutional stronghold of black power in South Africa.
The similarities between the two unions don’t end with the struggle for their black members’ civil rights. Half a world away, the unions also struggled to maintain job control in a system of casual employment, grappled with job-killing containerization and flexed their power at the choke points of the global economy to extend solidarity to workers’ freedom struggles around the world.
Although rarely in direct communication with each other, especially during the Apartheid era, the unions had remarkably similar approaches to the issues that vexed them. Cole’s book is a valuable contribution to the relatively thin field of global union comparisons.
Workers of the world (trade)
By the nature of their work, dockworkers of all countries have long been more cosmopolitan than many comrades in their respective national labor movements. They are exposed to new ideas and far-away struggles. Cole’s book stresses how these two regional workers’ movements melded their organizing for a better paycheck with the struggle against racism in their broader societies and how—keenly aware of their leverage in the fast-moving global economy—they went on to exercise transnational solidarity at these ports of trade.
One of the substantial victories of the 1934 Bay Area strike was the replacement of the shape-up system—the informal hustle for day labor work—with a union-operated hiring hall that worked to racially integrate the workforce. African-Americans from southern states joined the ranks en masse during World War II and were welcomed into union membership.
But the end of the war brought a serious reduction in work on the docks. Union leadership recognized that if membership ranks within the hiring hall were reduced on a “last in, first out” basis, the newer black longshoremen would disproportionately feel the effects of the layoffs—an action that would leave scars within the port workforce for generations. In an act of racial solidarity that stands out in the pre-civil-rights era, the Bay Area locals of the ILWU decided instead to share the lack of work. All existing members stayed in the union, and worked fewer shifts until business picked back up.
As a racially integrated union with a large black membership, the ILWU naturally played a leading role in connecting the labor and civil rights movements. The Bay Area locals were key organizers of a local 1963 civil rights demonstration, in addition to organizing one of the farthest-traveling contingents to that year’s famous March on Washington. They formed the membership backbone of the local chapters of the NAACP and Urban League. They pressed successfully for fair employment and housing laws in Oakland, and the union used its pension fund to build racially-integrated cooperative housing in the rapidly gentrifying Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco.
As Cole notes, the exceptional role of the ILWU in many left-wing struggles is often glancingly mentioned in historical accounts of the postwar labor movement. This book is the first time all of these examples and more have been brought together in a comprehensive narrative.
Durban dockers have enjoyed far less attention from American scholars. Their history of labor militancy dates back to the 1950s, although the apartheid state did not extend formal union recognition to industries that employed black workers until the 1980s. The union they formed—today called the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU)—made substantial gains in pensions, health and safety—and won for workers a guaranteed minimum wage regardless of the availability of work. It also affiliated with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a junior partner with the African National Congress (ANC) in both the successful final drive to end white minority rule and in the post-Apartheid government since 1994.
Interestingly, the ILWU’s commitment to civil rights extended to international solidarity. As early as 1962, Bay Area longshoremen occasionally refused to unload South African cargo in protest of Apartheid. In 1984, union members refused to unload South African cargo off of an older non-containerized ship, the Nedlloyd Kimberly, which sat docked at San Francisco’s Pier 80 for 11 days. The protest attracted the attention of community activists who joined daily rallies outside the port and eventually brought the ongoing work anti-apartheid boycotts to Bay Area colleges and community groups.
In more recent years, Bay Area longshoremen have refused to unload ships carrying Israeli cargo in 2010 and again in 2014, during periods of active military attacks against Palestinians.
Durban dockers, too, have notably refused to unload ships under contract with Israeli corporations in protest of what they call—and they have some license to say this—“an apartheid regime.” And their solidarity activism doesn’t end there. In 2008, they prevented a bloodbath by turning away a Chinese shipment of armaments that the embattled president of neighboring Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had ordered in a last-ditch effort to prop up his regime.
Maintaining worker power in the face of economic change
Both dock workforces began their nonunion eras essentially as on-call temps. In addition to racially integrating the docks, the ILWU-operated hiring hall also freed workers from bribery and the blacklist and allowed them to keep the best part of casual employment—only showing up for work when they felt like it and needed the paycheck.
The non-employee status of Durban dockers, on the other hand, was a source of union power and legal protection, and made de-casualization the employers’ strategy to reign in the power of the unions. The Apartheid system of labor relations basically exempted industries that employed black workers from statutory collective bargaining, while making strikes illegal. But if workers finish their shift with no promise or guarantee of more work the next day and—collectively and entirely coincidentally—don’t bother showing up in the morning to see if there’s more work available until the wages get better, is that legally-speaking an “illegal” strike?
