Stewart Acuff to Speak at Saturday Rally to Commemorate 1937 Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre

by Stewart Acuff

Tomorrow I will speak at a rally in Chicago to commemorate the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 when 10 striking members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) were shot down by the Chicago Police Department, because they were on strike for the 8 hour day and the right to organize a union. They were murdered for striking for an 8 hour day and the right to organize a union.

Workers were organizing and striking all over industrial America. The National Labor Relations Act had been passed, but it had yet to be upheld by the Supreme Court. The CIO and the autoworkers had begun sit-down strikes in plant after plant. Unprovoked beatings and killings were common. Workers and unions were still suffering the bloodiest labor history in the western world. Police forces and the National Guard had been routinely used to bust heads, break organizing efforts, and break strikes. The United Steelworkers were not yet a fully formed union. SWOC had begun the Little Steel strike to win contracts at the second tier of steel companies. The modern American labor movement was being birthed and it was a very tough delivery.

Victims of the Tazreen Factory Fire in Bangladesh Continue to Suffer

by Paul Garver

The factory caught fire about 6 p.m. After the fire, they did not allow us to go out,” says Nazma. “They locked the gate. The workers were screaming together.” Nazma is among the survivors of the Tazreen Fashion factory fire in Bangladesh that killed 112 workers in November. Nazma and others describe the unsafe and deadly working conditions at Tazreen—conditions similar to those many Bangladesh garment workers face every day. Solidarity Center staff in Dhaka, Bangladesh, compiled this report.

Five months later, more than 300 garment workers were killed and 2000 injured by the collapse of the Rana Plaza building near Dhaka that housed five garment factories producing for American and European markets. This man-made tragedy only underscores the futility of “corporate social responsibility” initiatives that merely provide fig leafs for global corporations who disdain responsibility for the atrocious conditions under which their profitable goods are produced.

Union Suppression Movement- Part 2

America’s Union Suppression Movement (And Its Apologists), Part Two

Leo Casey on April 18, 2013
This is part two of a two-part post. The first part can be found below.

As the war against American unions reached a fever pitch in recent years, there emerged a small group of right-wing academics and think tanks that have taken up the anti-union cause in intellectual circles. Of particular note for our purposes are Terry Moe’s book, Special Interest, and a recent study, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions?, which was jointly sponsored by the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now. [6]

Since I’ve already written a critique of Moe’s book for the American Political Science Association’s journal, Perspective on Politics, my focus here is mainly on the Fordham/ERN report.

Both publications tell a very similar story (all the more remarkable given the political and economic context I discussed in Part I of this post), in which incredibly powerful teacher union Leviathans invariably win the day in all manner of educational and public policy fights. The Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli offered a ten-second sound bite for this meme, when he recently wrote that teacher unions “were the Goliath to the school reformers’ David.”

How does one find one’s way to such an unfounded conclusion? With an ideological analysis that has only the thinnest veneer of social science.

Take the most basic issue in this narrative, the supposed “power” of teacher unions. As I used to teach my Political Science students, power can not be understood as a static, fixed property possessed by an individual or a group, but must be seen as a relationship among various players. Like any other political actor, a teachers union possesses no power in the abstract, but only in relation to other parties – school districts; school boards; state education departments; county, state and federal governments; corporations; political parties; parents groups; and so on, across the field of education policy players. Yet, in discussing the power of the “Goliath” teachers union, Moe and the Fordham/ERN report make no mention of the greater relative power of the education reform “David.”  This omission is telling for three important reasons:

The Union Suppression Movement

America’s Union Suppression Movement (And Its Apologists), Part One

Leo Casey on April 17, 2013
Last week, in “Is There A ‘Corporate Education Reform’ Movement?”, I wrote about the logic of forming strategic alliances on specific issues with those who are not natural allies, even those with whom you mostly disagree. This does not mean, however, that there aren’t those – some with enormous wealth and power – who are bent on undermining the American labor movement generally and teachers’ unions specifically. This is part one of a two-part post on this reality.

The American union movement is, it must be said, embattled and beleaguered. The recent passage of the Orwellian named ‘right to work’ law in Michigan, an anti-union milestone in the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and cradle of American industrial unionism, is but the latest assault on American working people and their unions.[1] Since the backlash election of 2010 that brought Tea Party Republicans to power in a number of state governments, public sector workers have faced a legislative agenda designed to eviscerate their rights to organize unions and bargain collectively in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Fueling these attacks is an underlying organic crisis that has greatly weakened the labor movement and its ability to defend itself. Union membership has fallen from a high point of 1 in 3 American workers at the end of WW II to a shade over 1 in 9 today. [2] At its height, American unions had unionized basic industries – auto, mining, steel, textiles, telecommunications – and had sufficient density to raise wages and improve working conditions for members and non-union workers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 2012, organized American labor has fallen to its lowest density in nearly a century. Today, American unions have high density in only one major sector of the economy, K-12 education, and in that sector unions are now under ferocious attack. [3]

The Struggle Continues for Memphis Sanitation Workers

As events continue in Memphis for the 45th anniversary of the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, here is a new video which shows how AFSCME Local 1733 members are continuing their struggle for fairness and respect.

