LABOR'S RENEWAL?: Back to Class Politics

...We should also realize that those truncheons have recently reappeared: as John Sweeney reminds us in his book, during the last few years they have been used on striking janitors in Los Angeles and striking coal miners in Virginia...

...These people will get paid between $75,000 and $500,000 a year to do so...

...In this respect, their record is no better or worse than that of American churches, American law firms, American business firms, and even American academic departments...

...The Vietnam War saw the end of the traditional alliance between the academics and the unions—an alliance that had nudged the Democratic party steadily to the left during the previous twenty years...

...Like the civil rights movement, the labor movement owed its successes to repeated and deliberate criminal acts—acts that we now think of as heroic civil disobedience, but which were brutally punished...

...The best thing that could happen to the American left would be for the academics to get back into the class struggle, and for the labor union members to forgive and forget the stupid and self-defeating anti-American rhetoric that filled the universities of the late sixties...

...You would never guess, from William Bennett's and Robert Bork's speeches about the need to overcome liberal individualism, that the labor unions provide by far the best examples in America's history of the virtues that these writers claim we must recapture...

...There is much too little public discussion of the changes that this globalized labor market will inevitably bring to America in the coming decades...

...America, the country that was to have witnessed a new birth of freedom, will gradually be divided by class differences of a sort that would have been utterly inconceivable to Jefferson, or to Lincoln, or to Walt Whitman...

...But we should remember that the early history of labor unions inAmerica, as in the rest of the world, is a history of the skulls of strikers being broken by truncheons, decade after decade...

...Only after an enormous amount of suffering, and very gradually, did it become politically impossible for mayors, govThis article is adapted from a speech given at the Columbia University Teach-In with the Labor Movement on October 3, 1996...

...They need to realize that the last hundred years of our country's history has witnessed a brutal struggle between the corporations and the workers, that this struggle is still going on, and that the corporations are winning...

...Only after a great many striking mothers had seen their children go hungry were the unions able to accumulate enough money to set up strike funds, and to provide a little help...

...This new situation is fine with the 1 percent of Americans who own 40 percent of their country's wealth...

...It was going to be a place where their kids all went to the same schools, and where they got the same treatment from the police and the courts...

...They have less and less at stake in America's future, and more and more invested in an efficient and productive global economy— an economy made ever more efficient and productive by the constant expansion of the global labor market into poorer and poorer countries...

...The strikers who braved the wrath of the police and the National Guard created a moral atmosphere in which no one was willing to be seen crossing a picket line, or be caught wearing clothes that did not bear a union label, or be known to have scabbed...

...They need to know that the deepest social problems usually go unmentioned by candidates for political office, because it is not in the interest of the rich to have those problems discussed in public...

...American campuses are very much better places—morally better places—than they were in 1970...

...Sometimes American unions have become corrupt, and have been taken over by greedy and cynical crooks...

...Nevertheless, leftist academic politics has run its course...

...There is less and less need to employ any of these workers, since the same work can be done elsewhere for a fifth of the cost...

...But ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold...

...Today our country, like the other industrialized democracies, faces a problem that few politicians, except for scurrilous fascists like Pat Buchanan and, in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, seem willing to talk about: the wages of European and American workers are ridiculously high by world standards...

...They need to remember that the same argument now used against raising the minimum wage—that doing so will discourage economic efficiency and productivity— was once used against the eight-hour day...

...Their new role in the academy is helping improve their situation in the rest of American society...

...Bill Bradley is one of the few prominent politicians to have insisted that we must prevent our country from breaking up into hereditary economic castes...

...That is the cause for which theAFL-CIO organizers are now fighting, and for which some of their predecessors died...

...The students need to know that the deepest and most enduring injustices, like the unending humiliation of African-Americans and the miserable wages paid to unorganized workers, are always downplayed by the political parties, and by most of the press...

...We should help our students understand that social justice in America has owed much more to civil disobedience than to the use of the ballot...

...To persuade the American people to see strikes, and violence against strikers, in this alternative way took a very long time...

...Only in recent years has this strategy once again become politically possible...

...But, of course, the strikers were also right when they replied that the police were acting as the agents of employers who refused to give their workers a decent share of the value those workers produced...

...It's shrouded oft our martyred dead...

...Like the civil rights movement, the union movement is a model of Americans getting together on their own and changing society from the bottom up—forcing it to become more decent, more democratic, and more humane...

...But when the students began to burn flags, and to spit at returning soldiers, they did deeper and more long-lasting damage to the American left than they could ever have imagined...

...But at their best, the labor unions are America at its best...

...Perhaps they have also heard of Medgar Evers or of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner...

...Writers like Michael Lind and Edward Luttwak are sketching very plausible scenarios of an America in which the top fifth of the country, the well-educated professionals, carry out the orders of the international super-rich...

...When they began to spell "America" with a "k," they lost the respect and the sympathy of the union members...

...The fact that people are now once again willing to cross picket lines, and are unwilling to ask themselves who makes their clothes or who picks their vegetables, is a symptom of moral decline...

...The remaining four-fifths of the country, the four-fifths that now has a median family income of $30,000, will get a little less in every successive year, and will keep on doing all the dirty work...