By defying white boss power in work stoppages, the Durban dockers became pioneers in the African freedom struggle. A 1954 Durban docker strike resulted in wage concessions, but also the termination and blacklisting of strike leaders. Other strikes followed, but the workers were careful to not elect any formal leadership. Cole argues that the dockers sparked a strike wave in other industries in the port city in 1973. Those Durban strikes are widely acknowledged as a turning point in the struggle against Apartheid.
White authorities retaliated by making the dockers regular hourly employees, which stabilized the workers’ incomes but legally restricted their ability to strike. (The Apartheid state did move to formally recognize unions of black workers by the end of the decade, and the post-Apartheid constitution protects the right to strike.)
Another economic change that all the world’s dock workers had to contend with was containerization. The standardized containers—40 or 20 feet long—that transition neatly from train to truck to boat (and back again) have revolutionized world trade. Filled with anything from diapers to televisions to just about any cheap plastic thing slapped with a “Made in (fill in the blank)” label, they rocket products around the world in the global logistics supply chain.
Amazon’s two-day shipping program would be largely impossible without them. Entire fleets of boats have been replaced to accommodate the containers. Harbors have been dredged, ports relocated and shorelines reshaped.
Of course, they’re job killers. Machines do much of the heavy lifting that used to require full crews of workers.
Containerization was imposed on Durban dockers in 1977, years before they gained formal collective bargaining rights. In the decade before container ships first appeared at the Durban docks, the workforce peaked at 3,500 workers. By the time automation was fully implemented in the mid-1980s only 1,200 workers remained.
In the Bay Area, Harry Bridges had the unique combination of street cred, shop-floor power and battle fatigue to make an accommodation with the shipping magnates. Rather than engage in dubious battle to preserve back-breaking jobs that were rapidly becoming unnecessary, Bridges struck deals in 1960 and 1966 that guaranteed all existing longshoremen wages even if there was no work. The slimmer crews who would work with the machines to remote control the giant steel boxes on and off the boats were promised a greater share of the profits.
When rank-and-filers felt that those financial gains did not make up for the loss of job control they had previously enjoyed, they went on strike over Bridges’ objections during the winter of 1971 to 1972. Stung, the old Communist militant lent no personal support to the strike.
Still, the organized workers who remained employed in the Bay Area and at the world’s ports enjoy a position of tremendous leverage within globalized capitalism.
Strangling the chokepoints of global capital
There is an understandable tendency among those of us who care deeply about restoring the power of unions to grasp for breakthrough strategies and inspiring flare-ups of worker militancy like the recent teachers strikes and digital newsroom organizing wins. In contrast, trade unionists who instead focus on port workers and truck drivers can seem hopelessly quaint and backwards-looking. Meanwhile, global capitalism is still at its root about making and selling products in the global marketplace. Workers who have a hand in how quickly those products move—if they move at all—retain the capacity for tremendous power.
Another book that takes stock of the potential power of workers at strategic locations in the global supply chain is Choke Points (Pluto), a new collection of essays edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness. Peter Cole is here as well documenting the Durban dock workers’ solidarity actions on behalf of other African struggles for freedom from colonialism.
Elsewhere, Peter Olney, former organizing director of the ILWU, makes a characteristically masterful contribution on the evolving nature of the global economy and the west coast longshoremen’s role in it. He writes, “the future for powerful dockworkers lies in conceptualizing themselves as logistics workers.” By this he means extending longshore organizing and solidarity further inland to the warehouses and trucking companies that combine to form the central nervous system of so-called free trade. The threat of waging strikes that can roll from boat to truck to warehouse would be an obvious point of leverage.
Sheheryar Kaoosji contributes a vital and educational post-mortem assessment of one such effort, the comprehensive campaign to organize the warehouse workers and truck drivers a decade ago in the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Despite being “resourced with strategic researchers and experienced organizers, and supported by motivated community partners,” this signature effort of Change-to-Win faltered with the changing political winds in Washington and the rival labor federations and the inability to get workers in different parts of the logistics chain to see their own common cause.
