Company Towns Are Still with Us
On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. Meeting them at the station were the local police chief—a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud—and several out-of-work miners with guns.
The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders. The street erupted in gunfire. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead—including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns.
The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that could only be spent at that company store. When they joined a United Mine Workers organizing drive and struck for better pay, they were fired and blacklisted.
Without a union, a workplace can be a dictatorship. But what if your boss is also your landlord, your grocer, your bank, and your local police? That kind of 24/7 employer domination used to be a common practice before the labor movement and the New Deal order brought it to an end.
Today, however, the corporate assault on unions is leading to the return of the company town. These new company towns are dominated by one large business that owes no obligation to aid in the town’s well-being—quite the contrary, in fact. As was clear in this past summer’s failed UAW organizing drive at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, the ever-present threat that factory relocation poses to a one-company town bends the local power structure to the company’s will. That’s why so many of the newer large factories—like the auto and aerospace plants that have sprung up across the South in recent decades—are located in remote rural areas. That’s also one reason why organizing campaigns in those locales face very steep odds.
ALTHOUGH NEW ENGLAND clothing manufacturers experimented with company housing in the early 1800s, company towns really came into their own during the industrial revolution that followed the U.S. Civil War. They were common in industries where the work was necessarily physically remote, like coal mining and logging. The company simply owned all of the surrounding land and built cheap housing to rent to the workers they recruited. In new industries like steel production, factories were built in areas where land was cheap, and the companies bought lots of it. By constructing housing on the extra land, the companies found a great way to extract extra profit from their worker-tenants. Besides, a privately owned town enabled companies to keep union organizers away and to spy on potential union activity.
Some of the most infamous and bloody labor battles of the 19th century, like the Homestead strike and the Ludlow Massacre, were sparked by the violent eviction of striking workers from their company-owned housing.
Life was even more miserable for workers where the company-store system prevailed. Employers would own and operate a general store to sell the basic necessities to workers, with as much as a 20 percent markup. An 1881 Pennsylvania state investigation into union-buster and future-walking-head-wound Henry Clay Frick’s Coke Company found that the company cleared $160,000 in annual profit from its company store (that would be about $3.5 million today).
Some employers paid their employees in “company scrip,” a kind of I.O.U. that could only be exchanged for goods at the company store. A worker who was lucky enough to get paid in cash could be fired if he or she were caught bargain-hunting at an independent store in a neighboring town. And payday was often so meager and delayed that a worker might have to buy on credit, resulting in the kind of merry-go-round of debt and reduced-pay envelopes that is disturbingly similar to the practices of today’s “payday loans” predators. It’s not for nothing that the refrain of the classic song “Sixteen Tons” goes, “I owe my soul to the company store.”
The rise of unions and the New Deal order didn’t put an end to company towns per se, but companies that gave in to union recognition found less reason to own worker housing. However, companies that remained non-union—particularly in the South—continued to act as landlord, thereby instilling in their workers an additional layer of fear and oppression to keep unions out. Lane Windham’s excellent new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970’s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, mentions—almost in passing—that one Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union organizing target, the textile giant Cannon Mills, continued to run a company town into the 1980s. When the company was purchased in a leveraged buy-out in 1982, the new owners quickly decided to sell the 2,000 houses it owned, giving workers 90 days to buy their homes or get out. The town—Kannapolis, North Carolina—finally incorporated and began electing its own city government after three-quarters of a century as a virtual dictatorship.
But Kannapolis’s conversion from a company town to a proper municipality only happened because an ailing firm in a globally competitive industry needed to sell off non-essential assets, and saw little need to be financially tethered to a community. The plant closed its doors for good in 2003, causing the largest mass layoff in North Carolina history.
Not all company towns were ramshackle developments. Some wealthy industrialists developed model company towns in misguided attempts at philanthropic social engineering.
