Misplaced Sympathies
TYLER, GUS
Misplaced Sympathies Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II By Joshua B. Freeman New Press. 410 pp. $35.00. The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret By...
...The AFL-CIO steadily declined...
...The cause was President Richard M. Nixon's call upon the Federal Reserve Board to "cool the economy" by raising interest rates...
...In his proposed strategy, he caustically assails the narrow approach of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1886 to 1924, for his highly-publicized statement that what organized labor wants is "more...
...Joe Curran of the National Maritime Union...
...The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret By Michael Zweig Cornell...
...They may consider themselves Catholics first, or Jews, or Puerto Ricans, or American Legion members, or environmentalists, or women, and vote accordingly...
...The Left was not purged from union posts, unless Left is defined as "Stalinists only...
...Numbers notwithstanding, they are not the prime political force in our democratic society, he says, because of their failure to act as a class...
...The main difference between them is their scope: Joshua B. Freeman focuses exclusively on New York, while Michael Zweig deals with labor nationwide...
...The greatest challenge has been a change in the composition and location of jobs...
...They extensively bemoan the purge of Communists from leadership posts during the Cold War...
...Moreover, many of the Communist union heads—such as Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union...
...former assistant president, ILGWU Two scholarly yet very readable books that address the future of the American working class (or, really, the labor movement) have appeared almost simultaneously...
...Just how these changes evidenced themselves is described in Freeman's chapters on the working class in New York...
...If you are bossed, you are...
...What happened then could happen again—and for exactly the same reasons...
...It was not until the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its millions of workers in manufacturing joined hands with the AFL, in 1955, that the labor movement became a major power in the country pursuing the broad ideals voiced by Gompers...
...In the case of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell the witticism is on target...
...They were predominantly craft organizations composed of a labor aristocracy—highly skilled workers in construction, the graphic trades and transportation...
...He credits ex-Communists for contributing to this development, and for throwing off "the dead weight of Soviet allegiance...
...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Syndicated columnist and radio commentator...
...Parties bearing those designations are currently at the helm in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and much of Scandinavia...
...The New York microcosm, though, provides penetrating insights into the national macrocosm—and vice versa...
...That quote has time and again been interpreted to mean that all organized labor wants is "more" money and "more" leisure...
...198 pp...
...So much for Zweig's scenario about how the purge of the Communists from top positions in American unions caused a 40-year decline in organized labor...
...And both authors, being eager for a revived working class presence, venture their thoughts onrestoring labor's influence...
...That was Gompers' ideal...
...By Zweig's measure, though, they were both workers since Powell was an "employee" of Uncle Sam...
...Cities could not meet their obligations...
...Under those circumstances the commonest way for a worker to improve his lot is through mass action by his class...
...None of the above, though, is meant to suggest that American labor does not face very serious problems that have inhibited its growth in the post-World War II era...
...Although Zweig inveighs against the notion that income levels are reliable political indicators, the fact is that they do determine values, social attitudes and voting behavior...
...The facts run quite to the contrary...
...25.00...
...The multiple clashing interests of our society have given rise to a breed of pluralists, within whose psyches whirls a turmoil of conflicting concerns in addition to "class...
...This conclusion wrongly assumes that the Communist union leaders alone were dedicated to a struggle on behalf of the working class...
...The only Labor party of any significance in the United States today is the Democratic-FarmerLabor Party of Minnesota...
...in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright...
...Nationally, unemployment doubled and the inflation rate tripled...
...The person making $ 100,000 a year finds it hard to think of himself as being in solidarity with someone making $10,000...
...Freeman also quotes Maurice Isserman, a devoted student of American Communism, who wrote: "If all the ex-Communists living in the United States in the mid-195 0s had been gathered together in one radical organization, they would have constituted the largest movement on the Left in American history...
...Both suggest that the real dynamo behind working class efforts to change the face of oppressive capitalism was the Communist Party and its adherents...
...Or, to use an old-fashioned phrase, they lack "class consciousness," what Marx called klassenbewustsein, Zweig establishes his "majority" by defining as a "worker" everyone who is not a capitalist or an independent professional...
...for the next 40 years.' According to Zweig, besides losing members, the labor movement also suffered spiritual losses...
...They grew weary of the irrational turns and twists they had to take to conform with party orders that were merely echoing a paranoid despot in Moscow, mastermind of a Byzantine international intrigue...
