Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech
It is sometimes said that there are decades in which not much changes and years in which an entire decade’s worth of sociopolitical tumult occurs. The so-called COVID year, March 2020 until the vaccine rollout of the following year, is an example of the latter. The COVID year markedly reduced average American life expectancy, nurtured extremist politics and conspiracy-minded cynicism, frayed communities, and eroded trust in institutions.
For workers who, in the words of Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, were briefly “elevated from disposable to ‘essential,’” the period led to an uptick in worker self-organizing, new wage demands and concessions on work-from-home flexibility, some successful union organizing, and a nearly impossible amount of worker protest to fully quantify, including “quiet” and actual quitting. “Not in nearly a century had so many people felt the failure of government and indifference of the bosses so quickly and so deeply, on a scale and with an intensity that was difficult to ignore.” Continue reading “Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech”
Review of Daniel J. Clark’s “Listening to Workers” for IRSH
Common to failing and fallen empires is a nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Americans like to believe that we miss working on assembly lines in auto factories.
The fantasy that “good jobs” are inherently and automatically generated by factories, or even that unionization magically converts working on an assembly line into the kind of job that workers would want their children to aspire to, motivates much of Donald Trump’s trade war. Likewise, the mixture of domestic tax incentives and narrowly tailored tariffs that comprised his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better”, aimed to “create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead”. Biden frequently waxed nostalgic about his 1950s’ childhood in Scranton, PA, and a work ethic instilled by his dad: “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community”.
Continue reading “Review of Daniel J. Clark’s “Listening to Workers” for IRSH”
The War on Communists in the Hotel Workers’ Union
The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union (HERE) gathered in Milwaukee in 1947 for its largest convention in history. With over 400,000 members, HERE was the fifth-largest affiliate of the American Federation of Labor — and growing. But a majority of delegates arrived in a less-than-celebratory mood, seeking to ban the Communists who had been so central to the union’s successes from the organization altogether.
Before the vote on a constitutional anti-communist clause, newly elected HERE president Hugo Ernst spoke against the “drastic” motion. He praised “the officers of Local 6 for the splendid work they have done in the hotels in New York, which we tried unsuccessfully to organize a good many years ago.” He attributed their success not to their being Communists (“probably in spite of that”) and lamented that had they refrained “from using their official position for other than trade union principles, probably we would not be confronted with this issue that is before us now.” Dedicating union staff and funds to Communist Party (CP) front activities far afield from contract enforcement was the most salient complaint that opponents had been lodging.
But the proposed amendment was carried amid boos while a number of delegates paraded around the convention hall waving American flags and singing “God Bless America.” Communist influence in the American Federation of Labor (AFL)’s Hotel & Restaurant Employees, though, didn’t end with a purge like it would in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) a year later.
In the end, the split was more of a family feud that kept a faction of former party influentials in power, continuing to lead a progressive union that fought for civil rights, socialized medicine, and good union contracts for decades to follow. Today with a growing socialist movement committed to a “rank-and-file” union strategy, New York’s hotel workers provide a lesson in how to gain — and lose — socialist influence within the labor movement. Continue reading “The War on Communists in the Hotel Workers’ Union”
LaGuardia: the pro-union mayor: Today’s City Hall contenders must follow Fiorello’s labor agenda
In New York’s mayoral election, plenty of candidates claim to be the anti-Trump. But, when it comes to protecting workers’ rights and reducing economic inequality, the better question is who will be the neo-LaGuardia. The “Little Flower” served as the city’s mayor from 1934 to 1945. A Republican, Fiorello LaGuardia was an aggressive advocate for egalitarian and anti-corruption New Deal policies, particularly in support of working New Yorkers at a time when the ambitions of the federal government remained limited.
An example: In 1934, newly elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia watched a citywide hotel strike drag on for a second month, and determined to find an amicable settlement for the workers. The industry, represented by the Hotel Association, sparked the strike by firing union activists who refused to join a company union.
The federal government’s untested mediators saw their job as getting the strikers back to work; nothing more, nothing less. The hotel bosses doubted the feds even had that authority, and steadfastly refused to negotiate with their workers’ chosen representatives.
The mayor responded by siccing the city’s health inspectors on the picketed hotels, producing 600 summonses in 48 hours, embarrassing the bosses and humiliating the scabs (who were forced to line up and drop their pants for mandatory hernia exams). The strike ended the following week.