George Pullman made a fortune building and leasing luxury sleeping cars to railroad companies. Pullman’s belief that the public would pay extra money for better-quality rail travel proved correct, and the Pullman Palace Car Company quickly had a monopoly in a market of its own invention. Pullman’s pressing need for new factories to meet consumer demand coincided with his growing paternalistic concern about poverty, disease, and alcoholism in the country’s industrial cities.
The town of Pullman was built on an area south of Chicago, near the Indiana border, adjacent to the Calumet River and the Illinois Central Railroad line. The company already owned some land there, and purchased more to begin construction in 1880. The housing that Pullman built was of much higher quality than what was typically found in working-class neighborhoods in industrial cities. There was green space and tree-lined streets. In the town center, he built a handsome and well-stocked library, a luxury hotel with the town’s only licensed bar, and a grand theater to feature “only such [plays] as he could invite his family to enjoy with utmost propriety.” Casting a shadow over the town was the towering steeple of the massive Greenwood church.
There was no requirement that Pullman’s factory workers reside in his town, and many commuted from Chicago and neighboring villages. But 12,600 Pullman employees did choose to live in his city by 1893. Some were supervisors and social climbers. Many more were young workers who wanted to raise their families in a new, clean environment. By the mid-1880s, the town was gaining a reputation as “the world’s healthiest city” for its low death rate.
Pullman’s undoing was his tendency to run his town like his business. As with his sleeping cars, he owned all the property and leased them to residents. His one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to afford its rent, and his ill-conceived attempt to convince all of the local denominations to merge into one generic mega-church failed. His library charged a membership fee to foster his notion of personal responsibility. Workers avoided the hotel bar and the watchful eye of “off-duty” supervisors, limiting their public carousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as “bum town.”
Pullman’s business sense led him to make a confounding choice for a civic father who was trying to instill middle-class values in his city: The housing, too, was for rent only. His aim was to ensure that housing remained in good repair and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them. Here, Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would pay more for higher quality, ignoring the fact that this particular public—his employees—had little choice when his was the only housing in town.
The Panic of 1893, and the severe economic downturn that followed, presented Pullman with a dilemma. His business slowed to a near halt. Any capitalist who did not also feel responsible for running a city would simply have laid off all but a skeleton crew of workers. In a more traditional company town, the laid-off workers would have been violently evicted by Pinkertons or the local police. The Pullman company reduced its workers’ hours but kept everyone employed on a reduced payroll. Crucially, however, the Pullman Land Trust did not reduce rents, plunging the town’s residents into financial crisis. Many workers fell behind on their rent. Their debt to Pullman had the effect of restricting their freedom to quit. It provoked a strike at the factory.
The strike was soon joined by a nationwide boycott backed by the new American Railway Union (ARU), which was led by Eugene V. Debs. Rail transportation around the country ground to a stop as members of the new industrial union refused to move trains that carried Pullman sleeping cars. The strike was violently crushed by the National Guard and its leaders were jailed. (Debs later said of the experience, “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed.” He emerged from jail a few years later as America’s most prominent socialist leader, calling the strike his “first practical lesson in Socialism.”)
George Pullman died in 1897, resentful of his reputation as a tyrant and of his model town’s ignominy.
Just a few years later, another bored plutocrat decided to build a model company town of his own. Friends cautioned Milton Hershey that Pullman had been a disaster for its owner. Warned that the town’s residents wouldn’t have elected George Pullman dogcatcher, Hershey responded, “I don’t like dogs that much.”
Hershey made his first fortune in caramel, and sold his confectionary for the unprecedented (for caramel, anyway) sum of $1 million in 1900. Although he retained rights to a small chocolate subsidiary, it was more of a local novelty. Prior to the advent of milk chocolate, the sweet was a luxurious treat for the wealthy that would not keep for long journeys by rail to allow for mass production and distribution
Then, like Pullman, Hershey became interested in solving the problems of modern industrial life. He founded the Hershey Chocolate Company to support his town—not vice versa. Hershey worked on a formula for milk chocolate that could be mass-produced, to provide his town with a sustainable industry.