Although the strategic location and potential power of the people who work at these choke points is obvious to outside agitators, the tendency of workers to focus on the boss who gets in their face and the name that signs their paycheck instead is a perennial obstacle to the untapped power of solidarity. Looking at labor battles in Turkey, contributors Çağatay Edgücan Şahin and Pekin Bengisu Tepe describe the problem as a “nineteenth-century working class” going up against the “Age of Industry 4.0’s capital.”
Some of the other essays in the volume are thick with academic jargon that make them less accessible to the layman. It’s regrettable, because if you can parse the language Choke Points is a blueprint for revolution.
The best contribution both of these books could make is to help focus the new generation of young socialists who are eager to help rebuild the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers on where our power really lies. I mean no disrespect to the crucial work of journalists and teachers, but global capitalism can grind to a halt when the ships don’t sail on time.
[This article was originally posted at In These Times.]
“The Class Idea” (And How to Get It)
Many progressives in the United States are prone to making gloomy jokes about moving North whenever conservative forces grip our national institutions. After all: Canadians have unions! They have health care! They don’t pretend that everyone’s middle class!
Why, people wonder, are the politics and labor movements of the two countries so different?
In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, sociology professor Barry Eidlin grapples with this question. His explanation not only illuminates the history but suggests some ideas about a course correction for the U.S. labor movement.
Canada, by contrast, strengthened its labor laws. The Canadian labor party—the New Democratic Party—is frequently in power in certain provinces, acting like a left pressure bloc on Canada’s not-quite two party system.
Eidlin locates the source of this reversal of fortune, in part, in how much harder the Canadian unions had to fight to establish themselves. In contrast, an American labor law regime was handed to union organizers by the New Deal. The fight in Canada took a decade longer for the government to recognize a protected right to engage in union activity, and it solidified a class consciousness among Canadian workers that in the United States is a bit more, well, flippy-floppy.
And this raises the perennial question: How can we get the American working class to recognize its own existence and fight like hell for what it deserves?
The United States and Canada are remarkably similar countries in terms of labor politics. We were colonized by the same European nations—England and France—which shaped our political cultures. And U.S. unions colonized Canadian workplaces by chartering locals north of the border. (The “I” in most unions’ acronyms stands not for “Industrial” but for “International,” which basically means, “Oh, and we have some members in Canada.”) For that reason, Canada’s labor law regime was modeled on the U.S. emphasis on government-certified bargaining units with firm-level contract bargaining, exclusive representation, and the union shop.
The passage of key pro-union legislation, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, preceded and in some ways made possible U.S. labor’s great upsurge in organizing and strike activity, Eidlin argues. Union rights were in effect “granted” by the Roosevelt Administration, which was rewarded, in turn, with the entrance of unions into the Democratic Party coalition as a special interest.
The Canadian government responded to increasing worker militancy during the Great Depression with equal parts repression and indifference. By way of example, Vancouver dockworkers went on strike in 1935 for union recognition. The struggle faced armed resistance from employers and the police, briefly spreading to a general strike punctuated by a bloody street fight—the Battle of Ballantyne Pier. In the United States, the West Coast longshoremen who had gone on strike the year prior, won union recognition through federal pressure and a nascent system of New Deal tripartite arbitration. The Vancouver dockworkers’ fight dragged on another decade until the Canadian government created more labor-friendly laws.
As a result, Canadian workers were far more likely to see themselves as a working class with distinctly different interests than the bosses, government, and two major parties. They made common cause with farmers in a third party—the forerunner of today’s New Democratic Party—that continued to gain votes and threaten the power of the established party. Crucially, they continued to strike during World War II for their rights and in protest of rising inflation.
That electoral threat, combined with the impact of the strikes on wartime production, finally compelled Canada’s government to enact a labor law that protected workers’ rights in 1944.
American unions’ post-war rise in militancy, by contrast, was greeted with legislative repression. The Taft-Hartley Act—which outlawed many forms of strikes and legalized anti-union “right to work” legislation—codified the legal status of unions as a mere special interest, one to be “balanced” against management.
Eidlin explores the key tests of strength faced by unions in the postwar years, and how that shaped the divergence in fortunes. Both countries faced a Red Scare, but unions in the U.S. contended with a 1960s New Left not centered on questions of class.
Canada’s labor movement, in contrast, made room for New Left politics within its New Democratic Party. They were able to tap into the hard-fought recognition of class interests to convince the government to strengthen labor laws as a way to mediate industrial disputes.
