VIDEO: On Rick Smith Show Discussing “We Always Had a 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.
“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.
I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.