 

Dr. King traveled to Memphis to support the workers who were on strike to protest unfair wages, discrimination and unsafe working conditions. Forty-five years later, conditions for those sanitation workers are surprisingly similar. The city is threatening to privatize their jobs, workers are not earning a living wage, and working conditions are hazardous and unsafe.

Herbert Parson is a Local 1733 member who was working for the City of Memphis during the strike in 1968 and is still on the job today. “It took Dr. King coming here to change things,” said Parson.

But the struggle continues.

AFT group develops lessons on ’63 ‘Jobs and Freedom’ march

by Michael Hirsch

The massive 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom represented the high-water mark of the civil rights movement.

The rally was the culmination of decades of organizing and a spur to all the new social movements that followed. It showed ordinary people making history.

Though not all its aims were met — domestic workers and farm workers, who are largely people of color, are

Bayard Rustin (left) outside the march headquarters in NYC

still not protected by federal law — Congress, in the years that followed, began to address racial discrimination in jobs, voting, housing and public accommodations.

Telling the story of that epochal march to public school students is a project of the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank supported by the American Federation of Teachers, which is creating a set of lesson plans on the occasion of the march’s 50th anniversary.

Now What? Labor Unions and the Inevitability of Class Struggle

bysBill Fletcher, Jr.

There is a story that I often use to make a point regarding one of the central problems in organized labor in the USA.  It goes like this:

A man jumped off of the Empire State Building in New York.  As he was dropping past the 30th floor he was overheard saying “…so far, so good…”

For more than five decades organized labor in the USA has been in decline.  At first the decline was not particularly noticeable since, through the early 1970s, organized labor still represented more than 25% of the non-agricultural workforce (down from 35% in 1955).  Nevertheless the decline rapidly increased in the aftermath of the recessions of the 1970s and the advent of President Ronald Reagan and Reaganism (the homegrown variety of neo-liberal economics).

​Having purged its left-wing in the late 1940s and abandoned any coherent sense of being a social movement on behalf of a class of people, organized labor drifted, slowly at first and then with increasing speed as gravity took hold.  Despite evidence of decline, most of the leadership continued to insist that the situation was not ‘that bad’ and that either (1) their particular labor union would survive intact, and perhaps grow, or (2)the pendulum of U.S. politics would inevitably shift and unions would rise again.

​Yet the rate of decline increased. In 1947 a Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which amended the National Labor Relations Act. There were many regressive components to this statute but one in particular has performed like a slow-acting poison in the political system:  so-called ‘right to work’.

Dolores Huerta recognized for union leadership

by Duane Campbell

DSA  Honorary Chair  Dolores Huerta  will be inducted into the   California Hall of Fame (2013) for her labor and community leadership.  She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Huerta’s influence has been profound since the founding along with Cesar Chaves, Philip Vera Cruz   and others  of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, through her current work in supporting union democracy,   civic engagement and empowerment of women and youth in disadvantaged communities. The creation of the UFW changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest and contributed significantly to the growth of Latino politics in the U.S.  In her frequent public engagements at college, universities and high schools  she brings a Latina feminist perspective to civil rights and immigration issues.  Dolores has been a supporter on union picket lines throughout the state.  

China Worker Roundtable: A Reminder

by Paul Garver

Chinese workers are continuing a wave of strikes for higher wages and, in some cases, for the right to elect their own local union officers.

At the same time, Hewlett-Packard and Apple have claimed that they are requiring their manufacturing suppliers in China, the largest of which is Foxconn, to correct numerous abuses, including excessive forced overtime, the abuse of student interns, and to promise to allow elections for local union committees.

China labor expert Eli Friedman has forcefully argued in The Jacobin that ultimately the liberation of workers in China can only arise from their self activity. He predicts that as manufacturers build new factories deeper in China’s interior, closer to the villages from which most of the new industrial workers are recruited, those workers are likely to demand greater political rights and social benefits. This would advance their industrial action to a new level of working class consciousness.

Three of the most prominent scholars of Chinese labor from around the world will join Eli Friedman in a roundtable discussion at 4:00 PM on Sunday March 17 at the CUNY Murphy Institute, 25 W 43rd St, 18th floor, Manhattan. The roundtable is moderated by Seth Ackerman of  Jacobin Magazine and is co-sponsored by Talking Union and by Labor Notes.

For more details, please click here. The event is free to the public, and all are welcome.

Why We Need a Labor Movement

English: Logo for London School of Economics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Len McCluskey is the General Secretary of the Unite union in the UK. This Lecture at the London School of Economics  on Jan. 15, deals with  class consciousness, class struggle,  neo liberalism, labor and the role of the unions in the UK. You can view the video here.