Breaking ground in 1903, the town was located near its own source of dairy farms for his chocolate business. At the center of town was a 150-acre park, featuring a band shell, golf course, and zoo. After ten years, Hershey’s amusement park was receiving 100,000 visitors a year, making tourism a crucial second economic base for the model company town. Hershey built banks, department stores, and public schools. Unlike Pullman, homeownership was a key part of Hershey’s vision and business model.
In a case of history repeating itself, Hershey was rocked by a Congress of Industrial Organizations sit-down strike during the Great Depression. In 1937, 600 workers took control of the factory for five days. Their sit-down was broken up by scabs and angry local farmers who had watched 800,000 pounds of milk spoil each day. They broke into the factory, battering and forcibly removing the strikers.
Thanks to the New Deal order, which saw an activist federal government defending the rights of workers, however, a permanent union presence was eventually established at Hershey (although the company finagled to have its favored representative, a more conservative AFL union, win a collective-bargaining agreement).
The town of Hershey, though by no means the utopia that Milton Hershey envisioned, exists today as a modestly successful tourist trap. The theme park and the still-operating chocolate factory continue to serve as a job base for locals.
COMPANY TOWNS ARE STILL with us. In the 21st century, company towns operate less like Pullman and more like Kannapolis during the years between Cannon Mills’s sale of its company housing and the final closure of the mill. The companies no longer are their employees’ landlord, but because they’re the only major employer for miles around, they still wield extraordinary power.
This past August’s NLRB election defeat for Canton, Mississippi’s Nissan workers, who sought to be represented by the United Automobile Workers (UAW), should put unions on notice that company towns are not some relic from our sepia-toned past, but an essential feature of 21st-century manufacturing employment in the United States.
In 2003, Nissan, a French-owned multinational carmaker now valued at $41 billion, located its sole American auto assembly plant in the tiny town of Canton. The factory employs around 6,500 workers, while the town is home to roughly 13,000 residents.
In the run-up to the union election, Nissan did what almost every employer does. It didn’t threaten to fire union activists, because that would be too obviously illegal. Instead, management merely predicted that the invisible hand of the market would force it to shut down a newly unionized factory and ship all of the jobs out of town. Thusly terrorized, the entire political establishment of Canton, its churches, and the workers’ own neighbors amplified this threatening message to potential UAW supporters.
The company inundated the local airwaves with television ads in which a local pastor compared the ostensibly horrific period before Nissan arrived—when residents were “fluctuating back and forth looking for jobs”—with the good news that Nissan employees can “come through the door knowing the lights are on, the water is running.”
It actually makes sound business sense for multiple competing businesses in the same industry to be located in close physical proximity to each other. There are economies of scale that can be achieved through shared distribution channels, a major airport, a shared community of professional engineering talent, an education system designed to build the bench, and an ecosystem of parts suppliers and other complementary businesses.
It just doesn’t make business sense if you’re trying to operate on a union-free basis. The fact that Chrysler, GM, and Ford workers were friends and neighbors in Detroit and its suburbs helped organizers foster a culture of solidarity that was essential to organizing the auto industry in the 1930s and 1940s. The fact that few new auto factories, foreign or domestic, have been built anywhere near Detroit—or anywhere near each other—for more than half a century is not an accident. It’s not the result of “free trade,” of the tax-cutting “savvy” of Southern politicians, or of some inherent deficiency of the so-called Rust Belt.
It’s the product of a bloody-minded determination by “job creators” to avoid the conditions under which unions are even possible. From the overuse of “independent contractors” to sub-contracting and outsourcing, to locating new factories in small and remote geographies, corporations in America strategically structure their business to avoid the reach of NLRB-certified, enterprise-based collective bargaining.
These business practices make it clear that employers will continue to evade and sabotage any system of labor rights that is tied to individual workplaces, rather than one that applies to entire industries. We will need new labor laws and new models of worker representation to democratize our communities.
[This article originally appeared at the American Prospect.]