...But it will remind you of something that many people have forgotten: that the history of the labor unions, in Britain, America, and everywhere else in the world, is a blooddrenched history of violent struggle...

...They at least know how Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Thanks to all those marches on the English department, and various other departments, the situation of women, gays and lesbians, AfricanAmericans, and Hispanics has been enormously improved...

...34 • DISSENT...

...You may find this song maudlin and melodramatic...

...Maybe these authors are too pessimistic, but we shall never know unless the questions they pose are taken up by candidates for public office...

...It was going to be a place where janitors, executives, professors, nurses, and salesclerks would look each other in the eye, and respect each other as fellow citizens...

...The strength of the dollar does not matter to them, because their investment advisers can 32 • DISSENT Labor and the Intellectuals flip their money into other currencies at the touch of a button...

...died...

...Unless the politicians begin to talk about long-term social planning, Lind and Luttwak argue, economic inequality, and the formation of hereditary economic castes, will continue unchecked...

...They know nothing of the blood that had to be spilled, and the hunger that had to be endured, in order that unions could be transformed from criminal conspiracies into fine old American institutions...

...As Todd Gitlin put it, we academics marched on the English department while the Republicans took over the White House...

...These protesters were absolutely right that Vietnam was an unjust war, a massacre of which our country should always be ashamed...

...The whole point of America was that it was going to be the world's first classless society...

...This is not to say that those twenty-five years of inward-looking academic politics were in vain...

...They need to be able to spot the resemblances between what the politicians were indirectly and gently bribed to ignore at the beginning of this century and what they are being indirectly and gently bribed to ignore now...

...The economic royalists whom Franklin Roosevelt denounced still had a lot invested in America's future...

...Their dividends typically increase when jobs are exported from Ohio to South China, and from North Carolina to Thailand...

...We think of strikes as an accepted, and perfectly reasonable, method of bringing about a slightly fairer distribution of profits...

...The police who brutalized the strikers thought of themselves as preventing criminal acts from taking place, and they were right...

...For today's super-rich, such an investment would be imprudent...

...Most American schoolchildren learn something about the martyrs of the civil rights movement...

...So we think of labor unions as fine old American institutions, built into the fabric of the country...

...We are still living with the consequences of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and in particular with those of the rage of the increasingly manic student protesters of the late 1960s...

...We should also remember that the history of the labor movement is one of heroic self-deprivation...

...So the American economy is passing out of the control of the American government, and thus out of the control of the American voters...

...The most important single reason for hoping that American labor unions will become much bigger and more powerful than they are now is that they are the only organizations who want to get these questions on the table—to force politicians to talk about what is going to happen to wages, and how we are going to avoid increasing economic injustice...

...To obstruct scabs from entering a workplace into which they are invited by the owners of that workplace is a criminal act, just as it is a criminal act to sit in at a lunch counter after the proprietor asks you to leave...

...There is little reason to believe that what is good for GM or Microsoft is good for America...

...ernors, and sheriffs to send in their men to break strikers' skulls...

...Those were the years in which academics like Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, and John Kenneth Galbraith worked side by side with labor leaders like Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph...

...We are accustomed to seeing labor leaders photographed with presidents, and officials of General Motors and the United Auto Workers jumping up and shaking hands at the end of a successful bargaining session...

...If the unions will help us revive this kind of politics, maybe the academy and the labor movement can get together again...

...Since those days, leftists in the colleges and WINTER • 1997 • 33 Labor and the Intellectuals universities have concentrated their energies on academic politics rather than on national politics...

...Until George McGovern's defeat in 1972, the New Left did not realize that it had unthinkingly destroyed an alliance that had been central to American leftist politics...

...But these schoolchildren usually have no idea of how it came about that most American workers have an eight-hour day and a five-day work week...

...If a revived union movement could get out the vote in the old mill towns, in the rural slums, and in the inner cities, instead of letting the suburban vote set the national political agenda, those questions would be on the table...

...They are unlikely to be taught about the conditions in the sweatshops and factories in which their great-grandparents worked, nor about how the unions made those conditions a little better for their grandparents and parents...

...Maybe together we can help bring our country closer to the goal that matters most: the classless society...

...It is time to revive the kind of leftist politics that pervaded American campuses from the Great Depression through the early sixties— a politics that centers on the struggle to prevent the rich from ripping off the rest of the country...

...This unwillingness was an expression of the sort of human solidarity that made the year 1989 possible in Eastern Europe, and which made the Founding Fathers willing to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor...

...The history of WINTER • 1997 • 31 Labor and the Intellectuals the unions provides the best examples of comradeship, loyalty, and self-sacrifice...

...In the twenty years between World War II and Vietnam the newly respectable labor unions made their presence felt on the national scene, and accomplished a great deal...

...From the days of Franklin Roosevelt to those of Lyndon Johnson, we made enormous progress toward the creation of such a society...

...Furthermore, the globalization of the markets in capital and labor means that no nation's economy is sufficiently self-contained to permit long-term social planning by a national government...

...Only because millions of workers refused to become scabs by taking jobs that would have meant food for their families did the strikes eventually succeed...

...While we had our backs turned, the labor unions were being steadily ground down by the shift to a service economy, and by the machinations of the Reagan and Bush administrations...