Eidlin, I think, underestimates the explanation given by many previous scholars for the lack of an American labor party: that property-based restrictions on voting were abolished before American workers had a chance to fully conceive of themselves as a separate class. The American labor movement entered the Great Depression already an atomized collection of special interests to be courted by the two major parties.
Regardless, a more urgent question for American activists is how to to wake the working-class giant. I suggest two trends—legal reform and political realignment—that contain promise.
One idea for creating a new labor relations system is an old idea that’s gaining traction: wage boards. These are public, tripartite industrial standards boards that can raise wages and working standards across entire industries. They were a cornerstone of the early New Deal framework, and still exist in some states, waiting for a demand to be revived.
The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, FDR’s first legislative effort to woo unions into the Democratic fold, is perhaps best remembered for its Section 7 guarantee of workers’ rights to organize unions. Though lacking an enforcement mechanism, the guarantee did inspire workers to sign up for unions in droves and helped get labor’s great uprising going.
The act also created tripartite industrial boards, like the National Longshore Board that arbitrated end of the 1934 strike. These consisted of a representative each from companies, unions, and “the public” for each major industry—with the power to establish minimum wages, work rules and union recognition. Strong unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and United Mine Workers were able to press the boards to raise wages and spread union standards across non-union firms in their industries. In non-union industries where workers didn’t rise up in paralyzing strikes, the boards gave little thought to working conditions.
The National Labor Relations Act was meant to be an enforcement mechanism for the National Industrial Recovery Act’s “right to organize.” The 1935 act outlawed pervasive union-busting techniques like retaliation and surveillance of union activity of employees. It threatened the power of the state to restrain “unfair labor practices,” and it demanded that employers bargain in good faith when workers declared themselves to be a union.
But the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by an arch-conservative Supreme Court that detested the idea of any kind of federal intervention in the private market. Roosevelt signed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act into law a few weeks after the court struck down the earlier law. His expectation had been that the two laws would exist side by side. The NLRA-created National Labor Relations Board would protect workers’ rights to organize and strike, while the NIRA-created industrial wage boards (and their state-level counterparts) would arbitrate union demands and impose the terms on employers.
University of Michigan law professor Kate Andrias proposes that wage boards, still on the books in states like California and New Jersey, could be used to pioneer a new form of social bargaining in the here and now. This is not pie in the sky. New York’s wage board system was dusted off by Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the Fight for $15 movement.
American unionists might hear “tripartite” as “two votes to one against the workers.” But what do you call a group of decision-makers who could vote to give you and your peers a wage increase or fairer scheduling practices or the right to several weeks of paid family leave but resists doing so? I call that a boss – a big one that we can run campaigns against.
Let’s imagine a hospitality industry labor board. The board could enact a whole range of changes, from raising the minimum wage to abolishing the practice of tipping. It could ban “clopens,” the practice of assigning an employee to work the first shift of the day after she just finished the last shift of the night before. It could take on issues of harassment in the workplace, like granting cocktail waitresses the right to refuse to wear “uniforms” that are too sexually exploitative.
The workers’ representative on the board could force a vote on any issue. Once that vote is scheduled, every union and workers center with an organizing stake in the industry would agitate for a yes vote. Join us. Sign this petition. Wear this button. Pay your dues. The unions could anticipate which major employers would have the most influence on the other two board members, and target them for disruption with actions like slowdowns, consumer boycotts, and rolling strikes.
Unlike in our current system, where workers are siloed in their bargaining relationships with individual employers, unions could take on entire industries as a class.
Our political system is in the midst of a rare political realignment, suggesting that a class-based party of the people is possible, even in America. As the Republican Party degenerates into authoritarianism and white nationalism, it becomes unelectable in many large city and big urban states. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, remains a big blob of incoherence, grappling with an energized left flank while trying to absorb “former” Republicans who would drag it to the right.
The solution may be regional. We are seeing the ideological fight, appropriately, in primaries, as witnessed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upsetwin over Congressman Joseph Crowley, and Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to Andrew Cuomo’s reelection.
But states like New York have essentially a one-party system—there is no threat of a Republican eking out a win in a three-way race. This makes a formation like the Working Families Party a viable second party.
With affiliates in more than a dozen states, the Working Families Party tends to act as a left pressure group in Democratic primaries, but doesn’t shy away from challenging corporate Democrats in general elections. It represents our best chance at an independent labor party in the United States and, like Canada’s New Democratic Party, could work on a regional basis.