When Labor Fought Rock-and-Roll
Facing the world ain’t easy when there isn’t anything going
Standing at the corner waiting watching time go by
Will I go to work today or shall I bide my time
So begins the Kinks’ song, “Get Back in Line,” one of the most hauntingly beautiful paeans to the forced idleness and stress of unemployment ever committed to tape.
I’ve turned to this song for solace, a little too often for comfort, but I’ve always been discomfited by the refrain that follows.
‘Cos when I see that union man walking down the street
He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat
Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine
Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line
Is this just Ray Davies being a contradictory crank? He has, after all, written songs snarking about health prescriptions from government doctors (“National Health”) and complained “I was born in a welfare state / Ruled by bureaucracy” about his childhood experience of getting moved from an inner-city still pockmarked with unexploded Nazi bombs to a planned satellite garden community.
According to Davies, the song was inspired by a period in the late 1960s when the Kinks were prevented from performing in the United States, which he vaguely blamed on the musicians’ unions. The Kinks missed the summers of love and Woodstock, remaining behind in the United Kingdom. Due in part to that isolation, the Kinks are celebrated as perhaps the most quintessentially British of the British Invasion bands, one that put out songs about Queen Victoria and “little shops, china cups, and virginity” while everyone else was doing the whole “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” thing.
But did the musicians’ union really “ban” the Kinks from America? If so, how were they ever so powerful? And what, if anything can modern labor advocates learn from this curious history?
The answer can be found in Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock and the Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968, a recent book by Michael James Roberts about how the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) fought rock-and-roll as an emerging art form — and in the process, lost much of its power.
Roll Over, Beethoven
It’s almost impossible to imagine that a union of musicians could ever exercise monopoly power in an industry as complex as entertainment, but the AFM did so from the 1930s into the 1950s. One reason is that the industry was significantly less complicated; there were only a handful of major record labels, a few radio networks, and a finite number of concert halls. As a traditional craft union, the AFM trained and certified “qualified” musicians and forced the employers to get their musicians from the union’s hiring hall. Part of the strategy of a craft union is to try to restrict the number of workers to roughly the amount of available work.
So rock-and-roll was legitimately a threat to the union’s power, as it flooded the market with non-traditional musicians, and the cottage industry of independent labels and unconventional concert spaces that sprung up around the devil’s music undercut the union’s bargaining power.
The union’s own hostile reaction to rock-and-roll exasperated the problem.
Start with the AFM’s structural problem of not making room for rock musicians in the membership. As a craft union, the AFM needed to vouch for the professionalism of its members, who could, theoretically, get hired out to any union shop. One baseline standard of musical professionalism is the ability to read sheet music. Rock musicians, by and large, don’t. They learn by ear, playing along to records or just mucking about with tunings and electrical feedback in the garage.
To induct a rock musician who couldn’t pass the reading test would open the union’s hiring hall up to the risk of sending, say, Jerry Lee Lewis to sub in a Broadway orchestra and having the conductor send him back with the complaint, “This bum can’t play!” That might sound ridiculous now, but it was a significant structural barrier to the AFM keeping up with the times.
The format of high-fidelity records was itself a threat to the union’s power. In the context of radio stations filling their airwaves with pre-recorded classical music and big band swing rather than hiring multiple live bands every day, they are a job-killing technology.
In 1943, the union waged an impressive industry-wide strike to force the record companies to pay mechanical royalties to musicians who appear on records. But the union still wanted to limit the use of records on the air, and waged various campaigns to keep live music on the air.
But rock-and-roll is essentially a recorded art form. The records
that get put out into the world, whether on vinyl or MP3, become the definitive versions of the songs for fans, their happy accidents of studio noise, feedback, and weird pronunciation to be noted and obsessed over. The rapidly growing audience for popular music would accept no substitute for their favorite songs on the air.