...Immediately after World War II, New York City was the biggest manufacturing center in the country...
...As the joke asks: What's the difference between a sewing machine operator and a brain surgeon...
...banks would not lend...
...Under intense pressure from Congressional investigations in a hostile Cold War climate, most unions purged Left-leaning organizers and officials," Zweig writes...
...In his search for class-conscious politics in the United States, Zweig points optimistically to some 1,400 trade unionists who met in Cleveland in 1996 and founded a new Labor Party that, so far as the media are concerned, is nonexistent...
...the heavily Communist leadership of Local 1199 of the Hospital and Healthcare Workers Union, and District 65 of the Distributive Workers Union—quit the CPUS A of their own accord...
...If you are the boss you are not a worker...
...But even those who do think of themselves as workers don't necessarily cast their votes as such on Election Day...
...The high mobility of the population— both geographically and occupationally—is relevant here too...
...There the shoemaker's son and the son of his son and so on for generations work at the same trade in the same town and carry the family name of Shoemaker or, in Yiddish, Shuster...
...In short, once the unions rid themselves of Communist officials, the labor movement was no longer a true labor movement...
...Actually, what Gompers said was this: "What does labor want...
...Zweig recognizes this generational progress, but he makes light of it...
...The unstated presumption is that Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Anarchists, Trotskyites, Lovestoneites, and just plain unionists who gladlyjoined in one anothers' picket lines were not part of the labor Left—that only the hard-boiled Stalinists were...
...In 1970, the whole nation was hit by "stagflation," a simultaneous plague of stagnation and inflation...
...Almost two centuries of experience in the United States suggests that labor does better in a coalition with other elements within the Democratic Party—environmentalists, feminists, minorities, children's advocates, educators, health care reformers, etc.—than it does when standing alone...
...Consequently, American labor's unification did not increase labor's strength as intended...
...Indeed, a more ecumenical party ought to fit Zweig's repeated call for a political formation that speaks not only for unionists but for all people of good will...
...Henry Foner of the Fur Workers Union...
...His mother was a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...
...He dwells at some length on the tales of Horatio Alger and concludes that their heroes owe more to good luck than to some component of American life...
...Without a sense of themselves as part of a working class movement (an idea that had been largely purged, along with the Left) union leaders spoke less and less for working people as a whole and more and more for the members of their own unions only...
...Freeman rightly observes that when a worker earns enough to leave his rental unit and buy a home in the suburbs, he doesn't merely make a geographic change, he undergoes a cultural change...
...WHILE BOTH Zweig and Freeman pay their respects to the CIO for expanding the scope of labor's interest, they see the 1955 merger as ushering in a period of decreased union influence...
...It makes no difference whether you earn $10,000 a year or $100,000...
...Outside the classroom, where the great class struggle takes place, his definition disintegrates...
...The sights, sounds and smells are not those of his once dense proletarian precinct...
...But as manufacturers departed for the suburbs, the South and overseas, that base eroded...
...In the course of his lifetime, however, it was not shared by most of the unions affiliated with the AFL...
...what counts is "power...
...It was able to support the amenities of what Freeman has termed a Social Democratic society because it enjoyed a strong tax base...
...Answer: a generation...
...Zweig believes "America's best kept secret," as his subtitle puts it, is that working people constitute a majority in the country...
...But to deny the upward mobility of families in the United States is to dismiss one of the country's most distinctive features, especially as contrasted with Europe...
...If he is class conscious at all, he now probably sees himself as middle class...
...Academically, Zweig is correct...
...That is the reason why European history is replete with "Labor" parties, whether known as such or, alternatively, as Socialist, Communist or Social Democratic...
...In his comments on the same period, Freeman notes that the labor movement in New York City displayed a vibrancy and creativity that made Gotham a virtual "social democratic" community...
...The United States, by contrast, has what is still essentially a two-party system—after experimenting with a Greenback Labor Party and a Progressive Party, as well as Socialist and Communist parties...
...Both are timely, in that they ask why unions no longer have the clout they once had...
...We want more schoolhouses and less jails, more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice, more leisure and less greed, more justice and less revenge...
...He thinks of himself as a homeowner who mingles with others of his ilk, and he pays some mind to keeping up with the Joneses...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