More crucially, if the GOP continues its death rattle of naked racism and authoritarian hero-worship, while billionaire vampires like Howard Schutz and Michael Bloomberg abandon its corpse to suck what life remains from the Democratic Party, the rest of us are going to need a party to continue to fight for the survival and uplift of the 99 percent.
That is not to say permanent union opposition to both boss and state is a long-term winning strategy. Eidlin’s book—along with two centuries of union organizing in practice—make clear that workers need state power to restrict the worst impulses of corporations. But a degree of explicitly declared political autonomy within the current Democratic coalition, combined with a labor relations framework that treats workers as a distinct and protected class interest, could revive the class idea in the United States.
[This article originally appeared in The Progressive.]
Take This Bullshit Job and Pretend to Love It
The British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” What kind of misery is it, then, if your particular form of exploitation is being asked to do nothing particularly useful?
David Greaber explores this question in his thought-provoking and hilarious new book, Bullshit Jobs. Five years ago, he wrote an essay for the radical magazine Strike!, asking why people in the United States and England are not working the 15-hour weeks that John Maynard Keynes had predicted would be the result of technological advancement? In our post-scarcity society, he argued, only a tiny fraction of the population actually has to labor in order to provide for the material needs of all. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” he wrote.
The essay went viral. Millions of people read it and thousands wrote him to vent about their own pointless jobs. Those first-person accounts enliven and flesh out Graeber’s book.
He breaks down these jobs into five major categories: Box-tickers, Duct tapers, Taskmasters, Flunkies, and Goons. While humorous, it’s also a well thought-out system of categorizing pointless work by the dynamics that create them. A Duct-taper, for instance, is hired because an existing employee (very likely a full-of-it supervisor) either skips or botches one essential part of his assignment and so an entire extra employee is hired to make sure that that one small task gets carried out. That task may be essential, but it hardly amounts to a full-time assignment.
A Box-ticker, on the other hand, exists mainly so an organization can claim it is doing something that it doesn’t actually take seriously. Much of this involves researching and compiling reports no one will read to comply with a regulation or to document progress on a mission or goal.
Flunkies, meanwhile, are employees hired purely to make their supervisor appear more important. A receptionist whose main function is to place phone calls for a middle manager just to say to the party on the other line, “Please hold for Mr. ____,” is a perfect example.
These bullshit jobs make up an astonishingly large portion of the global economy. Inspired by his initial essay, one U.K. poll found that 37 percent of respondents did not believe their job made “a meaningful contribution to the world.” A similar poll of Dutch workers found that 40 percent of workers didn’t think their jobs served a useful purpose.
Barraged by right-wing talking points, much of the public has come to believe that pointless, self-created bureaucracy is uniquely a public-sector malady. But Graeber found many times more private- than public-sector workers reaching out to him to complain—in detail—about their salaried jobs, which they said would make no discernable difference in the world if they quit and the posting was left vacant for several months (or years). Many of these were in financial and legal firms, where the bloat was by design. The purpose (for a law firm) might be to whittle away a chunk of a large class-action settlement on administrative expenses, or to make a manager seem more important by virtue of the number of employees reporting to him. Usually, it was some combination of the two.
The real difference between the public and private sectors isn’t—to borrow a line from Ghostbusters—that “in the private sector; they expect results.” Instead, Graeber finds, it’s that corporate firms expect every employee to actually show up each week for his or her 40-plus hours of “work” and to “look busy” while doing it.
Picture here the Seinfeld character George Constanza, who, after years of temp jobs and unemployment lands a cushy job in the New York Yankees’ back office. Well-paid and in delightful proximity to the heroes of his youth, he nevertheless suffers anxiety from the fact that he doesn’t understand what his job is supposed to be and nobody at work seems to be sweating him about assignments or deadlines. His stroke of brilliance is to furrow his brow and squint his eyes in a way that makes him “look busy” to his colleagues.
It’s funny in a sitcom but borderline tragic in real life. Why a bullshit job would be regarded as daily torture instead of a paid vacation might be confounding to anyone who hasn’t spent the lions’ share of her waking life pushing a boulder of Outlook calendar invites up a mountain of pointless conference calls on mute. As explanation, Graeber points to the early 20th century work of psychologist Karl Groos. Studying early childhood behavior, he noted infants’ delight at being the cause of an effect that they were able to repeat through their own actions—as well as their rage at being denied the continued ability to alter the world through their own actions. He called this “the pleasure at being the cause,” and time and research have shown that is elemental to human happiness.