Because the record industry was also slow to recognize the market for rock music, a lot of the early singles were produced by new upstart record labels like Chess, Philles, Stax, and Motown. Since the AFM refused to grant membership to many of the artists on those labels, the union missed the opportunity to organize them (despite the fact that those artists were, and still are, getting screwed out of their fair share of royalties). Today, most records are produced by non-union record labels that may nevertheless be distributed by the majors.
When rock music was recorded at unionized labels, the union’s collective bargaining framework treated rock bands more like employers than actual workers. The hiring-hall model assumed a producer or a big band leader assembling a full band of professional musicians. But a rock band can combine bandleader, songwriter, singer, producer, and the core musicians into one collective unit. Their need for the hiring hall was for extra musicians — a horn section or some strings — whom they are responsible for paying the union scale.
Rock music’s impact on the hiring hall is documented in the excellent 2008 film The Wrecking Crew, about the loose group of in-demand studio musicians who helped create a lot of famous songs in the 1960s. They were union members who stood out from the hiring hall crowd for their ability to transcend and collaboratively transform the music written on the page.
In order to specially request a musician, a band would have to also pay for the one whose number came up on the day’s roll. The film treats the idled musicians as objects of derision, sitting in the lobby in their navy blazers reading the newspaper while Carol Kaye is in the studio punching up the bass line to Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On.”
Union deals that call for workers to get paid for not working are notoriously hard to defend. Meanwhile, to this day, more rock stars turn up in the AFM’s database of employers than on their membership rolls.
Still, the story of the union isn’t solely about its role in preventing the emergence of new, innovative music. As many obituaries of the late great Chuck Berry noted, sometime in the 1970s he stopped touring with his own band. What’s less commented upon is that his contract rider spelled out that concert promoters had to hire a bassist, drummer, and piano player from the local AFM hiring hall. After all, how else could he be sure that they could really play (and that he wouldn’t have to bother negotiating a wage scale)?
We Love You Beatles, Oh Yes We Do
During the first wave of rock-and-roll, the musicians’ union mostly focused on professionally ostracizing the new breed of performing artists, and promoting cultural education for teenagers about the merits of classical and jazz music and the virtues of live performance. They also encouraged congressional investigations into the “payola scandal,” the elaborate web of schemes the upstart labels improvised to bribe radio deejays into giving their discs extra spins on the air (as if there was anything new or unique about corporations trying to buy their way to cultural dominance).
Payola and the variously coincidental airplane crashes, arrests, and military conscriptions of its biggest stars seemed to have put an end to the “fad” by the dawn of the 1960s. When rock music roared back to life with a British echo in the mid-1960s, the AFM gained a new more powerful tool with which to fight it: our nation’s immigration laws.
In order to work in the United States, British Invasion bands had to apply for H visas that required affidavits — subject to challenge — that there were no qualified American workers available to do the job.
“We can go to Yonkers or Tennessee and pick up four kids who can do this kind of stuff,” the AFM unsuccessfully argued to block the Beatles from reentry.
It’s true that to this day Paul McCartney can’t read sheet music, but the AFM’s legal argument was obviously a willful misreading of what “kind of stuff” the Beatles actually did.
While the union doubled down of their definition of professionalism and cultural merit, they sparked one hell of a backlash from teenage Beatlemaniacs. One emblematic letter from a San Diego teenager to the Secretary of Labor goes:
Please sir, what is the exact story on this? How will you determine whether there are qualified Americans when the Beatles request readmission? If you ask me or any other teen-age girl (and there’s a lot of us) there is no one who comes close to their talent, and we mean it!
Roberts includes a number of archival letters like these in Tell Tchaikovsky the News. As delightful as they are to read with 20/20 hindsight, they also point, Roberts argues, to the drift of labor from the Left.
The teenage girls and boys (of which there were many) who could not fathom a social movement that would try to restrict the free cultural exchange of the music they loved had a similarly difficult time understanding why the AFL-CIO was one of the staunchest organizational supporters of the war in Vietnam. By the time union building-trades workers were beating the shit out of hippie antiwar protesters in the “hard hat riot” of 1970, the cleavage was doomed to last for at least another generation.
