Living on in the Archives
History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.”
The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American sabotage and denounced all the strikers, who went back to the shops under unsatisfactory conditions.
The Wobblies brought controversy, but no organization to speak of, so the workers who remained reorganized themselves into an independent union that lasted for 17 years, organizing the kitchens and dining rooms of Manhattan’s fanciest hotels. The “Free Voice” is a fascinating document of the times, as radicalism remained even as the union took on bread and butter issues like hours and wages. Evident in those pages was a wide variety of Wobbly, Socialist and Communist sympathies with fraternal greetings from Soviet Russia, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood and William Z. Foster. This was a trade union that organized along amalgamated industrial lines, and strove to expand its ranks to include all the workers in their industry, regardless of race, sex or language (Each edition included German and Italian translations; Yiddish, Lithuanian and other languages were apparently available).
Eventually, the union was supplanted by a Communist-led, T.U.U.L. affiliated union, the Food Workers Industrial Union, which was led by men like Jay Rubin and Michael J. Obermeier who has previously been leaders of the Amalgamated. In 1935, the unions merged and Rubin and Obermeier pressed further to merge with the AFL-affiliated Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union. They wound up as leaders of the newly chartered Local 6, as well as the amalgamated New York Hotel Trades Council.
In its last issue, the “Free Voice” took stock of its legacy:
The organ of the Amalgamated Food Workers, the “Free Voice,” can now be incorporated into history as a vital organ of the Labor Movement and will live in its archives as a reminder of the fearless weapon that it was in furthering the struggle of the working class against the obstacles that beset it.
What’s sad is that this archive had been stored in a warehouse until specially requested, and the paper was so fragile and bitter that it crumbled to be touched. The New York Public Library is one of perhaps three archives left of the “Free Voice,” perhaps the last archive that is not microfiche, and is incomplete, missing many volumes and issues.
Although the union that they helped organize lives on as a powerful advocate of workers in the hotel industry, the names, thoughts and deeds of those radical pioneers is all but lost. I hope, in some small way, to correct that.
“…But they don’t mind throwing a brick…”
It’s touching that there are still people in this world who care enough to riot. I first heard about France’s proposed “first job contract” law from some of the French scientists with whom I am working. They’re absolutely pissed off.
The law would allow employers to hire first-time workers under the age of 26, and, for the first two years of this job, have no obligation to provide benefits and can fire the employee at any time for any reason. American workers have a similar status when they are hired for the first job, and for their second, third, fourth and tenth up until the day they die. Unless they have a union contract, that is.
Where is our outrage?
McLaughlin is Presumed Innocent
In a very troubling development, FBI agents raided the offices of the New York Central Labor Council and the district office of Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, the President of the CLC. McLaughlin has been President of the CLC for two decades, the third of three representatives of IBEW Local 3 who have headed the Council for the entirety of its 51 year history. His files were seized in connection to an investigation of a contractor, Petrocelli Electric, that did business with the city.
While McLaughlin’s tenure as President of the city-wide coalition of trade unions is open to criticism (McLaughlin is a skilled politician who has strived for unity in the labor movement; that unity has often been achieved through a lowest common denominator agenda that has precluded bold leadership stands), I have never heard any of his critics accuse him of corruption. To date, there have been no charges or allegations against McLaughlin or the CLC. The raid does have the unmistakable whiff of a politically motivated hatchet job. We should keep a critical eye on situations, as they develop.
“It’s Educational!”
I’m back from Amherst and I’m really excited. The Master’s degree that I’m working towards seems so besides the point. I hate the idea of ever having to stop going to ULA. The real value of the program is the ability to step back from my day-to-day work and see the forest from the trees.
I found the Labor Education class that I took to be a stumbling, fumbling frustration for nine of the ten days. This morning, however, I think I came to an epiphany, while I sat quietly and reflected on the readings and discussions. It’s too soon to tell, but it might have been a life-changing event.
We read a lot about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, the open learning center in the South that trained CIO organizers, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In his book, “The Long Haul,” Myles talks about movement periods and organizational periods.
The movement period is when shit just happens because people are fed up and feel emboldened enough to take action on their own. For example, in the 1930’s, millions of people organized unions at their jobs. It is not an exaggeration that, all over the country, co-workers organized themselves, sat down, stopped production and then called the union office and asked, “Can you ‘organize’ us?” Today, however, we are clearly in an organizational period. We are working our asses off to try to preserve and build our existing union organizations. It’s very much official, legal and staff-driven. Organizers, like me and so many of my friends, go out to the shops to talk to workers and convince them why they should form a union. Even at our best, that model can only organize hundreds of thousands of people a year when we need to organize millions. We need workers to organize themselves.
Labor experienced a movement period in the 1930’s partly because of the Depression but largely because leftist rabble were well-educated by the Wobblies, the Commies, the Yipsels and the Debsies and well-placed throughout industry to educate, agitate and organize all those untold millions.
How do we replicate that organic learning that took place so that we can experience a new movement period?
The answer, I think, can be found in another lesson from Highlander: the Citizenship Schools of the civil rights era. The idea of the Citizenship Schools was remarkably simple: black citizens sit in the round and, drawing from their own experience and desires, teach each other to read and write in order to vote and be involved in the political process. At the end of each session, each participant could go out and teach the next class, allowing the program to multiply and grow as an organic movement, not as the project of a single organization.
We need citizenship schools for the workplace, with a long view for planting the seeds of the next movement period. This is not an original idea, and I can’t imagine that someone out there isn’t already doing this. If I find them, and they’re doing it well, I will join them. If not, my comrades and I should start something new. We are already having those initial discussions. I need to look and see what’s out there. I want to study the old Trade Union Education League. I need to check out Labor Notes and the Troublemakers School. I should look into Brazil and other Latin American education programs.
I want to find more people who are interested in moving in this direction to have more informal discussions and brainstorming sessions. In the meantime, as luck would have it, Hunter College is having a conference this weekend on popular education in New York City. I’ll be there for more field research.