Much of the “bullshitization” of white-collar work is purely accidental, but Graeber argues that capitalists couldn’t have designed a more effective pecking order of oppression if they’d tried. At the bottom, you have millions of workers striving to work longer hours and fighting for a couple more dollars an hour that might lift them out of literal poverty. In between the desperate lumpen and the de facto rulers of the world is a massive segment of the workforce who secretly suspect that maintaining a decent standard of living doesn’t correlate with useful or productive work (or, indeed, any work at all!). But challenging the system could imperil their relative comfort.
They are more likely to resent people whose jobs are easily explainable to their family and neighbors—but who nevertheless demand better wages and working conditions—than to make common cause with them.
Graeber points to autoworkers and teachers as workers who achieve a tangible degree of satisfaction from their work and who are frequent targets of the public’s ire for expecting that and decent wages. I think more of all those amateur chefs on Chopped, hoping to win a $10,000 purse in order to buy a food truck. How many thousands of people are living an essentially monastic lifestyle because they want to make a living feeding people? In a world filled with well-paying but meaningless work, or poorly-paid drudgery that a robot could (and may soon) do, is it any wonder that so many people yearn for a meaningful life spent cooking for people and watching them enjoy the literal fruits of their labor?
What I particularly love about Graeber’s book is how it contributes to the revival of the kind of labor lit that flourished in the 1970s. The last 40 years of globalization, automation, and the gutting of our labor laws has narrowed the focus of too many labor writers to questions of how workers can get enough hours at a high-enough minimum wage and with decent enough benefits to reverse an inexorable slide into poverty.
In the ‘70s, books like False Promises by Stanley Aronowitz or Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day, and especially Studs Terkel’s Working shined a light on the meaning that people struggle to find in their lives through their labor.
Interestingly, each of these books devoted some discussion to Lordstown, Ohio. That’s where General Motors had recently built a factory staffed with a bunch of hippies and Vietnam vets. These workers managed to turn the company’s pioneering “small car”—the Chevy Vega—into a notorious lemon through their protest campaign of wildcat strikes and sabotage. Despite generous and rapidly rising wages, the workers rejected not just the inhumane pace of the assembly line but also their alienation from any pleasure at being the cause of an actual car driving off at the end of production.
They wanted not just to slow down the pace of the assembly line, but to spend more time with each car as it was assembled. They wanted to experience more of the pleasure at being the cause.
Contrast all that with this juicy quote that Graeber digs up for what I don’t doubt was a sincere objection by President Obama to the push to expand Medicare for all:
Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, “Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.” That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?
Absent a vivid socialist imagination, how can we justify all of these millions of office drones affording food, shelter, and clothing if we couldn’t make them spend 40-to-60 hours a week making every doctor and patient they deal with miserable and furious?
The closest contemporary cousin to Graeber’s book is Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government, which questions why we surrender most of our constitutional rights at the boss’ doorstep and don’t even notice that we are doing it.
Like Graeber, she looks back at the value systems of the pre-industrial era and how they got twisted and confused during the revolutionary rise of capitalism and the nation-state. Anderson is a philosopher by training, and Graeber is an anthropologist—which highlights how important it is for labor studies to embrace its interdisciplinary nature.
Being an anarchist, Graeber is loath to suggest specific policy solutions. Still, he can’t help but talk about the policy that is most frequently advocated by the nerds who talk about the post-scarcity society: the universal basic income. Obviously, he sees value in decoupling the deservedness of food, shelter, and clothing from how one spends the majority of her waking hours. There simply isn’t enough useful work to go around for each of us to trade an hour for a loaf of bread.
The alternative progressive policy proposal—a federal commitment to full employment—is touted as more pragmatic and winnable. It’s a reasonable appeal to the god, mom, and apple-pie Calvinist work ethic. And, after all, there are a lot of roads and bridges that need to be rebuilt, a lot of child and elder care that should be compensated as the very real work it is, and well, who wouldn’t love to see a lot of WPA-style public artwork going up around the world? But, Bullshit Jobs should serve as a warning that a continued fidelity to the notion that one must work for one’s supper would likely condemn many of us to box-checking and duct-taping, as the machines take over and make most of us redundant.
[This article originally appeared at the American Prospect.]