In the end, the Beatles were a widely beloved cultural and capitalist force that the AFM was simply no match for. John Lennon may have sang, “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me,” but ultimately it was the Kinks that had to climb on that cross.
The key difference seems to be the Davies brothers’ penchant for onstage fisticuffs and their general surliness. The AFM managed to block the band from entering the United States from 1965 until 1969, essentially by arguing that they were dangerous aliens and that there were thousands of American workers who could do exactly what Ray and Dave Davies could do.
Only a schlocky Hollywood villain would try to prevent kids from listening to rock-and-roll, but in retrospect, that’s exactly the position that the American Federation of Musicians found themselves in.
In the labor movement, many organizers tend to assume that the way unions are organized and bargain makes sense because someone smarter than us evaluated all the options and decided on our present course as the best possible one. “It is what it is,” we shrug and tell ourselves. But maybe we should be asking something more along the lines of, “Are we trying to kill rock-and-roll?”
Also a Worker
On Super Bowl Sunday, Jacobin posted a simple tweet, “Lady Gaga: also a worker” (in response to a previous tweet noting that Tom Brady was a worker, though one badly in need of some basic political education). The account was promptly showered with dozens of negative and hostile responses from joyless and doctrinally confused leftists.
Granted, Gaga is rich and famous — a peculiar digital-age version of what Vladimir Lenin called the “labor aristocracy” — but she is a worker. Her art is the product of labor — hers and others’ — and I guarantee you that nobody involved in making her music and videos is receiving a fair share of the revenue that they generate for giant corporations.
As a result of the musicians’ union’s inability to adapt to the changes in the record industry, songwriters, bandleaders, rock stars, and pop icons like Gaga are not able to bargain collectively — a loss of power that reverberates down the chain of production.
The most notable collective action taken by recording stars in recent memory was an effort to create a streaming service to rival the bottom-feeding Spotify and Pandora, essentially asking fans to pay more for their music — not for the corporations to take less of a profit. And the most notable sustained effort by recording artists to gain more control over their working conditions, the Future of Music Coalition, is a 501(c)3, not a union.
One fantasizes about Beyoncé, Jay Z, and Daft Punk announcing instead that they were becoming charter members of a new AFM local dedicated to figuring out how pop stars could strike and boycott media conglomerates to wrest more control over what they’re paid, what they pay for, and who has final approval of their art.
Absent that, the American Federation of Musicians’ clearest pathway back to power might — irony of ironies — be through live music. Their defense of live music on Broadway, where they have members and contracts under attack, is one that generates a good amount of public sympathy. Who wants to pay a hundred dollars or more for a ticket to a “live” show and listen to canned music?
Meanwhile, recording artists who aren’t stratospherically famous make most of their money on tour. Notably, the number of concert venues in major cities is again becoming rather finite and increasingly owned and managed by chain employers like Bowery Presents. That’s the kind of concentration of ownership that can give a well-organized union real power under our current labor relations framework.
Rebuilding that power won’t look like the union’s 1943 strike, and it certainly shouldn’t look anything like the union’s approach to the dawn of rock-and-roll. But it also won’t happen by surrendering to forgone conclusions about how unions should be structured, conduct their bargaining strategy, or conduct their protests.
[Originally published at Jacobin.]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before.
There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday.
Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light in the new generation of labor and social justice reporters. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a campaign you wanted to get in the press you had exactly two full-time labor reporters to lobby to convince them that your campaign was interesting enough to warrant fighting with their editors to get it in print.
Now our movement has a slew of journalists who dig deep and follow campaigns and movements over the long haul. The result is not just that good campaigns get press attention, but that movements grow and expand as people read about them and get inspired to join or do something similar.
Jaffe has a good eye for characters and a great ear for what they have to say, making Necessary Trouble a very engaging read. She weaves a narrative that connects the 2008 economic collapse to the outrage that gave rise to the Tea Party, the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda and Occupy Wall Street. The movement for black lives, the Occupy Homes protests against bank foreclosures, the occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, student debt protests, the Chicago teachers strike(s) and the rolling strikes led by OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15, Jaffe argues, are all connected to a growing sense among Americans that the rules of the system are rigged against the working class—and doubly or triply so against workers who are black, queer, young, old, immigrants or women.
