About a week ago in Huffpo I found this very succinct nutshell history of US labor relations by Matt Stoller. Other stuff got in the way but finally I posted it.
"The roots are traceable directly to an authoritarian South, a one-party unique region in America that has held the balance of power since the 1930s and that was and is dedicated above all to a race-based hierarchical society. Through shaping even progressive legislation, like the Wagner Act, Dixiecrats ensured that broad-based class movements failed. It's not widely-understood, but the reason the South flipped to an anti-labor stance in the 1940s is because the CIO had tremendous success in organizing multi-racial unions as World War II labor markets tightened. This was a direct threat to Jim Crow, and so Southern Democrats cooperated with Republicans to pass Taft-Hartley, a piece of legislation which basically made labor organizing impossible and turned unions into groups that can only advocate for their own survival. At the same time, there were massive pre-McCarthy purges of leftists and decertifications of leftists unions, leaving unions open to infiltration by the CIA, FBI, organized crime, and bureaucratic inertia. The biggest movement for social justice in American history - the labor movement of the 1930s - ran up against the South, and the South turned it into a pro-Vietnam reactionary force that rejected the New Left in the 1960s.
In 1945, there were more strikes than there had ever been in American history. From 1946-1948, the purges happened. And then the 1950s somehow placidly came, and women were no longer in the factories and African-American soldiers were somehow living back in segregated neighborhoods. It's funny, how history is written by the winners. It's funny how the history of the post-WWII reaction, the women in factories in WWII being forced out of work and the returning African-American soldiers and population migrants being forced into racist structures, is just kind of glossed over. It shouldn't be. That's when the national security state, the seeds of the authoritarianism that sprouted into Vietnam, Iraq, and a radically unfair media and economy, were fertilized."
The rest of the piece was interesting, but not succinct
This week in LA CityBeat I have a piece on Robert Hawkins, the Omaha mall slayer.
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5 comments:
Speaking of the proletariat. I walked into the breakroom today and found a fellow wage slave reading a book called "Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll". Your name was featured on the back cover. I spoke well of you and recommended Doc 40 to him.
Maybe I'm just tired, but I couldn't make that much sense of the Stoller article. I mean I agree that the South is the seedbed of reaction, and that much of the right wing crap is really about race. On the other hand, there's always been a racist wing to the labor movement. They were eager to protect the privileges of a few skilled white workers at the expense of workers as a whole. That's pretty much the history of the AFL, as in AFL-CIO. I notice that none of the comments mentioned race or class. Americans, including "progressives" don't know what unions are about. The concepts of collective bargaining and worker's rights are beyond their understanding.
Meanwhile, back in Omaha, there's going to be a 20 year reunion of Nebraska hardcore bands:
http://michaelhoman.blogspot.com/
I learned about if from Michael Homan, Katrina survivor, Bible scholar and Nebraska punk. Michael couldn't make any more sense of the mall murders than anyone else.
I didn't think much of the Stoller story, but I ran the excerpt as a reminded that once we had unions. And how the extraction of socialism from the US labor movement handed it to Jimmy Hoffa and the mob.
Hoffa stole control of the central states Teamsters from his mentor, the brilliant Trotsyist organizer, Farrell Dobbs. After ratting Dobbs out to the feds and sending him to prison, Jimmy continued to send flowers to Dobbs' wife every year on her birthday. Hey, it was business. In case anyone thinks Dobbs was unsullied, he formed an alliance with Dave Beck, a west coast gangster who was so corrupt he made Hoffa look like Keir Hardy. On the other hand, Beck used Dobbs' organizing techniques to turn the West Coast Teamsters into a union that still has some clout.
A Carpenter, an Electrician and a Teamster were showing off their dogs one day...
Oh and God bless you Fellow Worker Mick. I know of no other website where it is possible to read commentary on the state of labor along with photos of naked starlets posing with Daleks. I read the AFL-CIO weblog daily. There's some good stuff there, but they are not protected by Perception Management.
Just call us the polymath blog. Or just call us.
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