These movements are often “analyzed as if they had each happened in a vacuum,” she writes. “But in fact, as I followed them through the years, I would find similar patterns and even direct connections between them.”
The connections come, in part, to activists’ increasing understanding of “intersectionality.” That is, according to Jaffe, a term used by protestors to describe the way that people experience different forms of oppression (say, racism and sexism) as “intertwined, overlapping experiences.”
Intersectionality has become a mainstream enough concept that even Hillary Clinton felt the need to pay lip service to it on the campaign trail. “This generation,” notes City University of New York professor Ruth Milkman, “uses the word intersectionality as if it were a household label.” Jaffe makes a good case that this is a strength of the emerging movement.
Another concept that Jaffe emphasizes in her book is “horizontalism” in social movement structures. She defines the term as broad-based democratic decision-making without formalized leadership—where any member is free to speak out, propose and carry out a movement action.
“The ideal of horizontalism,” Jaffe writes “is connected to the sense that democracy, in this country, is failing, or perhaps, as some are coming to believe, that it never really worked.”
She points to Occupy Wall Street as the most obvious example of the movement’s horizontalism and experimentation with democracy. Occupy, I must say, never struck me as particularly new. It’s more like a welcome return of the Direct Action Network (DAN). Never a formal organization, the activist network was responsible for the 1999 Seattle protests that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization and went on to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Republican and Democratic conventions.
The lack of elected leaders, the consensus decision-making with “blocking concerns” and “stand asides”—even the “spirit fingers” to silently mark agreement—all of it first appeared in the DNA of DAN. The fact that a decade and a half later we are still reinventing the same wheel suggests the need for some more permanent organizations.
Jaffe agrees. “The next challenge for the movements,” she writes, “will be creating organizations that last, that suit the needs of twenty-first-century troublemakers, that can be flexible and still enduring, that can overlap and connect up with one another and create more long-term plans for the future they want to see.”
There is a deep-seated aversion to formal organization on the Left. Part of it is, as Jaffe notes, the fear of a movement becoming dominated by “charismatic leaders.” But part of it too, I think, is charismatic leaders not wanting to deal with the indignities of democratic accountability.
I worry that Jaffe’s readers will take the word “horizontalism” and use it to justify and fetishize a lack of formal organization. A better word, I think, is one she quotes to describe the movement for black lives: “leaderfull.” That is a concept that doesn’t preclude dues-paying membership, elected committees and formalized leadership. It’s more about maintaining a culture where good ideas, speakers and writers that come “from the floor” are not merely tolerated but actively solicited.
Two good examples of leaderfull organizing that Jaffe highlights come from labor. In 2008, the workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory engaged in a sit-down strike. Their leaders at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE) had proposed a small, symbolic civil disobedience action. The workers took that idea and ran with it—locking the bosses out and eventually winning their owed severance. They even got a shot at running the business themselves as a cooperative.
The second example was in 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck against Rahm Emanuel’s giveback demands. Rank-and-file activists engaged in some pretty deep coalition building and picket captains were given wide latitude with how to conduct their protests. The result was a traditional union strike that got converted into a community protest against austerity and corporate “ed reform.”
There’s no shortage of formal structure and elected leaders in labor. And while the UE and CTU are obviously exceptional unions, leaderfull organizing is more prevalent (and certainly has more potential) than is commonly recognized.
To her credit, union activists and campaigns are described throughout Jaffe’s narrative as essential to a movement fighting for an end to injustice and inequality. But I’m slightly disappointed that she didn’t delve into the recent rise in strike activity. Many of these strikes—like at Kohler and Verizon—were big, visible wins for workers.
There’s been so much written about worker centers and “alt labor” that it’s beginning to skew the market for labor writing. Yes, there’s a lot of action in alternative models of worker organizing, but old (not so) Big Labor is also showing encouraging signs of renewed militancy. Activists will learn from each other by example, and books like this must connect the dots.
To that point, Jaffe tells a delightful and inspiring story about the first night that then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to clear an Occupy encampment at the newly rechristened Liberty Park, near Wall Street, because it had to be cleaned. Occupy activists spent the night scrubbing the park down and, at dawn, were joined by hundreds of union activists, in their respective union colors, to stare down riot police. Bloomberg blinked and ordered law enforcement to withdraw. Jaffe reports that a burly orange-shirted member of the Laborers’ union turned to her to say, “This is power.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
Why “Comrade?”
A friend and, dare I say, comrade wrote me and asked why I use the word “comrade” so freely, instead of the more accepted “brother” and “sister.” Won’t people associate you with James Bond villains and bomb-throwing radicals when you use that word? And it’s true. I do throw it around a good deal, both as a warm expression of solidarity and friendship and, a little bit, to make people a bit uncomfortable in otherwise stodgy rooms.
Fuck it; I’ve already been blown up by Fox News for being dangerously un-American, so why pretend to be a safer person than I am? Besides, saying “brother” or “sister” instead of comrade is one of those bits of American exceptionalism, like not celebrating Labor Day on May 1 or calling football “soccer,” that really ought to be resisted as a matter of global solidarity. Comrade is the preferred salutation of the labor movement in most countries. Perhaps it gets lost in translation? The British default to comrade, but, being British, they pronounce it funny (“comb-rayd”).
I was a teenage socialist. I joined the Socialist Party when I was 17 years old. Although I’ve since quit the party, I remain a socialist. In socialist politics, we say comrade. We even abbreviate it as “Cde.” in the minutes (“Cde. Richman seconded the motion”). It was when I first started saying the word and where I first gained an appreciation for its meaning.
Firstly, the word conveys a sense of equality that brother and sister don’t quite get across. As I said, I was a teenage socialist. But I was a comrade, on equal footing and with equal title as people who had been in the movement for decades; people who had been trained by Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, Michael Harrington. I was their comrade.
When I organized a teach-in against one of those many little Clinton wars at Queens College with one of my professors, he called me comrade. Of course, he’s British; it comes easier to him. But it was a tremendous equalizer. I still see him at rallies or union meetings and he still greets me with a warm, “Hello, comrade. How are you?”
I first started using the word in a union context as a dare. A bunch of my co-workers marched together under no banner in the first huge march against the proposed invasion of Iraq. It was an unseasonably warm early spring day. There were a million of us. It felt like a celebration (and then the war started).
At some point during the march, my friend Alan and I found ourselves separated from our group. “It appears we have misplaced our comrades,” I said. Alan paused, laughed and challenged me, “How amazing would it be if you and I called each other comrade at the office on Monday?” And so we did, and so we have ever since.
It’s significant to this story that one of our friends at the union was trans, but not yet out. Hell, he wasn’t even out to me but it just felt wrong to call him sister. Comrade, as a gender-neutral salutation, just made practical sense. This old word has some relevance to the 21st century yet!
Finally, comrade is used in the military. The salutation is standard at VFW halls. (What could be more American than that?) To me, comrade implies that we’ve been through some shit together; a tough campaign, a boss fight, some controversy. And there’s a greater loyalty that comes out of having been through some shit together. Calling someone a comrade, for me, is about trying to always keep that first and foremost. It’s too easy to get into an argument of some immediate political issue or campaign decision and just go to war or give someone up as dead to you. But you don’t do that with a comrade. You’ve been through some shit.
You could argue that brother and sister do all of this equally well (well, not the whole gender neutral thing). But I would say that those salutations in labor have become a bit too pro forma. They are said to fill the air, with not much deep thought behind them. Saying comrade, in America, in the year 2015, requires more of a thought process. And I’m generally in favor of people doing more thinking.